When the Wait is Long

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life."

 Proverbs 13:12

Waiting is a facet of life few people enjoy.  The western culture of today is under-girded with the idea that quicker is better.  We don't feel like waiting and we don't believe we should have to.  Yet in the Christian life we find that God is not in a hurry.  I would like to take short-cuts concerning my sanctification, but God is pleased with what appears to us to be the long, often very long way.  Waiting provides opportunity to trust.  How many times in scripture do we see God reveal something divinely to His people and then wait years to bring it to fulfillment?

Moses believed while he lived in Pharaoh's house that God would use him to deliver the Israelites from slavery.  It was not until he fled Egypt and tended his father-in-law's flocks for 40 years that God gave him directives from the burning bush.  Even after he obeyed God and went to Egypt it seemed everyone was against him:  Pharaoh would not let the people go, the Israelites were angry that their labours were increased, and it seemed at times like it would never happen!  But God was faithful to His promise.  Moses had to learn to wait.  God told Noah that He would cause rain to fall from heaven and flood the earth.  It was 120 years later when the raindrops turned to a torrent when the heavens opened and the depths were broken up for 40 days and nights.  One of the longest waits fulfilled according to scripture was for the promised Messiah.  Throughout the Old Testament, God said He would send an anointed One to save His people from their sins.  That prophecy was fulfilled thousands of years later when the Father sent Jesus Christ born of a virgin and the Holy Spirit to be the Saviour of the world.

How God rejoices to use the crucible of waiting to refine us!  He puts a desire in our hearts, over time we learn to embrace this desire as His plan for us, only for Him to draw it out seemingly for an eternity.  We become heartsick as our hopes remain unrealised.  We wonder when God's Word will be fulfilled and toy with how He might fulfill it.  Satan delights to shoot arrows of doubt and unbelief at us.  God is good to make us wait.  Sometimes the desire God puts in our hearts can even overshadow our view of Him because of our feeble, shortsighted flesh.  I find that when I am burdened with disappointment or impatience it is because I have allowed my gaze to wander from Christ and onto the unfulfilled promise.  It is only when my eyes, heart, and renewed mind are fixed upon Jesus that I see the promise is still valid and unshakable.  Even after this realisation the waiting goes on and on.  God has many more lessons for those who are patient to heed them.

When I allow my hope in anything other than God to rise up, the fall is inevitable.  This world will let us down.  People will fail us, but God never fails.  Jesus is like the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden.  Even as those who ate from it would live forever, those who partake of Christ through repentance and faith will never die.  Our bodies will someday perish, along with fleshly hopes and pursuits, but our relationship with God will last forever.  If we look for life in anything other than Christ, it will become old, dull, and empty.  Only in Christ do we find life refreshed day by day.  Show me a man who is perfect in patience and I will show you one who has learned to wait upon the LORD.  There's nothing wrong with a long wait.  It makes the fulfillment that much sweeter and precious.