I think most people today hate waiting.
Isn’t that why amazon aren’t just offering ‘next day delivery’ but now ‘same day delivery’! Living near Moira, I don’t need to tell you that at the wrong time of day, it ends up taking 40 minutes for a short journey – so frustrating… I love a definition I recently read – Patience is the quality you admire in the driver behind you but can’t stand in the driver who’s in front of you. But yet in the Bible, we read about patience being a Fruit of the Spirit, and we regularly see waiting referenced as an essential practice of the people of God.
“The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, to the person who seeks Him.”
Lamentations 3:25
I want to suggest that this verse shows that Biblical waiting is intentional waiting, it is seeking. Think of these two situations, you are waiting at the doctor’s surgery for your name to come up on the screen, it’s boring and it’s passive. All you have done is turned up hoping that the doctor might see you. A second scenario is that you want to catch a particular species of animal, so you go to where you know these animals inhabit, you lay a trap and you hide behind a tree in anticipation… actively ready to react to the slightest sound!Now I’m not saying we try to trap God, but do you see the subtle difference in the waiting? We need to do what Jeremiah says in his letter to the exiles – “the Lord says…you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”
This is one WAIT not to HATE… Wait on Him.
How do we intentionally wait and seek? Just like in the hunting analogy, we begin by going to places He frequents…
We WILL meet Him in His Word. It is the principal platform for encountering the Almighty. If you are not reading it, you are closing the widest doorway into His company!
I believe we WILL meet Him in Christian community. There’s something so special about the BIG corporate worshipping environment such as the NewWine Sligo conference (get it booked!), Worship Rooms etc, where God’s presence is tangible, but there’s also the non-negotiable necessity of being committed to a local church. God speaks to individuals in the Bible, but so often He communicates to communities. It stands to reason that when we ignore the groom’s bride, we are endangering an encounter with Him.
We meet Him when we set aside time to intentionally seek Him. Why not take a moment right now, to wait in His presence… Make it your most important act today to make time to wait for Him…
“The one thing I ask of the LORD–the thing I seek most–is to live in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, delighting in the LORD’s perfections and meditating in his Temple.”
Psalm 27:4
I pray that you would echo the Psalmist in his desire to meet with the Lord and to live in His presence – that it would become the one thing we seek most…
Simon