Waiting

WAITING

 

Isaiah 40:31 “…they who wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” 

 

Waiting.

 

Waiting can be painful and frustrating. We don’t like to wait. Our cars which are supposed to speed up our lives, end up rushing us to a place where we have to wait. Either we end up waiting in our cars, or we rush to appointments and wait to be called in. 

            There are three stages to waiting:

First, as your car slows to a stop, your brain begins to reel as your progress is impeded. Alarms go off – you need to do something, anything to make the waiting more bearable. Grab your phone and check messages? Play with the radio? 

 

Second, you may begin to think of the cause of this slow-down. An accident? A big truck backing into a shipping lane? Congestion? Construction? Not that it really helps to know.

 

Third, as you wait longer, your mind moves to anger and blame. How did the driver ahead of you even get a license? They don’t know what they are doing. And why are there only two seasons in MB – winter and construction? Argh – you just want to get home. 

 

We don’t like to wait.

Waiting translates into doing nothing in our minds. Going nowhere. Wasting time. 

We have it burned into our psyches that we must “do something” because “doing nothing” is laziness. Waiting is counterintuitive to productivity. 

 

Yet the Bible is full of times of waiting. God or his prophets tell people to wait. Wait for the Lord. Wait for God to move. Wait for God’s answer. 

·      When God tells Abraham and Sarah that they will have a child, they need to wait for God’s timing.

·      On Mount Sinai, while Moses is receiving the Law, the people wait down below.

·      While the Israelites are captives in Babylon, they are waiting for their release. 

·      A Messiah is promised but the people have to wait 400 years before he appears in a backwater town like Nazareth. 

 

Waiting seems to be a big part of how God works with people.

 

In Acts 1:4, Jesus’ last words to his disciples before he ascended to the Father were “wait for the promise.” What the verse says in entirety is, “And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, ‘you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” 

 

What do you do when you wait though? 

What we find in Acts 2 is a story of the apostles busily acting instead of waiting. They are commanded to wait. And they do. For a while. After Jesus goes to the Father, they wait. They pray. Praying is part of waiting – prayer is waiting. The church in its essence is a people waiting together, waiting, and praying. Telling stories of Jesus and waiting. 

 

Peter gets itchy waiting. He can’t sit still and wait. To cope with the restlessness of waiting, he does some administration. That’s what the church has done for centuries when it feels the burden of waiting – we distract ourselves with meetings and plans and projects and politics.     

            Peter tells the group that they need to find a replacement for Judas Iscariot – he’s dead. What better way to wait than to do some housekeeping. They go “Vegas” on this decision and cast lots for the replacement who ends up being Matthias.

            After this, we never hear of Matthias again. 

            The disciples were supposed to wait, not administrate. Like a pregnant woman in her last trimester, when waiting is hardest, she feels like doing something (nesting). 

            The casting of lots, rolling the dice, does not get them in trouble with God, but their action doesn’t lead anywhere. God is gracious with people when they fail to wait:

·      When Abraham tries to force the promise with Hagar…

·      When the people form a golden calf because Moses is MIA…

·      When the Jews’ hearts are distracted by idols in the OT…

It’s the act of the apostles that chooses Matthias. He’s chosen before the Spirit arrives. In Acts 9, with no apostles present to do this act of admin, we’re told of God’s own action of choosing. God elects the 12^th apostle not by rolling the dice but through an amazing encounter with words and visions. On the road to Damascus, a zealous Pharisee named Saul (Paul) is knocked to the ground and addressed by Jesus. That’s God acting. That’s the Spirit choosing. 

 

Waiting is hard. But we don’t have to do church admin while we wait. It’s not a waste of time. It’s a time of prayer and worship. We are in a period of waiting as the church, waiting for God to move, waiting for God to act in history. While we wait, we pray. While we wait, we tell the stories of Jesus, his life, his death, his resurrection. The church is birthed and called to wait because it is always to be looking for the living Jesus Christ’s action in the world. For the church, waiting is the way of attentive looking. The church must wait because its only job is to witness to the living Jesus Christ, who is moving in the world. 

            We must wait for the Spirit to empower us to act.

 

What are you waiting for? Can you wait for God to move in your life? 

            When we take matters into our own hands, we may miss the really great thing God has been doing or is going to do.

            Wait upon the Lord, he will renew your strength. Wait for the Spirit to reveal his truth to you. Wait for his deliverance.

            Waiting is worth it when we know that a gracious and generous Lord has good things planned for us.

 

Inspired by and adapted from the book When Church Stops Working by Andrew Root. 

                                                AMEN