Weary in the Waiting

You pray, but God doesn’t seem to be listening. You trust Him, but it appears He’s letting you down. You believe His Word, but His promises are coming up seemingly empty in your life. You seek, but do not find…you knock, but no one answers. If God is doing anything at all in your life…you can’t see it. The fight of faith intensifies, as it appears that not only is God running late…He may not even show up at all. By the looks of things, God’s either too busy in the lives of others or He just simply doesn’t care. With each passing hour, your Spirit grows weary…in the waiting.

My eyes are straining to see your Promises come true.
When will you comfort me?
(Psalm 119:82 NLT)

I am exhausted from crying for help; my throat is parched.
My eyes are swollen with weeping, waiting for my God to help me.
(Psalm 69:31 NLT)

It’s been said that the hardest part of faith is the last half hour. You see, there are times of overwhelming confusion that come just before deliverance. In the darkness, we tend to give up just before the Light breaks through. Charles Spurgeon once said, “The wilderness is the way to Canaan. Defeat prepares us for victory. The darkest hour of the night precedes the dawn.” We love God’s grace, but we don’t like His watch. His calendar appears to be astonishingly different than the ones we hang on our walls, and we’re not sure He’s managing time, or our lives, very well at all. Unless we continue to look through God’s eyes in the mundane, seemingly empty, times of our lives, we will grow weary and our faith may fail.

What we don’t realize, in our times of desperation, is that if God is guiding our steps, if He’s directing our lives, then He has allowed us to be brought into the very valley in which we cry out for mercy. The fact is, God has permitted the circumstances that have brought us to our knees, and He has done so, with a plan and a purpose. In our times of waiting for God to show up…we shouldn’t be crying out, “Why is this happening, when will you rescue me, and how will you do it?”…we should be faithfully approaching God’s throne of grace and asking Him, “What? What is it that you want to do in and through me in this?”

You see, there’s a BIG difference between “being still” and “doing nothing.” When God appears to have escorted you into His “waiting room,” you can be certain that He doesn’t want you “doing nothing”…He wants you “being still.” The enemy fills us with the lies that we must take action…take matters into our own hands. The enemy whispers, “God’s Word can’t be relied upon, He can’t be trusted…you have to do something!” But God’s strong, still, small voice replies, “Wait on Me…I will save you…I will deliver you…I hold your life (every detail) in the palms of my hands.” The enemy wants you to “reason” your way through the valleys of your life…God asks you to trust Him and rest in Him.

When you’re trusting God…you should be praying, drawing nearer to Him, and resting in the peace He provides in the midst of the raging storm. As you wait, God strengthens you because you begin to realize that God IS at work…He’s growing your faith. And faith is rarely grown with anything other than overwhelming circumstances. God has brought you to a place of helplessness and hopelessness, so that you will find that when you are in need…He is ALL you need. He brings light into the darkness…He doesn’t have to bring you OUT of the darkness in order for you to experience His light.

Even in darkness light dawns for the upright… (Psalm 112:4)

I’m not sure what you’re waiting for right now. Maybe it’s a job that you desperately need to help support your family, maybe you’re waiting on God to heal you or someone you love, maybe it’s waiting on God to soften the heart of an addict in your family…whatever you’re waiting for, God doesn’t appear to be “at work.” He seems more absent than present in your circumstances. If this is where you are in your faith…God wants you to lay hold of one truth today:

“No ear heard, no eye seen, a God like you who works for
those who wait for him.”
(Isaiah 64:4 MSG)

God has not forgotten you…He has not abandoned you in your time of desperation. He often works best in your brokenness…a humble heart is more moldable in His hands. Stop worrying about the details…quit trying to figure it all out—God knows what He’s doing. He’s in control…even if life isn’t. Trust that when your world seems to be falling apart…it’s really just falling into place in the hands of your Almighty loving God.

Trust. Wait. Rest. God’s help is on the way. Wait in faith, and the Spirit of God will fill you with peace and joy, so that you will not grow weary in the waiting.