In our church gathering this past Sunday we heard from God's word in John 4 that the kind of faith Jesus asks of us believes in the Word and obeys in the wait (if you missed it, you can check it out here). "The wait" means the time between when God speaks a promise and when His word comes to pass, we're still obeying His commands, not waiting for our faith to turn to sight. This means a significant portion of our faith in Christ requires patient, humble, steady expectation.
This reminded me of a passage that brings out some deep emotion in my heart as I think about the analogy the Lord uses in it: Psalm 130:5-6 — “I wait for the Lord; I wait and put my hope in his word. I wait for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning—more than watchmen for the morning.” Twice the author writes we will wait for the Lord and for his word to come to pass "more than a watchman" does "for the morning." He's connecting how we relate to God and His word to how a watchman relates to the sunrise.
Let's think about this as if you're the one on watch: you’ve got the night shift on the city wall, keeping alert and scanning the darkness around, ready to sound the alarm in an emergency. As the night reaches its darkest, you’re exhausted because God made nighttime for sleep, but you’re staying awake and growing increasingly weary with each passing lifetime of a moment. You’re hoping so much for that first light to pierce the darkness, for that sun to rise because it means your watch is done, the night is gone day has come, just like it always does. So you wait… you wait for first light, for the consummation of day and the end of the night.
Is the watchman in the night ever thinking, “What if the day doesn't come? Is this going to be the night where all the natural laws of the universe are suspended after it's been this way for a few thousand years and the day isn’t going to come?” NO! He knows the day is coming! So he waits patiently, humbly, steadily, expectingly.
Even more so, more sure than the sun rising on a new day is God's word coming to pass! It is more sure than a new day! And when God’s word comes to pass, when that sun rises, the waiting is over, the light has broken through, and night has given way to day. We need to have a category in our faith to be able to say, “I will wait for the LORD. I wait… I put my hope in His word… His word is enough."
We can do this from the depths of our hearts as deeply as we're convinced His promises will be fulfilled.
There’s a song I love called I Will Wait For You, and no it's not the one by Mumford and Sons; it is by the Gettys and it reflects so much of what I want for us to walk in. I encourage you to listen to it here often for your joy in Christ to grow and your faith to be encouraged. Blessings!
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