“Wait for the Lord; be strong and let your heart take courage; yes, wait for the Lord” (Psalm 27:14).
Often, when an army is advancing into enemy territory and word is received that the advance has stopped; it is often because they are waiting for supplies to catch up with them. Provisions of clothing, food, ammunition have not yet arrived to make their final advance possible. They dare not press on until they are adequately provisioned, so they wait.
So it is in the everyday life of a Christian. We are desperately in need of the supplies that come from above and must overcome the temptation to move on unless we are adequately equipped. We must learn to wait for the Lord. We need to cultivate a spirit of dependence on God and of confidence in Him who daily gives us the needed supplies of grace, and strength, and courage.
How easy it is to pray and not wait. The fact of the matter is much of our praying is preoccupation with ourselves and our own needs. Wherein, when we are waiting upon God, we are pre-eminently occupied with Him. We enter His presence and sit quietly, so that He, as our God, can envelope us with Himself. Our God longs to reveal Himself to us, to fill us with Himself, to lead us in His paths. Waiting on God gives Him time and space to come to us in His own way by His divine power.
God does not want you to see waiting upon Him as a boring and tedious exercise but as time where His Holy Spirit can stir your soul and fill it again with child-like dependence and confident expectation. He wants you to know that He is the living God who notices you and longs to be with you. He wants you to wait upon Him until we know that we have met Him.
What does He promise to those who will wait upon Him? “Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary” (Isaiah 40:31).
When you pray let there be moments of silence, reverent stillness in which you yield all you are to God. Do this with expectation that He will speak to you and teach you and guide you.
Prayer is so much more than throwing a shopping list at God’s feet. In prayer we are meant to feast in the presence of God and allow Him to feed us with the glorious blessing of Himself. It is in that waiting that we give Him permission to search our hearts and to free us from those thoughts and actions and attitudes that are not yet yielded to Him. In that waiting upon the Lord we offer up the vessels of our lives so that He might sanctify them and make them useful to the Master for every good work (II Timothy 2:20-21).
Oswald Chambers said, “The measure of the worth of our public activity for God is the private profound communion that we have with Him. Rush is wrong every time, there is always plenty of time to wait upon God. We have to pitch our tents where we shall always have quiet times with God, however noisy our times with the world may be.”
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