One form of patience is forbearance. It’s also a form of self-control. When you forbear, you restrain your impulse to do something—usually because there’s a much greater, long-term reward in the future. Rather than get the short-term reward, which is usually pathetic or destructive (such as the short-term reward of being able to vent your anger, and get all the frustration out of your system) you have a much greater prize in mind.
Waiting for God is the usual form of this forbearance. (The King James Version refers to this as “waiting on God” or “waiting on the LORD.”) We wait for God because he’s told us something is coming… and we get ready for it.
Waiting on God… for nothing.
Plenty of Christians are “waiting on God,” but they’re doing it wrong.
First of all, they’re waiting for God to do… something. What are they expecting him to do? Well, actually, they don’t know. Something. They’re waiting for God to “make it all better.” They’re waiting for God to fix their lives. They’re waiting for God to improve their circumstances.
Exactly how will God improve their circumstances? Well, they really have no idea, ’cause God never gave them any specifics. Or they’re pointing to certain promises in the bible… which were never actually made to them, but to other people. Like God’s promise, “I know the plans I have for you…” which so many Christians take out of context, adopt as their own, and await their arrival. And they’ll be waiting a mighty long time. God never promised any such thing to them, for these are not generic promises made to every follower. They’re specific promises to specific people. Not you. Nor me.
But that’s the thing about God’s promises: They’re specific. He doesn’t tell people, “Someday things will be better.” He tells us what he’s gonna make better. He tells us how he’s gonna make it better. He gives us details so that when they happen just as he said they would, we’d know God was behind it all. Vague promises are how con artists, or the devil, work: They’re taking advantage of the human brain’s ability to find patterns where there aren’t any, and playing the odds: They figure you’ll turn all their phony predictions or wild guesses into self-fulfilling prophecies. But only God knows precisely how things will happen—and that’s how he proves he’s behind things.
In my experience, God doesn’t usually tell us when things will happen. That’s because they’re gonna happen soon. Often a lot sooner than we expect. You see, we’re used to reading about long-term prophecies in the bible, and think most of God’s prophecies work that way. They don’t. Most of them take place within the year, or within a week, or on the same day, or in the next few minutes. God only brings up when it’s gonna happen—like “within your lifetime” or “before your son moves out of the house”—when he takes any longer than that. The rest of the time, his promises unfold relatively soon. When he first told me I was gonna teach children, I assumed he meant years—many years—in the future. Not before the next school year began. Just goes to show how God knew my future way better than I did.
So when we’re “waiting on God” for some obscure, fuzzy thing which we think will happen in years to come… we’re not really waiting for anything he revealed. Ergo we’re not really waiting on God. We’re hoping our dreams come true, but we have no evidence they will.
Secondly. As we wait, we need to get ready. Unless God tells us, “You needn’t do a thing; I’ll take care of everything”—’cause sometimes he does—we need to be about our Father’s business. One really obvious example of this is Jesus’s Second Coming. We know he’s gonna return—but we don’t just sit around and wait for him to return; we have to fulfill the Great Commission and train Christians! Problem is, a lot of folks assume if God’s gonna do something soon, there’s no time to get ready for it—or they assume he’s got everything in hand, and requires nothing of us, so we needn’t do anything. Wrong attitude. God wants us prepared for his blessings, not stumbling around when we get them because we don’t know what to do with them. So people who are waiting on God aren’t inactive while they wait. They’re busy.
Sad to say, that’s not what we see when we usually see people wait for God: They’re doing nothing… and they don’t quite know what they’re waiting for. They figure they’ll know it when they see it. But they’ll never see it, because it’s not really coming.
Those who wait upon the LORD…
Lots of Christians are into pictures and sculptures of eagles. (In the United States, particularly bald eagles.) This verse is tacked onto it somewhere:
But they that wait upon the LORD
shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings as eagles;
they shall run, and not be weary;
and they shall walk, and not faint.
—Isaiah, Isaiah 40.31 KJV
It’s a good verse. But when you pin these Christians down and ask them what it is they’re waiting for… well, they’re not sure. “I’m just waiting on God,” they figure. “You know, like a waiter. I’m ready to do whatever he tells me. He says jump; I say ‘How high?’”
Good answer. Wrong answer, but it’s a really good attitude to have. I’m not gonna knock the attitude. We should be willing to wait on God like a waiter. But that’s not what Isaiah meant.
The beginning of this chapter shows us Isaiah’s purpose in saying this:
“Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God.
“Speak from your heart to Jerusalem.
Proclaim to her that her war is complete,
that amends are made for her iniquity,
that she receives from the LORD’s hand
double
credit for all her sin offerings.”—The LORD, Isaiah 40.1-2 KWL
Those who have been waiting upon the LORD, in verse 31, have been waiting for him to fulfill his promises to end the war and rescue Jerusalem. They weren’t generically ready to do whatever God wanted: They were already doing as God wanted, and waiting for him to save them.
Just as we Christians should be doing: Already busy at the tasks God wants us to do, and waiting for the Kingdom to arrive once and for all. We wait for specific things which God said were coming. Otherwise we wait for nothing.
Waiting for God’s answer.
I waited
and waited for the LORD.He reached out to me—
he heard my cry for help.
He pulled me up from the pit of destruction,
from mud
and mire.He set my feet on a rock.
He made my steps firm.
He put a new praise song to our God in my mouth.
Many can see—
and fear, and trust in the LORD.
—David, Psalm 40.1-3 KWL
Other translations have “waited patiently” rather than “waited and waited.” The original, kavóh kivvíti/“waitingly waited,” is odd English, and is meant to emphasize the wait—or the patience David had in waiting. The verb kavá/“look for” also implies hope—so, “waited hopefully” works too.
When we call God for help, or make our prayer requests, we can likewise wait for God for an answer. And sometimes God takes a little while to answer. Sometimes he wants to see whether we really want it. Or, if we’ve asked for something we shouldn’t, he’s waiting to see whether we’ll come to our senses first, and take it back before he has to say no. Sometimes the timing isn’t right; while his answer is a great big yes, he’d rather answer it with a mighty demonstration. In all these cases, of course, patience on our part is required. We’ve gotta trust he’ll answer.
As David pointed out in his psalm, when you wait for God, you get spectacular answers—which many can see, and it brings them to faith. But not every Christian is willing to wait so long. Too often, we give up and try to fix the problem ourselves. In the United States, most Christians have money, so we use that. We have political power, so we use that. We have other idols to turn to. We don’t have the patience for God.
So we have to practice our patience. When we ask God for things, we have to be tenacious. We have to stick to the prayers until God answers once and for all—and nice and obvious, so there’s no mistaking it came from God. You don’t have to worry about taxing his patience. Nagging God for stuff is, after all, Jesus’s idea. When you’re waiting on God for an answer, your hope is in his answer, whatever it may be; and it’s not a false hope. So be persistent. And patient.