Buckle Up and Wait for Good Reason

The season of Advent is historically a season of waiting. So much of Christmas is about expectancy and expectation. It’s preparing, getting ready, decorating, and buying gifts, but it’s waiting. Some of us love this, some of us are kind of cynical about it, but there’s this thing that never gets old, and that’s when the calendar flips to December.

While we expect some kinds of waiting, we also hate to wait. No one enjoys mall parking lots, traffic, checkout lines, or lines to see Santa. It triggers something within us, messes with our plans, and threatens our sense of control. It’s frustrating.

And where it gets really complicated is when it comes to God. We have this expectant waiting that God can do BIG things. He provides, answers prayers, and makes a way when there isn’t one, but there’s the frustrating kind of waiting too.

• Why won’t God do something?
• Why isn’t He coming through?
• I need Him to do something now!
• I thought He promised, did He forget?

Why Should We Wait?
Whether we are waiting for clarity, healing, provision, a relationship to mend, doors to open, kids to come home, or prayers to break through.

We don’t hate waiting because it’s long, we hate it because we can’t see how it works out.

Waiting is a reminder that we’re not in control. There’s a tension we feel between expectancy and frustration when it comes to waiting. We think, “If God isn’t moving fast enough, maybe I can speed this up. Maybe I can help Him out, it sure seems like He needs some help here!”

We start to question if God is in control, or if He even cares or sees what’s happening. That’s when our expectancy turns to frustration. And if we struggle with God without understanding how God works in the waiting, we miss God, we misunderstand what’s happening, and we begin to go down the path of cynicism, doubt, or even worse.

Why Should We Rush?
The problem isn’t that God is slow, it’s that we’re rushing. None of us is alone in this, we all do it. And the good news is not that we are always faithful in our waiting, but that God is always faithful in His coming.

Genesis 12
The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.
2 “I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.” 
4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Harran. 5 He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Harran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.
6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 The Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him.
8 From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord.

God makes a promise to Abraham, and it’s the kind of promise we like. Everything is up and to the right. It has a powerful and lasting impact, but when we draw back the lens, we see much more.

1. Abraham is wealthy, established, living with family, and well-resourced.
2. Abraham and his wife Sarah have no Children. Sarah is barren, and they are both old – Abraham in his 70s, Sarah in her 60s. Not exactly “childbearing age.”
3. In the call to Abraham in verse 1, God promises a destination but hasn’t shown it yet. God is asking Abraham to abandon his home for an unseen promise, but this isn’t like moving to a new state, it’s like moving to a new country without knowing exactly where you’ll end up.
4. God promises Abraham many descendants in verse 2, but he is an old man with a barren wife.
5. Abraham takes the big step of faith and actually does it! But the story isn’t over.

Because then, the waiting begins.

As the years pass, Abraham and Sarah both keep getting older, and the frustration sets in because, very often, it takes more faith to wait than to go. But 25 years later, finally, a son was born to the old man and his barren wife. Promised fulfilled!

But even that seems to fall short when he dies. However, the waiting doesn’t just stretch across Abraham’s life, it stretches far beyond that. It stretches across generations.

Why Should We Trust?
God’s original promise wasn’t just about political or physical greatness, it was becoming a people through whom God would bring blessings to all of humanity, a promise ultimately fulfilled through Jesus Christ.

Matthew, in his gospel, begins to lay out the genealogy and the story of Jesus, ending with this:

Matthew 1
17 Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah.

So, it’s all connected, and the waiting is worth it, but this isn’t a 5-minute wait at a red light, it is 42 generations worth of waiting.

And Abraham doesn’t know the connection. Some of us don’t see the connection to God’s promises in your life and how they are the slow work of salvation in your life – and that’s okay. Obey anyway.

Between Abraham and Jesus were centuries of waiting, often in silence, but Advent tells us that slow is not the same as absent. Before God fulfills a promise, He forms a person. God intentionally makes us wait on purpose.

What God does in us as we wait is as important as the thing we are waiting for.

There’s something that develops in us in faithful waiting that doesn’t grow any other way. When we wait there’s a space where something can grow. Cynicism, doubt, bitterness, endurance, or faith? What’s growing in you?

We need to have a faith where we believe that the promise we’re waiting for means something much bigger than we can comprehend, and what God is doing in us in the meantime might matter even more.

Pastor Michael explains that Christmas is the proof that God always keeps His promises even when the waiting is long.