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 HOPE-FILLED WAITING

“Wait patiently for the Lord, be brave and courage. Yes! Wait patiently for the Lord” Psalm 27:14

“Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up on wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint!” Isaiah 40:31

If you received notice that you had won a major award and that it would be delivered any day now, you would become expectant. You would check the front stoop to see if it had arrived via Amazon. You would check the mailbox to see if it had come in an envelope. You would race to the door every time the doorbell rang to see if it had come in person. Your sense of anticipation would definitely be heightened as would your sense of sight and hearing.

All of us know periods of waiting in life. For the follower of Jesus Christ, our waiting on the Lord is grounded in His promises recorded in His Word, the Bible. In 2 Corinthians 1:20 we read that all the promises of God have been fulfilled in Christ Jesus and so our waiting is expectant. God never fails to fulfill what HE has promised. In Romans 8:18-25 we read that we are waiting for the consummation of and our experience of the fulfillment of all of God’s promises in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. We are urged to be alert, awake, expectant, and ready for that Day.

There are things God has promised us in the working out of His salvation in us. Freedom from debilitating habits, guidance, direction, reconciliation, comfort and healing and growth in walking in the Spirit, we long to see the Lord bring to completion. If I am waiting to hear from the Lord, that very season of waiting does something to me. It has a way of heightening my sense of hearing as I strain to hear, long to hear His Voice. “If you seek Me, you will find Me. When you search for me with all your heart, I will let you find Me,” says the Lord. (Jeremiah 29:13-14)

I continue to ask the Lord to enable me to hear His voice, and since salvation is of the Lord, I can trust Him and live in hope-filled waiting.  God has given me His Word, therefore I can seek Him, believing Him, knowing that He is never late in answering, doing what He has promised. My waiting is a place for the Holy Spirit to work in me, preparing my life to experience and to receive what God has promised to me in His Word.

When the angel Gabriel appeared in the Temple in Jerusalem and told Zachariah, the priest, that his wife, Elizabeth, was going to become pregnant (she was very old and had been barren up to that point in their marriage), Zachariah’s heart and mind were so blunted by time that he would not believe his own eyes and ears. You would think that an angel standing in front of you, telling you that he stood in the Presence of God and that God, Himself, had sent him to deliver this message that it would have been sign enough to cause anyone to believe.

He was so focused on his own barrenness and that of his wife that the Word of God he was hearing seemed to be an impossibility. It is like so many who can read the New Testament eyewitness accounts of who Jesus Christ is and what He has done, and yet their focus is so on themselves that salvation seems an impossibility;  they stumble at the Message from God.

The promise bounced off Zachariah like a well thrown football that should have been a touchdown. But the priest’s fumble did not thwart the promise of God, for you see, when God speaks, what He says will happen…does happen. How God will do what He says may well be a mystery to us as it was to Mary when the angel Gabriel spoke to her about the conception of the Messiah, the Son of God, in her virginal womb. Gabriel stated clearly, “Nothing is impossible with God.”

Like Mary, the Lord simply asks that we surrender, that our hearts give consent to what God has promised and that we receive it in hope-filled faith. God’s Word creates and calls into being things that do not yet exist, things that are humanly impossible. It is in Jesus Christ that God has displayed His, “Yes” to us all. Where you can least imagine change, redemption, reconciliation, life transformation, and peace, God has given Jesus Christ to make them reality in you.

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