If you read my last post, waiting on time – part 1, I started with this quote, “God is not in a hurry. You are. It’s why you’re tired. It’s why you’re anxious, stressed and disappointed. Today, I pray you surrender your timeline in favor of His peace. Trust that what was meant to be yours, will be.” I started writing and realized that I was trying to talk about waiting on God and listening for His voice in the little every day things as well as waiting on Him when you need Him to move in a big way in your life. Waiting on Him to lay smooth stones for you to walk on and waiting on Him to move mountains. It was too much so I concentrated on the moving stones and organizing the small details of your every day life. Today, I want to talk about waiting on Him to move mountains.
It is so hard to wait on God to move mountains. The mountains that have been in my life have never had an expiration date. Even when you think you know about when something might happen or change, it’s still hard to wait on God. I remember back to when I was pregnant and I knew that sometime around 40 weeks later, or about my due date, that baby was supposed to come out and I’d get to see their face. That was at least the expectation, even though I never had an actual date that I knew it would happen on. The reality is, you are completely dependent on God to bring that baby into the world, there is no guarantee that it will happen. There was at least some relief to the waiting, because at some point, you would not be pregnant anymore. I know the joy of holding that baby and I know the pain of loosing one. But I’m not still pregnant, nobody stays pregnant forever.
That’s a small taste of what I’m talking about when you are waiting on God to do something big. It’s small because it’s a relatively small number of weeks, it’s less than a year, and you know eventually, it will end. However, there is a lot of waiting on God that doesn’t have an end date at all. Infertility doesn’t have a promised end date. Singleness doesn’t have a promised end date. A dream being realized doesn’t have an end date. God’s rescue from a very scary and difficult circumstance doesn’t have an end date. Waiting to see a loved one again that has gone ahead of you to be with the Lord, doesn’t have and end date. There are just times when God will ask us to wait on Him, without knowing when it will end.
Now, there is a difference between being lazy and waiting on God. Let’s just get this out of the way from the beginning. To quote Dr. Tony Evans, “To wait on the Lord is not to be idle. It is to refuse to step out of His will to address your situation.” To wait on the Lord is not the same as needing a job and hanging out on the couch watching TV all day because “the Lord will provide.” Waiting on God means that you have done everything you can remove obstacles. For example, you have updated your resume and applied lots of places but you aren’t willing to start selling drugs just to make ends meet. Ok, maybe that’s a little extreme but you get the point. I’m not talking about just sitting around idly waiting on the Lord to work a miracle.
It’s like the story of the church in a farming town during a drought, gathering to pray for rain and only one little boy bringing an umbrella. You trust that the Lord will provide and therefore you are working to remove obstacles for when He does, when His timing is perfect, without trying to control the circumstances.
Remember we talked about Simon out fishing all night last time? He had been doing what he needed to do. He wasn’t sitting at home hoping that fish would jump into his boat. He was out on the water at the best time to fish, and this put him in the right place at the right time to have an encounter with Jesus.
We are in a very intense time of waiting in my family right now. We have known for at least the past 5 years that God was up to something. Time after time God was speaking to us, letting us know that He was working and changing and teaching and preparing us for something big that He wanted to do. We know our lives have been under attack from the liar as he has surrounded us with hurt, rejection, fear, anger, slander, and deceit to name a few. We have felt like we were stumbling in the dark many days, trying to follow Him. Consistently, without our even knowing to ask, the Lord would cause a conversation to happen where we were told those specific words again, “God is preparing you for something big.”
We don’t know what this means. I have a pretty good guess at what it doesn’t mean. I don’t think that whatever the Lord has been preparing us for, will look big in the world’s eyes, or even to other Christians close to us who know more details. I think about the promise God made to Abraham and Sarah to produce offspring that would outnumber the stars. There was no date that accompanied that promise. God didn’t even say, I’ll do it when you are 99 just to prove that I can. He did not give an end date to waiting on that promise. And, when God did finally fulfill that promise to Abraham and Sarah, He did it with one child. Talk about a promise fulfilled that didn’t actually look like a promised fulfilled to everyone watching. I thought God said his descendants would be many, but He only gave them one??
But I want to talk about what happens before Sarah actually gets pregnant with Isaac. There comes a day in this story where it’s pretty clear Sarah is all the things listed in the quote at the top of this post. She is in a hurry to have a child because she’s not getting any younger and in her eyes, she’s running out of time. She becomes stressed and anxious, disappointed and plain old tired. She gives up. If you look at the beginning of Genesis 16, you can see her mind turning as she thinks, “well, I still don’t have any children, it’s pretty much a lost cause at this point and I’ve run out of the strength to continue to wait on the Lord.” So she decides God isn’t worthy of her trust anymore and takes matters into her own hands. She tells her husband to sleep with another woman, thinking that this will make everything better. I don’t believe, in the history of the world, has a husband sleeping with another woman ever made the wife’s life better, but maybe that’s hindsight talking.
This sounds crazy to us but you don’t have to read many more chapters into Genesis and the generations that follow Abraham to see that it wasn’t that uncommon of a practice in those days. But this brings up an interesting point. What sin traps hide from us as we try to wait on the Lord, with no end in sight? See, Sarah didn’t do anything illegal. Everything that happened to Hagar was legal because she was Sarah’s servant, but just because something is legal, doesn’t make it right. Just because you have every right to do something to someone, or to act in a situation, doesn’t mean you should. The book of Philemon is Paul’s letter to a friend of his who had a slave named Onesimus. O had run away and eventually met Paul, he had converted to Christianity and then had served and helped Paul. In his letter, Paul asks Philemon to not do what was legally allowed but to welcome O back home as a brother in Christ. There is a difference between leading a Holy life and never breaking the law. We obey God first, no matter what the law says.
We tend to think of sin as bad things we do but I think a lot of sin is actually based on the posture of our heart. Sarah’s sin was not trusting God with her story. She got in a hurry and took her life in her hands. She gave up on trusting God to move the mountain in front of her. At this moment of weakness where she gives up waiting on God, she thinks her actions are going to bring peace, but they actually create a lot more destruction. We see jealousy and envy, hatred and rejection come out and more people are hurt because of this sin.
God wasn’t moving according to Sarah’s timeline but that didn’t mean He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t in a hurry, she was. He didn’t doubt that Abraham and Sarah would have a son, He knew what He was doing the whole time. He is Author of life and all creation. He can do whatever He wants. He can move things and cause things that are moving to stop. He really does have power over everything so if He has promised something, no matter how dim the circumstances look, He will make it happen. You don’t have to question that.
There have been many times in this season of waiting that I have wanted to make a phone call or move in a direction that I knew God was not asking me to move in. I so desperately wanted this difficult season of waiting on God for years to end that I almost listened to human advice that straight up contradicted what I knew the Holy Spirit was telling me. Obviously I don’t know what the consequences of that action would have been but I know I wouldn’t have been walking in obedience. At minimum, there would have been a lot of striving in my own strength to work for God instead of living a light abundant life, full of the joy and true fulfillment that God offers.
If we want to find rest and joy under Jesus’ yoke, which is easy and light, we must trust God with our story. We must wait on Him when He asks us to wait. We must trust Him when He makes a promise, even if it feels like it’s taking forever. He is never late, He is also never early, He is always perfectly on time.
Will you join me in trying to trust God with your story and wait on Him? It’s not going to be easy, but it’s going to be the best.
Your Fellow Traveler
lacey
Find True Joy 