Worship While You Wait

Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s Founding Fathers, was also the father of many popular idioms. Writing under the pseudonym Poor Richard as something of a secular Solomon, Franklin gave away many pearls of modern wisdom. These pearls include: “Well done is better than well said,” “Haste makes waste,” and most famously, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

True enough. For a time, however, thoughts of death—though not death itself—can be avoided and even taxes evaded (despite garnering devastating consequences in either case). Waiting, by contrast, can scarcely be dodged and is nigh universal to the human experience. Indeed, to wait is to be human. It is the great equalizer; common to kings, beggars, geniuses, and simpletons alike.

As my wife and I anticipate the birth of our son in only a few days, my thoughts have often turned to the Lord’s manifold purposes in seasons of waiting—waiting for an answer to prayer, for an open door, for healing, for relief, for employment, for retirement, for a child to come, for a child to return, and all else between. So much of life is waiting; surely the Lord would have us do it well. He does nothing without purpose. Thus, we should endeavor to wait—even wait!—with purpose ourselves, knowing that this is a gift from His hands. Indeed, as with all things,—“So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31)—the Lord expects us to worship while we wait.

To wait is to be human. To wait well, however, is to be Christian. Throughout the Bible, God’s people were no strangers to the wilderness of waiting. For if you remember, the nation of Israel wandered about this particular wilderness for a generation.

In His wisdom, God often calls His people to wait with no off-ramp in sight. Abraham was well-advanced in years before he received the child of God’s promise from many years before; for decades, Moses tended to livestock in the wilderness before God suddenly tasked him with tending to the people of Israel through another wilderness for several decades more; David faithfully and courageously led sheep as a youth before God, through many trials and snares, established him as the leader of a nation; even Jesus Himself, the Captain of our salvation, worked as a carpenter in near obscurity for thirty years before He began His earthly ministry.

For each of these men, prolonged waiting wasn’t merely a crucible to be endured, but a season to be embraced as God prepared them for those seasons to come.

Waiting and faith so often go hand in hand. Alongside faith, waiting is a prominent theme in Hebrews 11. For what does it mean to have faith but to wait well upon the Lord and worship Him while doing so? As the inspired writer puts it, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). By faith, though Abraham could not see far off, “No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God” (Romans 4:20). Waiting, like faith, is not passive—but active. Though he was in a season of strenuous waiting, Abraham’s faith in the Lord grew strong in direct proportion to his worship of the Lord—“he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God.” Like Abraham, we must be “fully convinced that God [is] able to do what he [promised]” (Romans 4:21).

By faith, the people of God place their hope on the bedrock of His unchanging, perfect character. Circumstances and fortunes change, but we worship, even in our waiting, the living God who does not change—“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). Indeed, we can wait unto the glory of God because “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).

Downstream of our faith is so often some form of waiting. Not idleness, but waiting; worship-filled waiting that seeks to be faithful in the present, all the while looking ahead with unshakeable certainty to the promises of God for the future. By faith, though the Old Testament saints waited all their lives for the promise of God, “These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were seeking a homeland... But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:13-16).

We so often think of waiting as that dreadful time in between seasons when, in fact, waiting is a God-ordained season unto itself. Waiting is not so much that perilous gap between seasons solely to be endured, as much as it is a vital time in its own right meant to equip us for that which is to come, “so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:7).

Much like trials and suffering, God’s purposes in our prolonged waiting, though perhaps mysterious, are by no means aimless. And so, rather than strain with all our might for a peek beyond the next horizon, and in so doing be found idle where we are, let us wait well. “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7), and in the midst of your asking, seeking, and knocking, worship while you wait.

The Lord Jesus Christ is not aloof in our waiting. As the Alpha and the Omega, He is the Beginning and the End and all things that lie in between.

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Photo by John Tyson, Unsplash

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