Maybe
you have been walking with God and growing in the Lord and you are doing great,
you are experiencing for the first time in a long time (or maybe ever) the
freedom of not only a newly created life in Christ but the freedom from
addiction you have longed for—but now you are waiting for the next steps in
your walk with Him. Maybe God has shown you some of the new path you will walk
down but the door has not yet been opened, you are waiting on God’s timing and
direction.
Sometimes
we are waiting on God and something new to happen in our life and it can be a
real test to go through especially (as I sometimes say) if you are new to the
family of God. We have to learn to trust Him and seek Him and His word during times
of waiting. The waiting has purpose.
When
you think you know the direction you should be moving in and you haven’t yet been
told by God to move you must remember that God has an absolute perfect plan. He
isn’t putting us through trials and tests because He likes to see us suffer and
He isn’t making us wait simply to see if we can—I mean, of course, if He wants
us to wait, wait is what we will do, but there is a perfect and spiritual
reason for the waiting process and it isn’t just to develop our patience, it is
also to put His plan for us into motion at the right time involving the right
people and places. Our plans don’t ever just involve us; they involve the plans
of others too.
It can be difficult
to trust God and sometimes waiting can feel or seem like you are doing
“nothing”, but during those times you can seek God and pray and ask Him for His
divine guidance. His word tells us in Proverbs 4:2 (NLT), “For I am giving you
good guidance. Don’t turn away from my instructions.” Thank God for His
wonderful living word (Hebrews 4:12) which gives us the answers we so
desperately need while we journey from this strange land to our home in heaven.
Remember that “…Our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait
for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” Philippians 3:20 (NKJV). His word also
tells us in James 1:3-4 (NKJV), “…The testing of your faith produces patience,
but let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete,
lacking nothing.” Patience, if we let it, will do a “perfect work” in us and
that makes the waiting worth it.
“But those who wait on 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” Isaiah 40:31 (NKJV).
Pursue patience (1Timothy 6:11) and know that God hasn’t put
you aside or become too busy with someone else and left you to wonder what you
should do next. Once again it comes down to knowing just how wide and how deep
His love for us actually is and then we can know that He isn’t leaving us to be
the God of another. For our God is
omnipotent which means He can save, help, love, guide and correct all of us at
the same time and never once lose sight of or heart for any of us. This intense
measure of God’s love is described in the following verses from Ephesians
3:18-19 (NIV), “May (you) have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people,
to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know
this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all
the fullness of God.” If this love surpasses knowledge (which is acquired and
known in our intellect and our minds) but we can be full with it, then it can
only be known spiritually.
This is what you do
while waiting on God—you embrace and soak up His great love and get to know
Him.
Getting
to know Him is to understand His nature and it is not to make us suffer, wait,
or endure hardship for an unknown or unnecessary reason. Yes, the reason might
be unknown to us but I assure you the purpose is not unnecessary. Some people
really do have a distorted view of God and why we go through the things we do. It
is one of the many things I have been set free from and I finally met my God,
the God who would rather love me than watch me suffer— I once believed it was
the other way around. Sometimes it takes us realizing that what we might feel
is suffering is not necessarily considered suffering in God’s eyes. We have to
remember that He knows our big picture, our end result, our finished faith.
Trust Him.
If we can imagine God sitting on His throne
demanding everything go His way just because He is God and He said so—then we
can just as easily imagine Him working lovingly on our behalf to make sure all
of the pieces to our newly created life in Him fit together just as He planned
for them to and just as His word tells us. I know for some this may be hard and
because we come from dysfunctional families (all are, to some degree) we can
have a hard time seeing God as the loving Father that He is, but let’s imagine
and believe that God is the loving and caring Father that He is and know
that everything He does He planned before we were ever created and He not only
knows what to do, when to do it but He knows what is best for us. It literally
tells us this in 2 Timothy 1:9 (NLT), “For God saved us and called us to live a
holy life. He did this, not because we deserved it, but because that was His
plan from before the beginning of time—to show us His grace through Christ
Jesus.”
Isn’t that what we are
in this for, to live out God’s great plan for our lives? After all, when we
pursued our own plans we fell prey to addiction/sin and the bondage that goes
with it, our plans don’t work for our good they work to destroy us. Take God at
His word, and He tells us in Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV), “For I know the plans I have
for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans
to give you hope and a future.” If the One and Only Living God has plans to
give us a future with His prosperity and hope then let’s be patient enough to
wait on Him to put these wonderful plans into motion for our benefit and not
our harm.
~
