DAILY DEVOTIONAL – May 11, 2021

“How We Wait”

Prayer:  Lord Jesus, we pray as David prayed in Psalm 25, “Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all the day long.”  Amen.

Scripture: Lamentations 3:25-26

The Lord is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul who seeks him.
 It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.

Devotional – “How We Wait”

Many frustrating things happen when you are driving on the road.  One of the things that always gets my frustration up is when you’re sitting at a red light behind another driver.  The light finally turns green, but the car ahead of you doesn’t budge.  Why?  Because they are busy with their cell phone.

This happened to me just the other day.  I could tell even from behind them that they were playing on their phone, and when the light turned green, their head was still looking down and their hands off of the wheel.  For what feels like an eternity, I restrained myself from honking at them because, at least in my experience, it’s always the exact moment you decide to honk that they start moving.  Finally I had to do it, I honked, and they jerked their head up grabbed the wheel and they hit the gas.  Of course, it was too late, just as they were headed into the intersection the light turned yellow and I was forced to stop and sit through another red light.

As I sat there, it occurred to me that this whole scene could serve as a good illustration for an important Biblical teaching.  How we wait on the Lord can and will have a significant impact on whether or not we see Him when He does come.  I’m not just talking about when He comes to us on the Last Day, but when the Lord comes to us in an answer to our prayers and when He comes to us even without our prayers because He knows what we need and graciously comes to provide it every day.

In our passage from Lamentations 3 it says that the Lord is good to those who “wait for him.”  When I think of waiting my mind usually goes to the doctor’s office or the line at the DMV where you read magazines you would never otherwise read or play with your phone to pass the time.  However, that is not what the prophet Jeremiah means by waiting.  Instead Jeremiah means exactly what he writes next when he says the Lord is good “to the soul who seeks Him.”  Waiting on the Lord does not mean doing nothing, it means seeking the Lord who is coming by looking for the Lord who has said He is always with us even now though yet unseen.

Though the person ahead of me at the intersection no doubt wanted a green light and would prefer not to have had to wait at a red light, had it not been for my honking they would have missed the green light altogether, not because they were unable to see it, but because of how they waited and what they did while waiting.

The same is true for us as we await not only the final appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ when He comes to judge the world, but also as we wait on Him each day to answer our prayers and lead us in the life of joy and peace and fulfillment that He has promised can and will be ours if we are walking by faith and waiting on Him.

After reminding us that waiting on the Lord does not mean remaining idle, Jeremiah then says in verse 26 that it is good for us to wait “quietly” for the salvation of the Lord.  Waiting quietly on the Lord does not mean to literally remain silent your whole life, but it does mean that we should consider how we wait, what we are doing with our life while we wait, and how our waiting might influence (positively or negatively) our ability to recognize our risen Lord who is with us and who comes to us every day.  If the things we have chosen to occupy ourselves with in this life while we wait for the Lord’s coming and while we pray for Him to reveal His will to us are causing us to take our eyes off of Him, His Word, His Church, and His presence with us in prayer, then we risk missing His presence and work in our lives now.

The Lord said He will come like a flash of lightning; in less time than it takes for a traffic light to turn from red to green.  Failing to wait on the Lord and live our lives now “seeking Him” in every way possible doesn’t mean we will necessarily miss out on our eternal salvation, but it does mean we will likely miss a lot of opportunities the Lord gives us each day to experience His glory and presence amongst us now.  The Good News of the Gospel is that God is with us, Jesus is risen from the dead, and so we should be careful how we wait on Him, not because He hasn’t come, but because He is here!

Thanks for joining me for another daily devotional, and remember, that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today, and has already taken care of tomorrow.  Amen.