The Challenge of Waiting
How are you at waiting? I must confess I am not great at it! God’s work of teaching me patience and trust is an ongoing one. I am thankful for His long suffering and grace!
Our society and culture today certainly does not help us develop in this area. We live in an age when everything is expected to happen immediately. We have instant access via the internet to all kinds of information worldwide. We have ‘next day delivery’ when we purchase online, a drive-thru at a restaurant, and instant photos on our smartphones that we can easily edit.
So then, is it any wonder waiting is hard? It can be challenging and testing as we wait on the Lord. We find ourselves waiting for God to fulfil His promises, waiting for prayers to be answered, waiting for healing, deliverance, breakthrough, or restoration. While these things are hard to wait for, imagine having to wait 400 years!
This is where the people of God were at the beginning of the New Testament. They knew and believed the promises of the coming Messiah made by the covenant keeping God and woven all throughout the Old Testament. But it had been a long time since the promises were made. More than this, in the midst of waiting God hadn’t spoken one word.
Hope in the Waiting
I wonder, dear friend, if you find yourself in a similar position today? Waiting for God to reveal His plan, for the cry of your heart to be answered, or for His promises for you to be fulfilled. Be sure of this, it may seem that God is silent, but He is never absent. He is with you right now in this hard season and as you wait, trust, hope, and pray.
But He hasn’t left you to muster up enough strength or figure things out on your own. He’s given you His Word and His Spirit. The Holy Spirit helps to develop the fruit of patience to wait and believe that He will do all that He says while His Word provides the anchoring truth of God’s never-changing character.
At the close of the Old Testament, God spoke to His people through the prophet Malachi, the messenger. As was the case in the other prophetic books we have studied, God’s people had been faithless, disobedient, and rebellious, going their own way and resistant to God’s truth. A speaking God requires a listening people, yet their ears were closed and their hearts were hard.
Despite the people’s failings, we see a God who is loving, kind, faithful, patient, forgiving, merciful, and just. He always keeps His covenant promises to His people, even when they forsake Him.
The same is true today. This is our God! No matter what we have done, He remains faithful. He is unchanging, and all His promises to us are ‘Yes and Amen,’ fulfilled in Jesus.
The Result of Waiting
At the end of Malachi’s message in the Old Testament, he closes by introducing us to someone who the Gospel writer Matthew will continue to tell us about. He writes of another messenger of God, John the Baptist, the one who was prophesied to be the forerunner who would point to Jesus, the promised Messiah.
“‘I am about to send my messenger, who will clear the way before me. Indeed, the Lord you are seeking will suddenly come to his temple, and the messenger of the covenant, whom you long for, is certainly coming,’ says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.” – Malachi 3:1
What a way to close the Old Testament! Though God would no longer speak to His people through the prophets, God’s plan of redemption is not over. Hope was still on the way. John the Baptist would be a mighty prophet used by God. But more than this, his coming would mean that the true Redeemer would soon arrive.
Praise God, for Jesus came! He came and fulfilled the demands of the Old Covenant. He paid the penalty for sin by his death on the cross, and He rose victorious from the dead so that we can enter into the New Covenant of grace and know complete forgiveness and the gift of full salvation.
Even though His people had to wait for what seemed to be a very long time, God kept His word. He is faithful to all His promises to send a deliverer to rescue and redeem His people.
So, we can be encouraged today. God is at work, even if we cannot see it and His sovereign purposes seem hidden from us. We can trust and believe, relying and hoping in His promises and in the knowledge of His faithfulness and steadfast love for us, His people.
The promises don’t end with Jesus’ first advent. We know through the promises in His Word that Jesus will come again. We live in the light of the hope of His return. This assurance helps us to stand firm and keep our eyes on Him in the waiting.
In the meantime, we build our lives on His Word, which equips us to live for Him and be transformed to be like Jesus.
Endure in the hard times knowing that God is with you. Find encouragement as you wait through the promises in God’s Word. Remain steadfast in hope, for God is trustworthy.
Stand firm dear friend!
