Isaiah 8:17 (NKJV) 17 And I will wait on the LORD, Who hides His face from the house of Jacob; And I will hope in Him.
As you know, I believe the Lord has spoken to my heart that this is to be a year of unprecedented favor for the body of Christ. In our church and in my life, there have been many manifestations of this favor. Recently I was praying for direction concerning our church and the Lord spoke something to me that I really did not want to hear. I wanted to know what plan we should put in place for the summer. I wanted a set of goals or directives that I could pass on to our people so we would have a focus for the next step. The answer I got was “wait.”
Waiting has never been my strongpoint. When I first went into fulltime ministry, I worked with another brother who tended to be very cautious. The joke between us was that he wanted 14 confirmations and then maybe one more to be sure. If I thought something might be the Lord, I wanted to go for it right away. Needless to say, balance between us was necessary for success. I am somewhat more cautious with age, but I still would rather go than wait. Nevertheless, wait is the word I got.
I do not really know what I am waiting for. I do not know how long we are to wait for whatever we are supposed to wait for. I just know that we are to wait. Of course, that does not mean do nothing. It means keep doing what we are called to do until either something happens or we know something else. I do not really like that plan.
I was driving in my car last week praying about the message for Sunday morning and I heard the Lord speak to me again. He asked, “What did I tell you to do right now?” I answered, “You said wait.” He said, “Don’t you think you ought to study waiting?” Sometimes the obvious tends to escape me.
I began to look up scriptures about waiting. As I did, I also realized that waiting and favor go hand in hand. If we are going to walk in favor, we are going to have to wait. The nature of favor demands it. Favor in circumstances or favor with people means that someone is doing something for that we cannot do for ourselves. Favor cannot be forced or it is not favor.
Our first look at favor was in relation to the Hebrew women in the time of the Exodus. God told them to go to the Egyptian women and asked for gold, silver and clothing. They were told by God to ask for these things not take them. Once they asked, they had to wait for the Egyptian women to comply. It may have been a few moments or a few days, but they had to wait.
In Acts chapter 2 after the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the bible says that the church had “favor with God and man and the Lord added daily to the church those who were being saved.” This favor with man was not something they went out and got. It was something that people gave to them and required that they wait. To walk in favor we must know how to wait.
As I began to look at the scriptures related to waiting, I found that this seemed to be a theme in Isaiah’s prophecy. The most famous “waiting” chapter in the bible is probably Isaiah 40. However, I found a number of other verses that speak of waiting in this powerful book. Today’s scripture caught my attention.
In this verse, we see that the prophet is determined to wait on the Lord, even though God has turned his face from the house of Jacob. To me this suggests that things were not going well. It would seem that God was not moving in a way that seemed to be a blessing to the house of Jacob. Yet even in these difficult times, the prophet will not only wait for Lord, but also place his hope in him. I found this to be very reminiscent of our day.
The truth is that I was praying about what to do because we need to see some things change. We are not having the success I want to have in terms of growing the Kingdom of God. We, like most churches and people in our country, are in tight times financially. We need some miracles to get some things done. I wanted to know what to do in order to see the things happen that we need to happen. Instead of a plan, God told me to wait. When I read this verse I thought, “I guess I am not the first to have to wait for God!”
It is easy to wait when we know what we are waiting for. It is easy, or at least easier, to wait when we know how long we are going to have to wait. In this chapter, the prophet does not know either of those things. We will look at the details of Israel’s circumstances this week but for today, I want us to see that Isaiah had to wait with no guarantee of how long or even what specifically he was waiting for. This is often where we find ourselves.
Most of our faith life is spent waiting. I am reminded of Mark 11:24.
Mark 11:24 (NKJV) 24 Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.
Real faith requires that when we pray to the Lord and we base our prayer on a promise from the Word of God, we believe that the request is ours the moment we pray. To ask God for something he says he will do and then refuse to believe that God will do what we ask until we see it is not faith. God is not a man that he should lie. What God says he will do, he will do and when we ask him for something we need to see it as done. That is faith.
I tell my people that even though this is the case, there will always be a period of time between, “believe you receive” and “you shall have.” It might only be a few minutes or it might be years, but there will be a wait involved. Faith, like favor, requires that we be able to wait on the Lord.
I have been using the term “wait on the Lord” in this post for the most. When I began to study this topic, I was under the impression that to “wait on the Lord” was somehow different from “waiting for the Lord.” There are two words translated wait in the Old Testament. I assumed at first that one meant wait on the Lord and one meant wait for the Lord. I found that they were both translated both ways. Waiting on the Lord can have a certain connotation that we will probably look at later, but both terms actually mean the same thing.
In the southern United States people tend to use the term wait on, while in the north we tend to say “wait for.” Let me illustrate. When my children were younger and we were ready to go somewhere the kids might ask me, “When are we leaving?” If I lived in the south, I might say. “We are waiting on Mama because she isn’t ready yet.” Because we live in the north, I said, “We are waiting for Mom. She isn’t ready.” Both mean the same thing. Mother is not ready to leave yet and we are not going anywhere until she is!
What does it mean to wait on or wait for God? It means that he is not ready to do whatever it is we want him to do and until he is, we wait. I do not really like that idea. I want an explanation. I want to know how long I have to wait. We must take our lesson from the prophet in Isaiah 8. We wait until God is ready and we hope in him. That means that we understand that he will do what is needed when it is needed.
God wants to give us favor. God wants us to understand that we have no hope but to hope in him. Waiting can be the most difficult thing to do, but wait we must. However, the promise is that those who wait for the Lord and his timing will not be ashamed. (Isaiah 49:23)
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