They that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength. They that do not wait on the LORD may have an entirely different experience.
We can get ahead of God’s plan when we decide that waiting on the LORD is not working. That happened in the bible’s story of Abraham and Sarah, who looked at their body clocks and decided that they were a day late and a baby short. Their desperate response produced multigenerational fruit of “baby mama drama” that has kept the entire world unstable even unto this day. So reads a familiar hymn:
Oh, what peace we often forfeit, oh, what needless pains we bear, all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.
But we need not stand in judgment on Abraham and Sarah, because they responded to decades of frustration, whereas most of us may have taken even more drastic steps under less stressful circumstances. With the passing of time, they clearly faced a climate of second-guessing that eventually undermined their convictions in what God had already said. Knowing what we know about human nature, we can guess that their family and colleagues had become generous with friendly advice for them to take some action on their own, irrespective of what they initially perceived to be God’s promise.
God’s timing can be an odd thing to grasp even for the most dedicated saint. Each of us needs to carry everything to God in prayer, because His presence always brings us a step closer to a level of surrender that allows Him to work through our lives. It is written that for everything there is a season, and a time in every purpose under the heaven. God is always on time. God does not serve time; instead, He uses the times and seasons to accomplish His purposes. God causes all things to work together through His people to accomplish His purposes.
Living a surrendered life also means that we need to stay on alert to move according to God’s timing. Being ready means to be aware of what Christ has said and is saying to us through the flow of events. Jesus has compared the Church to a bridesmaid who needs to keep her lamps trimmed for the wedding feast, explaining that those who are not prepared will be left out of that feast. This all points to a need for each of us to keep our eyes on Jesus. We must avoid misinterpreting our situation when He seems to be moving too slowly, or when this world’s circumstances seem to have overcome God’s authority.
The laws of relative motion teach us that our perception of time and distance are greatly influenced by that on which our perspective is fixed. Each of us experiences these phenomena on high-density roadways. If we are keeping pace with a moving target, we can seem momentarily to be motionless, when in fact, we are traveling at lightning speed.
Each of us needs to keep our eyes fixed on Christ. With His prophetic word serving as a kind of global positioning device, we can enjoy real-time joy and a peace that passes all understanding. On Jesus Standard Time, we are always ready to spring forward. And if we have gotten ahead of schedule, we need to run back into His loving arms.
