I don’t like to wait. No, let’s be completely frank: I despise waiting. There is a certain highway in the city where I live that is notorious for snarled traffic, often for a couple of hours on both sides of rush hour. I avoid it like cream of broccoli soup. Every Sunday morning, there are certain members of my family who move at the speed of a glacier in getting ready for worship, and I’m convinced they make less haste on the days I preach. They make me wait, and I don’t like it.

And I am not alone. Fallen humans categorically do not like to wait. We want instant gratification. We want life’s knottiest dilemmas solved in a half hour. Why is it so difficult for sons of Adam to wait? Conventional wisdom says doing absolutely nothing should be easy for us, but it is not.
Over the years, I have learned that waiting on the Lord is one of the most potentially sanctifying (and necessary) aspects of the Christian life. It is one of those glorious “gospel paradoxes” that helps us understand what the LORD told Isaiah, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (Is. 55:8).

We wait in hope

We pray in hope, and then we wait on the Lord to answer. A Christian man prays for a job so that he can provide for his family as God has commanded, and then he waits. A mother prays that God will draw her wayward son to himself unto salvation, and then she waits. We pray that God will make our future path clear, and then we wait. We read Matthew 6:34 for a thousandth time for comfort.

We wait, but we don’t surrender to passivity.

The Puritans understood this reality well and developed something of a doctrine of waiting; they referred to it as “God’s school of waiting.” William Carey understood it well. He spent seven years on the mission field before seeing his first convert. Of greater import, the inspired writers understood it well: “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (Ps. 27:14).

Many seminary students will complete their theological training then do the last thing they anticipated: wait. I snail-mailed or e-mailed more than 200 resumes and suffered through seemingly as many interviews with schools and churches after completing my Ph.D. before leaving Louisville for my first full-time ministry, a pastorate in Alabama. Total wait time: three years. The last year of that period was particularly agonizing as I watched my closest friends take off, one-by-one, like jets off an aircraft carrier, and soar through ministry doors God had opened.

But there I sat, feeling a bit like mold or moss, waiting. But it was for my good.

As difficult as it can be, waiting builds spiritual muscles in a unique manner. My sinful impatience notwithstanding, Isaiah makes this truth clear:

“But they who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount with wings as eagles, they shall run and grow weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

Lessons from God’s school

What a glorious promise! And yet our discontented hearts find it difficult to wait on God. Still, waiting on the Lord does many good things for us. Waiting:

  • Causes us to pray without ceasing. We are needy, and he owns the cattle on a thousand hills. He is always faithful, and the outcome of our waiting proves him wholly true.
  • Instills in us a clearer understanding that we are creatures absolutely dependent upon our Creator. Though our sinful hearts crave omniscience and omnipotence, we possess neither, and waiting helps us to focus on that reality.
  • Increases our faith. After all, does not the writer of Hebrews define faith as “the conviction of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”? (Heb. 11:1). We wait and God works.
  • Transfers the doctrine of God’s absolute sovereignty from the speculative realm to the practical. In waiting, we actually experience God’s lordship in an intimate way.
  • Grounds our future in a certain hope. This is Paul’s point in Romans 8:24-25: “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” As we wait God instills in us patience, that most elusive of spiritual virtues.
  • Reminds us that we live between the times. When Jesus returns, the not yet will collapse into the already, and there will be no more waiting for an answer to desperate prayers. The kingdom will be consummated, and Jesus will set everything right. Until then, we pray and wait and are sanctified by God’s wise process.
  • Stamps eternity on our eyeballs. When we bring urgent petitions before the Lord, we wait with expectation, and the city of man in which we live fades in importance as we begin to realize that the city of God is primary. As Jonathan Edwards prayed, “O Lord, stamp eternity on my eyeballs.” Waiting helps to do that. It prioritizes the eternal over the temporal in accord with 2 Corinthians 4:18: “as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

Your waiting is not fruitless

Though it’s difficult for us to see, waiting, in God’s economy, is for our good. Even our waiting achieves God’s sovereign purposes. And waiting must not paralyze us. It should not delay ministry, even if it’s not what you are presently doing full-time. If you are called to ministry, unleash the gospel where God has planted you, even as you await his providential guidance for the future.

As Paul Tripp puts it, waiting on God is not at all like the meaningless waiting you do at the dentist’s office:

We don’t just wait—we wait in hope. And what does that hope in God look like? It is a confident expectation of a guaranteed result. We wait believing that what God has begun he will complete, so we live with confidence and courage. We get up every morning and act upon what is to come, and because what is to come is sure, we know that our labor in God’s name is never in vain. So we wait and act. We wait and work. We wait and fight. We wait and conquer. We wait and proclaim. We wait and run. We wait and sacrifice. We wait and give. We wait and worship. Waiting on God is an action based in confident assurance of grace to come.

I pray that God will sanctify my impatience. After all, isn’t that the word that really describes our distaste for waiting? Perhaps it really is a sign of God’s love for me that I seem to find the rush hour traffic jam virtually every day.