Sermon: Waiting

A Neglected Christian Discipline
#1771
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 06-Jul-24; 75 minutes 2024-07-06

[Thirty seconds of silence.] Well, hello to all of you. I just made you wait, but I would bet most of you did not enjoy it. You probably felt uncomfortable. Some of you may have been so uncomfortable that you began to squirm. You felt nervous. Some of you began to wonder about me. What is wrong with that guy? Why is he just looking around? Does he not know he has a sermon to give? Others began perhaps to wonder about their electronics and started fiddling with their computer, checking the sound. I hope nobody rebooted. That would take a while. Some, I am sure, became suspicious of me. "He's up to something" may have gone through your head. "This is a ploy."

Some actually may have started to get a little angry. What is he doing? Does he not know that we only have so much time in a service? "Come on, go, go. Don't make me wait." Perhaps someone thought I was wasting their time. I know a few of you probably started letting your mind wander. Well, if he is going to do that, I am going to think about this. Some thought it was kind of funny because it was so unusual. Those of you who are radio aficionados probably thought dead air is inadvisable.

But it was indeed a little experiment, one which some of us actually failed. Those people—you know who you are—failed to sit patiently though you were only waiting a mere 30 seconds. Seemed like a lifetime, did it not?

Now, our culture is somewhat to blame. I have spoken before about our "instant" culture and our shrinking attention spans. And by the way, we are one second ahead of the goldfish as far as our attention span. I believe they are at nine seconds. We are now at eight seconds. So they are winning, actually, not us.

I mean, think about it, we click off of a video in a few seconds if it does not catch our interest immediately. "Oh, this is boring." Go somewhere else. We cannot take the time to read long prose, articles, or books, you know, TL,DR. We do not possess the patience to save our money so that we can get the things we want, so we put it on credit. And we also scream, "I want patience and I want it now!" Truly, rock star and philosopher Tom Petty was correct in his 1981 hit, "The Waiting is the Hardest Part."

To most of us, waiting seems like a waste of time, a waste of our lives. We are taught, even conditioned, to use every last second doing something or we think we are failing somehow. Helicopter parents put their kids in this lifelong mode by scheduling every minute of their lives with classes, sports, play dates, other kinds of appointments; field trips and every other activity under the sun. You gotta keep these kids busy. And as adults, it turns out we are going 10,000 miles an hour from the time we take our head off the pillow until we fall back into bed exhausted at night.

Who has time to wait? "I sure hope Starbucks doesn't make me wait two minutes for my coffee." The truth is that everyone must wait. It is a part of life and it is also true that most people do it very poorly. Tradition and culture have taught us bad habits about waiting. And those bad habits often turn into bad reactions, bad attitudes, and ultimately, if we keep it up, bad character because you know what we make waiting all about? Us. That is our first mistake. We make waiting to be about our precious time, our money, our reputation, our satisfaction, and I could go on and on about the things that waiting does to us or having to be made to wait does to us.

Perhaps the worst thing overall is that we often blame God for making us wait, accusing Him of being unfair or negligent because we have to wait for something. We want something, we have asked for something, we have done everything He has asked us to do in order to receive a blessing. But it is God's fault that we have to wait for it. And oftentimes when we do this, when we blame God and get all frustrated about having to wait, we think, "Ok, now it's time for me to take charge of the situation." And then we try to "fix" the problem. I put fix in scare quotes because in our "wisdom" (and I put that in scare quotes too), we end up not fixing, but breaking, breaking things further, making us sink further into the mire of impatience or despair or feeling hopeless because things did not work out the way we wanted them to.

I mean, consider just as an example, the actions of Moses in Egypt. Forty years old, general of the Egyptian army, and some people believe he was next in line to be Pharaoh as the son of Pharaoh's daughter (which is the way they did the line of succession, the son of Pharaoh's daughter), and he sees his people Israel being oppressed in Egypt. He looks out, sees somebody hitting an Israelite, and instead of waiting for God to act, instead of waiting for God to free His people, he goes over to the Egyptian and kills him. He was going to fix the problem of Israelite slavery in Egypt. He was a big man. He had power, he could do what he wanted. Right?

Well, it was not long before he could feel the sand between his toes in the wilderness because he had to flee for 40 years. Oh, he fixed the problem. Right? No, he just made it worse, worse for himself and worse for the Israelites because I am sure the Egyptians did not take that lightly.

So, it looks like waiting is an important thing, something we often do not think about.

You know, we often think about Christian disciplines as being like prayer, Bible study, meditation, fasting. Those are disciplines we put ourselves through in order to learn godly things like humility, to increase our relationship with God, knowledge, thinking things through so we have greater understanding. This list is it not wrong, not wrong at all, but it is incomplete because we do many other things as disciplines—or should. And I think one of the ones that we fail to do as a discipline is to wait.

Have you ever thought of waiting as a Christian discipline? Of being able to teach yourself to wait better? It is a worthy goal because many of us fail miserably at waiting. Many of us have a nature of impatience and selfishness. Actually, we all do. It is something that must be overcome.

So I am going to consider waiting in this light today. We will see a few examples of it being done poorly and well, and we will draw some conclusions about this often-neglected Christian discipline of waiting.

Now, before we go to any scriptures, let us consider this waiting subject in terms of God. God is eternal. He has been around a long time. How long has He existed? You tell me. In time periods that we can understand, it is impossible to know. I mean, we can say He is eternal, that He is infinite, and that just blows our minds. What does that mean? We cannot conceive infinite time in the past, as well as infinite time in the future. It is just boggling to the mind to consider how long He has lived.

But consider this in terms of waiting. How long did He wait planning and considering before putting His plan into motion? Epochs of time, millennia. What does that mean to a God who has lived forever? How long did He wait before creating the angels, before creating servants to assist Him in these things that He wanted to do? How long did He wait to create the physical heavens and the earth? How long did He wait before making mankind in the persons of Adam and then Eve?

How long did He wait forbearing with human evil before sending the Flood? It was about 1,600 years or so between Adam and the Flood, 1,650, somewhere around there. That is a long time. Rome was still around 1,650 years ago. I am not saying the city, I mean the Roman Empire. That is a long time ago. How long did He wait to call Abraham? How long has He waited to send His Son, both the first time to pay for sin, to redeem man from his sins, and then to send Him back a second time for salvation?

Are you considering how long God has waited patiently? Millions, billions of years? I mean, we think it is a long time between Christ and His second coming, but God has been waiting for far, far longer than that. The magnitude of His waiting is imperceptible, inconceivable. You might say, as an argument: "Well, He's the master of time. He is not bound by time. He lives outside of time. Time means nothing to Him." True. But considering all of the time that He allows us to perceive and what He has done in His purpose and plan, it is a lesson to us in waiting, in patience. Because in Him or with Him, waiting for long stretches of time is hard-baked into His character, if you want to put it that way. He is just as much patience as He is love or faithfulness because He is willing to wait for long stretches for something to get done.

So He is a patient, forbearing, longsuffering, slow to anger, unhurried, supreme Being. He waits and waits and waits for just the right time. He is perfection in timing. He always brings what is needed at exactly the right moment. And He waits for it. He does not get impatient. He does not make it happen a year ahead or even a second ahead. It occurs exactly at the right time. That is Ecclesiastes 3:11. It popped in my head that this would be a good verse of turn to.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also put eternity in their hearts [that is, mankind's hearts], except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.

My paraphrase of that verse, especially the first part of it is, "God times everything beautifully." It always works out when God is the one working things to their completion. He completes them perfectly, not just perfectly in the product but perfectly in the time that He has given for those things to happen.

The next part of this argument then is, what is He doing? Well, He is creating children in His image! We are being spiritually created to be like Him in as much of a fullness as possible in this life and obviously in the next. He wants waiting, that is, patience, endurance, perseverance, forbearance, calmness, stillness, to characterize us just as it characterizes Him.

Now, we think waiting is excruciating and difficult because we are finite creatures. We are not like God with infinite time to work with. We see ourselves as just a clap in the entire existence of mankind. We are grass that springs up, browns, and fades away in just a short amount of time, and we think every moment is precious—and it is.

But waiting, from God's point of view, is not a waste of time. It is not a waste of our life. That is just our perspective because we have all these ideas of what we need to do and all these bad ideas of who we are and how important we are and why we should be the one in charge of all these things. God, however, thinks of waiting as a vital discipline during which we learn to build godly character, we learn to act like Him. And sometimes the best action that can occur in a given circumstances is to wait, is to be patient, to let things work themselves out, or let God work to make sure that they work out in a way He wants them to work out and not the way we, in our limited perspective, think they should work out.

Let us go to Exodus 34 and we will read verses 5 through 7. This is when Moses had to go back up on the mount to receive the Ten Commandments because he had smashed the original ones by throwing them down the mountain because of the Golden Calf incident. So, in the meantime, he had asked God, "Let me see Your glory." God says, "Uh uh. That can't be done. Humans can't see My glory and live. I'll let you see My backside as I pass by you." And so when He decides to do this, God decides that He would preach him a sermon while he is waiting, if you will. So this is what we have here.

Exodus 34:5-7 Then the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation."

You see the two halves of this. One is what we would call positive characteristics. The other half would be the juxtaposition of what we might call negative characteristics, that in which He punishes and judges and those sorts of things. And God balances these ideas in His character. So He does say, "Hey, I'm going to be merciful and longsuffering and I'm going to be good and truthful to you. But if you step outside the lines, I will enact judgment. I will be a just God. I will not clear the guilty. But sometimes I'm going to wait." It is implied here that this goes for three or four generations and then He may cut things off.

But we are going to look specifically at one of these. We could say this passage is the first summary description of God's character. Actually, this is the first summary description of God's character that He gives Himself. And by the way, this is also the most referenced passage in the Old Testament or within the Old Testament.

Now, the one word that we are going to focus on here is longsuffering (in the New King James). Several other versions render the Hebrew term as slow to anger, which is actually much closer to the literal Hebrew that is written. In Hebrew the phrase is erekh apayim, but you probably do not need to know that, you will not be using it very often, I am sure. But the phrase itself means "long of nose." It is a strange phrase, that God would call Himself long of nose. But the Hebrews commonly described a person who displayed anger as "their nose burned hot!" Because an angry person's face becomes red, looked like it is burning up, it has gotten hot. Thus, Hebrew's main words for anger are nose, heat, and hot nose. "You got a hot nose!" That would mean something different in our culture.

So when God describes Himself as long of nose, it indicates that it takes a long time for His nose to heat up in anger. The Hebrews were a very concrete, earthy people, were they not?

What He is saying is, as the New King James here interprets, He is saying that He is longsuffering or that He is patient or that He is forbearing. He waits to react, sometimes for a very long time before He actually becomes angry. And then as Charles Whitaker taught us in a couple articles that he did a couple of years before he died, that God's anger is slow in building, very quick in terms of His action. And then He immediately begins rebuilding. His anger is a moment. It says that, His anger is but for a moment, and then He turns in love and rebuilds what He destroyed.

Let us go to Proverbs 14 just to see one of these pieces of wisdom that Solomon gave us. It uses this the same phrase.

Proverbs 14:29 He who is slow to wrath has great understanding, but he who is impulsive exalts folly.

This word here translated in the New King James as "slow to wrath," is literally "he who has a long nose." Truly. This is what it says in the literal Hebrew: "He who has a long nose has great understanding." So it is a mark of great wisdom or understanding or perception to wait before you get angry, to be patient, to consider for a long time what your reaction will be. In other words, a person who is patient, that is, one who waits and does not react with quick anger, is not only taking the path of wisdom but imitating the character of God. Because back in Exodus 34 that is what God said. He was long of nose. And so Solomon is telling us here that we should be long of nose too because that is a mark of wisdom or understanding on our part.

Now, we need to remember too this is repeated in a way in the New Testament in James 1:19 where the apostle James tells us to be "slow to wrath." Slow to wrath here in Proverbs 14 and also in James 1:19. And if you remember what is in chapter 1 of James, you will remember that he starts the chapter, starts the book, with talking about patience. By verse 4 he is saying, "Let patience have its perfect work that you may be perfect and complete." He is telling us right as he opens up his epistle that we need patience in the trials of life.

That is the context of what he is talking about there. He tells us to have joy in our trials because God is doing something to help build our character. And so we need to be patient or enduring through all those trials because God is making us perfect and complete and it will happen better and faster if we are patient, if we endure it, knowing that God is putting us through a discipline that is going to produce good fruit. And that is how you can have joy in your trial, if you can kind of separate the fact that even though you may be suffering, you are suffering because God wants you to grow. God loves you so much that He is giving you this trial. We do not appreciate the trial, but we should appreciate the fact that God is working with us to help us grow spiritually into His image.

So James is saying, allow things to work out. Let God work on your spiritual growth. Wait, do not jump in, do not interfere. Wait, God is working. You do not need to worry.

Let us go back to Isaiah the 40th chapter and we are going to read verses 27 through 31. That is the end of the chapter. This may actually be the best known passage about waiting for God since it is used in songs and such. I see it like every other week on Facebook, somebody will put a meme up there with the last scripture written in it.

Isaiah 40:27-31 Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel: "My way is hidden from the Lord, and my just claim is passed over by my God"? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, neither faints nor is weary. There is no searching of His understanding. He gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might He increases strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall, but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Did you catch what was going on here? This paragraph begins with a question made to the Israelites, asking the Israelites why they complain so much and think God as being unsympathetic and unfair. Why are you going, "Waa, waa, waa! God doesn't love me? God has gone far away." That is a typical Israelite approach. They feel oh, so neglected by God because He has not done what He said He would do.

Let me paraphrase for you what God's answer is from verse 28 on. I am not going to be reading this from the Bible. This is my own paraphrase in a kind of modern way of speaking so that we understand a little bit better what He is you saying.

Of course, He asked them, "Why are you complaining so much?" And then He says, "Don't you realize who you're dealing with? I am Almighty God. You, with your feeble intellect and uncontrolled emotions, have no clue how I work. You don't understand what I'm trying to accomplish. I'm trying to accomplish the creating of humans in My own image and I will accomplish everything I set out to do in My good time." Those who wait on God will be the ones to benefit. They will be exalted.

I do not know how good a paraphrase that is, but that is what I felt from this as I read it over and over again. That God is getting a bit exasperated here and saying, "You don't have a clue as to what it takes to create children in the image of God. Butt out! Let Me work. Just wait." How many times have you said that to your children? You are doing something and they come on, "Mommy, mommy, mommy!" "Just wait, I'm doing something. I'll get to you later. I haven't forgotten. We'll do it just as I said, I promise. I'll do it. But just wait, stop your fussing, your complaining." And believe me, God was working with a bunch of little toddlers, all two years old.

Let us go to Psalm 78 because this is a perennial problem with Israel.

Psalm 78:40-42 How often they provoked Him in the wilderness, and grieved Him in the desert! Yes, again and again they tempted God, and limited the Holy One of Israel. They did not remember His power: The day when He redeemed them from the enemy. . .

The psalmist is saying here that the Israelites had a real problem with tempting, or testing, God. That is, the Israelites were always, again and again, trying to force Him to act on their behalf. "Oh, we've got a great God. He did wonders in Egypt. Now we want Him to do this for us and this is for us and this for us. And whenever we come up with a little problem, we want Him to come down and totally solve it for us." What they wanted was God as a genie in the bottle so that they could take off the cap and say, "Ok, genie, we want this and this, 1, 2, 3, fulfill our wishes." They wanted Him to do their bidding at the time and at the place of their convenience and if He failed them, well, what did they do? They sulked, they complained, they threatened to just run back to Egypt. We will not worship You anymore.

They limited Him, which the psalmist says here, to what they wanted. They did not have the scope of understanding, but they knew what they wanted. And so they limited Him to doing what they wanted Him to do. They limited Him to what they could imagine as solutions to problems. They limited Him to fulfilling their carnal desires. And God hated that. "Don't tempt Me," I am sure He thought time and again, as they wandered the wilderness.

And one of their greatest transgressions in this vein was their impatience. They wanted things now. They would not wait, they did not want to wait for what God would give them. They wanted what they wanted and they wanted it immediately—and we need to take a lesson from this. We are not all that far removed from the children of Israel. We are still human beings. We still have the carnality of our human nature that we have to fight, with God's Spirit. And we have to be humble and realize that we are not the prime movers of either God's plan overall or our own spiritual creation.

God is in the driver's seat there. We are the passenger. He is going to take us where He wants us to go. We do not have that control. All we have to control is our own reactions, our own obedience, our own submission, our own following of what He wants us to do. Both of these spiritual purposes, the greater overall plan of God and your individual spiritual creation, move at God's speed. And we already saw that He is willing to wait a long time for His purposes to bear fruit.

Many of our problems, many of our trials occur because we jumped the gun. We take initiatives that we are not supposed to do. We force actions or reactions either in ourselves or in others, doing things at the wrong time. We move too hastily before we think things through. We do things out of order. We try to be so spiritual when we do not have the legs to do it, if you know what I mean. We have not learned all the other things that we need to do before we can do that great spiritual thing. It is a great desire to make a big spiritual jump. But oftentimes we are not up to it, even though we may think we are.

We act like this, we do these things out of order. We make these jumps, we move too hastily because we become impatient or we get worried, fearful about something or, as we will see in a few minutes, we become presumptuous that we have been asked to do something or called to do something. We become envious of something or someone, we become angry or proud or whatever, you just name your sin. We sin and do not wait for God, do not follow His plan but insert our own somewhere in there.

We all do it time and again, because He is not telling us every day what the plan for the day is. So we come across a situation and we react to it badly, wrongly. Rather than waiting and really thinking things through, we react and cause problems.

So waiting on the Lord, taking our cues from Him and not from our carnal nature, invariably leads to growth in character, in righteousness, and in spiritual strength. That is the good way. That we wait on the Lord. Let Him lead us through the maze of problems. And then we grow, we learn what righteousness is. We grow in spiritual strength. But instead, oftentimes because we failed to wait on Him, we end up having to repeat the lesson some other time, maybe several other times because He wants us to wait for Him, submit to Him, and learn what He wants us to learn. But we are so impatient to get to the end, to get to the solution that we do not learn the lesson.

Think about this. This is Romans 8:28. We all know this. Maybe many of us can say this from memory. One of the most famous of Paul's scriptures.

Romans 8:28 And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.

Oh, wonderful! This is such an encouraging verse. And it is, it is a great verse. It is one that is good to have in our mind, to think about, and to be encouraged. But have you thought about this, meditated on this verse, and considered how many qualifications are in this verse? It is not just "all things work together for good." That is in there. But there are qualifications: to those who love God, to those who are the called. And we could also consider "according to His purpose" as an additional qualification because sometimes He does not work things out according to our purpose, but according to His purpose. And so we may think that God has not answered us or given us the solution or worked things out for good when actually He has because it is His purpose and not ours that He is working out.

Now, an element that we must understand in regard to this verse to grasp the truth of what Paul declares here, is time. It is not even mentioned. But it is right there in the background. The duration of what it takes to make all things work together for good is not specified at all. Yes, God will make things work together for good for His called people who love Him. Absolutely. But how long is it going to take? It could be instant. Jesus did that. He walked around Galilee and Judea healing people and it was instantaneous. It could be an hour that something has worked out. It could be a day that it takes for something to be worked out. Or maybe a week that one has to wait for something to work. out. Or a month. Or a year. Maybe we can wait a year.

But what about a decade before something actually works out for good for the called who love God? What about an entire generation, let us say 25 years? That is roughly the time Abraham had to wait for his son Isaac. Things did not work together for good for a long time for that man. What about a lifetime for all things to work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose? That is your convergence, folks. A lifetime of everything working together to where God is satisfied that good has been produced. A lifetime of change, a lifetime of trial, a lifetime of growth and producing fruit.

What about it takes God all the time between the present, whenever that is, and Christ's return to bring about the good that He is looking to produce. That could be a long time. We do not know. It seems endless because we do not have a terminus that He gave us. It is just simply when He sends His Son and the scripture says that that is in the Father's mind when it is going to happen. We do not know it. So it is limitless to us to think about things being worked together for good for a person, a church, a world, an entire creation. We do not know.

The time element for things to work together for good is entirely up to God, not us. We do not know it at all. We cannot even guess, not accurately. So what do we do? We wait. That is the answer. We wait. We use the Christian discipline that we have been learning throughout our converted lifetimes to wait.

Now, this brings in another virtue or two. First, waiting requires faith. We must trust God to accomplish His individual tasks for our growth and our overall spiritual creation as He sees fit. He may run us through the same trial many times over months or years in order for Him to say, "Ok, I think he's got it. I think this is part of his character now because he's overcome this better every time that it's come up." But we have to have faith in Him that He is a good gauge of what we need.

You know the saying, "Man proposes, but God disposes." That is true. We may think that things should go a certain way. We may make plans, but it is God who has charge of our spiritual growth in the course of our lives. And that includes the time it will take to get things done for good.

So we have to exercise faith in His wisdom, in His goodness, and His love for us to work with us in a way that produces the best results. And for some of us, it is probably not going to be all that easy. But one of the elements that we all have to have, whether our life is relatively easy or not, is that we have to learn to wait, wait on God, because those who wait on the Lord are going to reap the rewards.

A second virtue that it brings up is that waiting requires hope. Hope is the eager, productive expectation for things promised but not yet realized. It is positive and active anticipation of God fulfilling His purpose, which has not ended yet. So we hope, we have this positive frame of mind that things are going to turn out the way God said that they will. But when we are made to wait, sometimes we begin to doubt. The common failings during periods of waiting are dejection, despondency, disillusionment, even depression. And ultimately, if we let it go too far, just quitting on God, forsaking Him.

So when we wait, we have to be hopeful, hopeful that God is doing what He has to do to bring us into His Kingdom. Because those things that I mentioned, the dejection and despondency and such, they are all products of hopelessness. We do not see the light ahead. We do not see the goal. We are no longer moving toward it, but curling inward on ourselves, being sorry for ourselves. And when this happens, it shows that we have lost our hope in God's promises and have nothing left to buoy our spirits and to keep us focused and motivated on continuing in strength and enduring to the end. So we need faith, we need hope.

Let us look at a couple of examples quickly. Let us go to I Samuel 13, during the reign of King Saul. We are going to read verses 5 through 14.

I Samuel 13:5-14 Then the Philistines gathered together to fight with Israel, thirty thousand chariots and six thousand horsemen, and people as the sand which is on the seashore in multitude. And they came up and encamped at Michmash, to the east of Beth Aven. When the men of Israel saw that they were in danger (for the people were distressed), then the people hid in caves, in thickets, in rocks, in holes, and in pits. And some of the Hebrews crossed over the Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead. As for Saul, he was still in Gilgal, and all the people followed him trembling.[So the nation of Israel was in fear because Saul and his men had incited them to strike back at Israel.] Then he [Saul] waited seven days, according to the time set by Samuel. But Samuel did not come to Gilgal; and the people were scattered from him. [Ok? Now they are not just in fear, they are running away and leaving Saul with very few men.]

So Saul said, "Bring a burnt offering and peace offerings here to me." And he offered the burnt offering. Now it happened, as soon as he had finished offering the burnt offering, that Samuel came; and Saul went out to meet him, that he might greet him. And Samuel said, "What have you done?" And Saul said, "When I saw that the people were scattered from me, and that you did not come within the days appointed, and that the Philistines gathered together at Michmash, then I said, 'The Philistines will now come down upon me at Gilgal, and I have not made supplication to the Lord.' Therefore I felt compelled. and offered a burnt offering." And Samuel said to Saul, "You have done foolishly. [I was going to say, "You fool!"] You have not kept the commandment of the Lord your God, which He commanded you. For now the Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever. But now your kingdom shall not continue. The Lord has sought for Himself a man after His own heart, and the Lord has commanded him to be commander over His people because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you."

Now, we know King Saul had a host of problems. This was not the only one that he had. But this passage focuses on his fear, leading to impatience, and then to self-justification, and finally to presumptuous disobedience. You see the way it worked. There was an outside stressor that caused him to fear and he began to think about it, but he knew he had to wait. He was considering that the Philistines were going to come right over the hill at any moment and he was afraid that God would not help him unless he had made the sacrifice.

This is the way his mind was working. "Ok, I need to sacrifice. Samuel isn't coming. He said seven days and he would be there to sacrifice this. But look, the sun is going down on the seventh day. What am I going to do?" If you want to look back to chapter 10, verse 8, that Samuel said that he would take seven days and be there. But he was delayed. Who knows how long he was delayed? It might have been one hour. I can imagine that because Saul was so fit to be tied about not making this sacrifice so that he could face the Philistines that he did it immediately after the seven days. Maybe it was an hour, maybe he waited half a day or a day. I do not know.

But he did not wait for Samuel. Samuel was a priest. Samuel could do offerings. Saul was a king. He commanded an army, that was his job. But as soon as the time had passed and Samuel had not come, he decided to offer that sacrifice himself. What did his unwillingness to wait, his impatience coupled with his fear lead him to do? It led him to execute a prerogative that he did not possess as king. He was not a maker of sacrifices on the altar. He presumed an office that he was not entitled to not as king. He was not a priest. That was not part of the deal, that was not part of his anointing, and so he could not perform the sacrifice—but he did.

God does not like presumption. Oftentimes in the Scripture, like Nadab and Abihu and Uzzah, when people did things presumptuously, *snap! He acted immediately! "You are out of line, sir." Bang! Nadab and Abihu and Uzzah were killed immediately. Saul was not killed immediately, but Saul was stripped of something he really wanted, which was a dynasty. And as soon as he did something presumptuously, God said, "Uh uh, you're done, your line is done. I'm going to find a man who will not be presumptuous, a man who has My heart."

We need to be aware of this tendency of human nature. It will try to assert the self to fill a vacuum when one is imagined. It will take over roles and responsibilities of others so that something will be done that the person thinks should be done. Human nature will even take over the roles that God has given to Himself when human nature determines that things are not moving quickly enough. And like I said, as with Saul's presumptuousness, it does not sit well with God. That is why waiting is so important and why it needs to be a discipline, because we have to control our human nature.

Let us go to Psalm 37. Doctor Maas was here last week, but we need to consider this. It is a very well known song. David shows here that he learned the lesson that Saul did not. With all the trials that David went through, he learned to wait for God. We are just going to hop, skip, and jump through here.

Psalm 37:1-9 Do not fret because of evildoers [Philistines were the evildoers. Saul should not have worried about them.], nor be envious of the workers of iniquity. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb. Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness. Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart. [They are coming. You just need to wait for them. Trust God.] Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass. He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday. Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him. Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, because of the man who brings wicked schemes to pass. Cease from anger, and forsake wrath; do not fret—it only causes harm. For evildoers shall be cut off; but those who wait on the Lord, they shall inherit the earth.

Psalm 37:12-15 The wicked plots against the just, and gnashes at him with his teeth. The Lord laughs at him, for He sees that his day is coming. The wicked have drawn the sword and bent their bow, to cast down the poor and needy, to slay those who are of upright conduct. Their sword shall enter their own heart, and their bows shall be broken.

Psalm 37:34 Wait on the Lord, and keep His way, and He shall exalt you to inherit the land; when the wicked are cut off, you shall see it.

Psalm 37:39-40 But the salvation of the righteous is from the Lord; He is their strength in the time of trouble. And the Lord shall help them and deliver them; He shall deliver them from the wicked, and save them, because they trust in Him.

Like I said, David learned this lesson, unlike Saul, because you could bet your last dollar that God has the wicked's number. They will not get away with anything. He is a God of justice. He will not let them get away with their sin. But whatever the trial is, we need to wait on God. Does He not say that He will fight our battles for us? Let Him fight. He is far stronger than you. He knows a lot more than you, infinitely more than you. He knows the way it is going to work out. So let Him fight your battles

In the meantime, what does David say? We need to trust Him and keep His way. That is what we do while we wait. That is the discipline that we must have, to wait in trust and righteousness. That is what He requires of us.

Let s look at another one. Let us go back to Genesis 6. This time we are going to look at a good example. If you know your chapters this is Noah and the wickedness on the earth.

Genesis 6:1-3 Now it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose. And the Lord said, "My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred twenty years."

Genesis 6:8-14 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. This is the genealogy of Noah. Noah was a just man, perfect in his generations. Noah walked with God. Noah begot three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. So God looked upon the earth, and indeed it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. And God said to Noah, "The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make yourself an ark of gopher wood, make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch."

Genesis 6:17-19 "And behold, I Myself am bringing floodwaters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die. But I will establish My covenant with you; and you shall go into the ark—you, your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives with you. And of every living thing of all flesh you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female."

Genesis 6:22 Thus Noah did; according to all that God commanded him, so he did.

And I just want to add in here,

Hebrews 11:7 By faith Noah, being divinely warned of things not yet seen, moved with godly fear, prepared an ark for the saving of his household, by which he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.

Now, we can read all that in two or three minutes, and because it takes such a short time and it is just words on a page, we tend to ignore or dismiss the time element in all of this. God appears to call Noah to his task 120 years before the Flood. I am just assuming that. It is disputed that God told him at that time. But let us just take it as written, that God said there is 120 years, Noah has found favor in My eyes, this is what you are going to do.

But 120 years! I know the man lived to be 960. But 120 years of time between the command and the fulfillment? Noah was a paragon of virtue. For us, 120 years is about two lifetimes. I am approaching 60. That is only one lifetime. If I were Noah, I would have another lifetime to go before anything appeared of what God had told me. Do we have the patience to wait all of our lives, the rest of our lives for God to act? Like I said, there is no indication in Scripture that God actually told him at 120 years. He may have not even have told him that it would be 120 years. Maybe that was God's determination in His own mind. But He told Noah, "Hey, go build the ark. I'm going to save you and your family, and two of every animal; and get to work." and not giving them a time element.

And so he did it, and waited and waited and waited. Noah had to act in faith to build the ark as efficiently as possible so that it would be ready when God sent the Flood. And if God did not tell him that it was 120 years, he had to be ready at any time.

Does this not sound a little bit like the return of Christ?

Noah was an exceptionally faithful man. It says that at the end of chapter 6, he did everything as God commanded. And actually, it said it several times throughout this story. Chapter 7, verses 5, 9, 16, I think that was the last time. But it is mentioned at least four times in Noah's story that he did everything exactly as God commanded. And one of the things that he did perfectly was wait, wait with faith and righteousness. And when the Flood came, he was ready, the ark was ready, his family was ready.

Let us finish in James 5. I guess I am saying, let us be like Noah, because we are facing a similar thing. God has called us. He says, "I want you to do a work. I want you, especially, to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ and be ready for when He comes back."

James 5:7-11 Therefore be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and latter rain. You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not grumble against one another, brethren, lest you be condemned. Behold, the Judge is standing at the door! My brethren, take the prophets, who spoke in the name of the Lord, as an example of suffering and patience. Indeed we count them blessed who endure. You have heard of the perseverance of Job and seen the end intended by the Lord—that the Lord is very compassionate and merciful.

This is what James' half brother said in Matthew 24, verse 13. I am talking about our Savior Jesus Christ.

Matthew 24:13 "He who endures to the end shall be saved."

This paragraph in James 5 is an extension of that teaching. Waiting, patience, endurance, and perseverance are all facets of the same virtue—the virtue of holding fast, of commitment, of conviction to the end. We must not get ahead of God. We must not take Him to task. We dare not become presumptuous because we cannot handle the timing of His deliverance.

We all need to work on the Christian discipline of waiting on God. And if we do, He promises that we will become strong and soar like eagles.

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