Wait For Him

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}

If you have seen recruitment ads for restaurants, you will have noticed requests for ‘waiting staff’. These are people whose job it is to literally wait. They wait on you to be seated and give you the menu. They wait on you to decide, and then take your order. They wait on the chef to prepare your food, and then they wait on you to leave so that they can clean the table and start the process all over again.

All of us, though, are waiters in one form or another. We wait for appointments and results; we wait for buses and taxis; we wait for kids coming home from school and we wait for friends in coffee shops. And of course, everyone’s favourite, we join a queue and wait our turn. For each of us, the more important something is, the longer we are willing to wait.

For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him. _{Psalm 62:5}

The most important thing we can ever wait for is God, and yet with Him, we often become impatient. We come to Him with our prayers and request, say ‘Amen’ and rush off. We don’t wait in his presence. We simply drop off our list and get back to our day.

The Lord waits to be gracious to you, to show mercy to you. We would never put God in the ‘waiting staff’ category and yet that is exactly what he does. He waits on us to talk to him, he waits to hear our concerns, and he waits for us to be still in his presence. The Lord has so much to give and he delights when we seek him out and prepare our hearts to receive his grace.

Because of His great love, the Lord is patient with our impatience. So, if the Lord is prepared to wait for us, shouldn’t we be prepared to wait for Him even more?