Waiting On God

“The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.”

— Lamentations 3:25 (ESV)

Waiting Is Hard

When my family moved back to Kankakee in 2022 from our haitus to Ohio, it seemed like all we were doing was waiting. We had reasons to move back, but we moved on what was basically blind faith. God had given us a runway of about two months to have a place to stay, an exciting opportunity, and a few amazing friends, but otherwise, we had no idea what would come next.

Waiting is hard, but it’s even harder when the odds start to stack up against you. It gets challenging to hold onto the promises of God when the realities of life seem to be getting in the way of what you need most.

Yet God knows the difficulty and complexity of every challenging situation we face. Waiting is only an invitation from God becasue life consists of starts and stops, wins and losses, progress and setbacks. Lamentations 3:25 is a comforting verse about trusting God, but it’s tucked in the middle of prayers of lament. Worry, frustration, and uncertainty surround the promise to wait on the Lord.

The same is true of other passages about waiting on God. Psalm 37 is one of my favorite psalms because of all the amazing promises of God’s faithfulness tucked within, but the premise of the psalm is: “Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers!” (Psalm 37:1).

At first, it might seem discouraging that so many of the sweetest promises in God’s word are really cries of blind faith amid difficult circumstances. Do we have to suffer in order to understand hope?

In some ways, the answer is yes. God forms his character in us through suffering—both in understanding the love and heart of Jesus and in refining the sinfulness within us. That’s one of the main reasons that James tells us to be joyful when we face trials (James 1:2-4). But I think something else is on display in these lament/hope companion passages.

A Clear Invitation

God doesn’t deny the reality of trouble. He doesn’t leave out the fact that humans can’t see into the future, struggle to give up control, and worry all the time. Instead, the word of God gives space for the honest place of human hearts. And in that uncertainty comes the clear invitation to wait on the Lord.

One of the most well-known verses about waiting is Isaiah 40:31 (ESV), which says: “But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.” Have you ever experienced that?

Isaiah is showing us that waiting is not just about pausing. It’s about resetting the source of our hope and strength. That’s why Lamentations says, “The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.” It’s not that God is only good to people who seek him, but that when we wait and seek the Lord, we discover and step into God’s goodness.

As much as I hate the waiting, I can hardly think of a place where I’ve experienced more of God’s divine strength and goodness. Maybe you have had the same experience. Maybe you are at a point in your life where you can either keep pressing on in your own strength or you can stop and rest in God. You’re invited today to receive the goodness and strength of God simply by waiting on him and putting your trust in his presence and plans for your life.

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Reflect

1. What keeps you from waiting on the Lord? How could you flip that barrier into an opportunity for God’s grace?

2. What areas of your life do you need God to move in? Get specific and bring those things to God. Spend a moment waiting on him, then go through your day looking for his strength and trusting him with the outcomes.

Keep Praying

“And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.”

— Luke 18:1 (ESV)

• Read Luke 18:1-8 ESV

  And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’” And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

A Parable About Persistence

In Luke 18:1-8, Jesus tells the disciples a parable about a widow who found justice through persistence. Although the judge seemed unwilling to help her, he relented because she simply would not stop. Jesus doesn’t always explain his parables in the New Testament, but here he tells us outright that the story's purpose was to motivate the disciples to pray and not lose heart.

In matters of justice and deliverance, persistence is key. We do not know when the dam will break or when the door will open, we only know how to pray and how to seek.

It reminds me of what Jesus said in Matthew 7 and Luke 11. He told his listeners to ask, seek, and knock—to persist in leaning into the kingdom of God and reaching out for answers. It came with a promise: “For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened” (Matthew 7:8 ESV).

There’s no promise that God will give us whatever we want, but that doesn’t stop Jesus from extending the invitation. If we only fixate on the outcomes of asking, seeking, and knocking, we might miss that Jesus is first inviting us to a posture of anticipation. God is a giving God, so positioning our hearts in a place of asking with expectation helps us to align with his will.

The widow in Jesus’s parable faced a judge who “neither feared God nor respected man” (Luke 18:2). She needed justice, but arguments, reason, and evidence were not on her side. Jesus elevated the persistent widow because her behavior modeled something Jesus wanted his disciples to get: those who stand in the truth have the freedom to be persistent.

One of the enemy’s main attacks against prayer is discouragement and hopelessness. Jesus teaches us that no opposition should keep us from pressing into the truth. We may have a vision in our minds for how God will answer us, but God’s answer is often better and more creative than ours. When we live asking and expecting, we have eyes to notice and celebrate all the ways God is responding.

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Reflect

1. What holds you back from prayer? Where have you allowed discouragement and resistance to keep you from seeking God?

2. Take a moment and pray for something you stopped praying for, pushing past the voice of opposition.

God Was Kind To You

“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”

— Ephesians 2:4-7 ESV

Desperately Separated

The Christian life can easily move from a place of spiritual desperation to casual maintenance. Routine engagement with church, Christian content, and devotions like this one can leave the impression that Christianity only exists to benefit the life of the Christian. After all, the Bible is filled with life-giving insights and inspiring stories. It’s fairly easy to extract meaningful metaphors and tips from the Bible stories. But the Bible is more than a story about moral idealism.

That frame of mind embraces a message that, yes, sometimes humans mess up, but the truths packed into the Bible are capable of helping steer Christians in the right direction. If we start seeing the purpose of the Bible and spiritual disciplines as only adding to our lives, we’ve missed the starting point of the gospel.

The message of the Bible is that people didn’t just fall back from freedom, they fell away completely. The starting place for engaging with God is a place of desperate separation. Maybe you sing Phil Whickam’s “Living Hope” at your church. It starts with this line:

How great the chasm that lay between us
How high the mountain I could not climb

The song lays out a theology of hopeless desperation before God by confessing that even if we wanted to get back to God (which we often in our sin don’t even want), the distance to cross is too great. This is not exactly an uplifting start for a song talking about a God that is supposed to be hope made alive to people. But hope shines brightest in the darkness.

Entering Into The Gospel Story

Humanity’s standing before God is bleak. We enter into the story of the gospel as offenders. The ones who, despite being made in God’s image, live like we want God to die. To live in sin is to pronounce that God’s truth is detestable to us. That’s the natural inclination of the flesh—it wages war on the truth of God’s word.

But when God enters the gospel story, he does so by his own will in grace and mercy. That’s why Paul can say that Jesus has been kind to us. He offers us something that we don’t deserve.

Switching Perspectives

There is a time to reflect on Bible stories for moral insight, but that approach to the gospel story is an incomplete picture of what God is actually saying to us. If we are only looking for a nugget of truth to apply to our lives, we will probably miss it completely.

Approaching Christianity as a consumer of spiritual goods puts us in the seat of authority. We make the decisions, plan our spiritual growth, and get all the credit for each milestone. Have you ever met someone who is blatantly self-righteous? Anyone with all the receipts for their spiritual growth is probably growing into something other than Christ.

Christian faith can only be approached from a place of utter humility. It proclaims that the only thing we bring to the table is a dead heart but what we get in return is an invitation to everlasting life.

That’s because God, in his love, was kind to you.

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Reflect

1. Do you see yourself in charge of your spiritual journey? Where are you holding tightly to your faith and missing out on God’s grace?

2. Take a moment to meditate on the kindness of God. Open your Bible to Ephesians 2 and respond to a God that reaches out to you.

Pray

Jesus, thank you for showing me your kindness by reaching out to me when I had nothing to bring to you but a dead heart. Help me see your gospel story as an invitation of grace. I confess that it’s only because of your love and mercy that I get to respond to your truth. So form in me what I can’t form in myself. Work in me what I can’t accomplish in my own strength. Create in me a new heart.

Approaching Grace

“Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

— Hebrews 4:14-16 ESV

The Way Back to Grace

Faith can start with an explosion of energy and passion, or it can take the path of slow heart transformation. Working through the complexities of trusting in God is no simple task—much less persisting in faith throughout all the blessings and hardships of life.

Blessings bring opportunities for self-dependence. That is the kind of subtle erosion of trust where God slowly fades into the background, and material hopes move to the forefront. It’s a simple pattern of replacement where, piece by piece, the places we used to rely on God (or even look to him, for that matter) get filled up with anything else that captivates our attention.

Hardships bring opportunities to reject God. After all, it’s hard to think that God is good when surrounded by pain and injustice. The promises of God’s faithfulness can seem dim and distant from the lowest of lows.

Both places can lead back to vivid recognition of God’s grace.

Whether sinking from freedom into hardship or drifting from contentment to self-sufficiency, the way back to grace is through Jesus, the High Priest.

Jesus, The High Priest

All priests exist to minister to God’s people and to intercede on their behalf, but Jesus does it best. His ministry as High Priest surpasses every other human priest, even the greatest ones recorded in the Bible.

Jesus is like the priests throughout the Bible, but he is far greater.

• His priestly line is not from earthly families. Because he is God’s son, his right to the role of high priest is based on his nature.

• His sacrifice is not temporary. Jesus doesn’t offer sacrifices of animals and offerings from the Old Covenant. He offers himself as the perfect offering for sin and ushers in the New Covenant.

• His ministry is never to be passed on to another. Jesus is raised from the dead, lives forever, and ministers before the throne of God even now.

It might be tempting to see Jesus in comparison to the biblical description of Israel’s worship, but it’s better to see the worship described in the Bible as an imitation or shadow of the ministry of Jesus.

This is great news for us today because it means in Jesus we are privileged to bypass any barrier to God. We get to access God through God.

Application: The Posture of Grace

We wander from God toward the pride of self-sufficiency or the grief of hardship when we lose sight of the throne of grace. That throne is the source of all mercy, forgiveness, healing, and hope. We can abide in God’s love at his throne becasue his ministry liberates us from the weight of sin.

We can take our sins and sorrows directly to the Savior. God has not only purchased our freedom. He has invited us to the seat of reconciliation and peace. If faith for you feels like a rush of excitement, don’t wait to run to the throne room. If your heart is slowly turning to the Shepherd, look again to the seat of grace.

How long has it been since you approached the throne of grace?

Grace is not meant to be a one-time transaction, so the fuel of encountering God needs to be sustained through constant engagement with his word and his presence. God knows that we need daily grace to overcome sin and live in the knowledge of God, so even the most hesitant believers are invited to experience grace again by approaching the throne of mercy. Confidence in the approach begins with a timid trust until with assurance we realize we belong to the God of grace.

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Reflect

1. Where in your life are you allowing blessings or hardships to keep you from the throne of grace? Ask God to search your heart and open your eyes.

2. What does it look like to live close to the throne of grace? Reflect on how you can respond to Jesus as your High Priest.

Pray

Jesus, teach me how to respond to you as the High Priest. I trust you to lead me into freedom through your grace. I give you my burdens, and I lay down anything that keeps me proud. I know that I am safe in your presence and confident before your throne—not because of what I deserve, but becasue of what you have done. I open my heart for you to work in me by your Spirit.