By David ReayTuesday 11 Aug 2015LifeWords DevotionalsFaithReading Time: 0 minutes
Transcript:
Read Isaiah 30:18
18 Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you;
therefore he will rise up to show you compassion.
For the Lord is a God of justice.
Blessed are all who wait for him! (NIV)
We don’t need to be told how hard it is to wait. Christians find it very hard and do so because of their faith not despite it. The writer Krish Kandiah, in his book Paradoxology, tells of a time when he was urgently called by his elderly neighbour. This neighbour had a fall. Krish went to him and called for an ambulance.
In some other parts of the world there would not be the tension of waiting but sheer resignation that nothing could be done. But he knew for sure that help would be coming. It was this confidence that created the tension. Help was on the way but hadn’t come yet. If no help were forthcoming then the agony of waiting and the need for patience would not arise.
Those who trust in God believe he is compassionate and faithful, that he will keep his promises. But at times we just have to wait while seeing little or no evidence of God’s goodness. If we ditched belief in God or assumed he was a capricious and unreliable deity then we would surrender to grim resignation. But we know our God is not like that. So we wait and we long for what was promised to be fulfilled.
We wait for a future we cannot create and cannot manage. We wait for a God we know is there but sometimes seems to be absent. Waiting is always the hardest work of faith.
Blessings
David Reay