When He Waits

When He Waits

Therefore the LORD waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the LORD is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him. Isaiah 30:18, ESV

WRITING TO REBELLIOUS PEOPLE, Isaiah expressed God’s desire to be gracious and show mercy, justice, and blessing. Though they needed God’s intervention and had been waiting for answers, God wasn’t the problem. They were. They had turned away from him in independence and then turned toward him when they had a need. They were trying to play their relationship with him both ways. So God waited.

Andrew Murray wrote that there are two hearts in every prayer: our heart with small expectations for our immediate need and God’s heart with infinite, divine intention to bless us.^a Those two hearts have different perspectives, assumptions, and timelines. They also have a different understanding of the dynamics involved and the purpose behind the prayer. We often see nothing more than our need to have God show up in our lives in tangible ways. But God sees the entire relationship—his showing up in our lives, to be sure, but in the context of love, closeness, and a united purpose. Whether he waits to respond is not a matter of a carrot-and-stick reward system. It’s an invitation to come closer.

God’s heart is the true one, of course. He understands our limited vision of the dynamics of prayer, but our limited vision is supposed to be temporary. He reveals his heart every step of the way if we have eyes to see it. Prayer and faith are meant to draw us deeper into the relationship, to be the vehicle of his revelation in our lives in which we seek him in love and he responds to us in love. His apparent silence is hardly ever a “no.” It’s a call to come closer, seek more eagerly, adjust our thinking and vision, and press in to his presence. He wants us to hear his heartbeat. When we do, we find him entering into our petitions and fulfilling them with pleasure. We discover that those who wait for him—and cultivate the relationship in their waiting—really are blessed, as he promised.

Bow before him, waiting on him until your soul envisions that you are in the hands of a powerful, wonder-working God.