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MW Editor’s note; Mentoring Warriors welcomes guest author Joe Savage to the tribe. His insights into waiting will help any man as he learns the true reason to wait.

A while back I was invited to speak to a group of men for a Saturday morning breakfast. The only request was to share what the Lord had laid on my heart. I accepted and did what I usually do when I get an opportunity to speak: I prayed, “Lord, what do you want me to share?”

I waited for a few minutes and I heard nothing. So, I asked again, “Lord, what do you want me to share?” Then, I heard the Spirit direct me to wait. Ok, I can do that. Like a good Westerner who wants immediate results, I waited a whole two minutes before I asked again what to share. And, again, I was told to wait.

After a series of asking what to share and being told to wait, it hit me. The Holy Spirit impressed upon me the need to talk about waiting on the Lord. Honestly, I’m not very good at waiting. I’m the kind of guy that once my mind is made up – Boom! Let’s go! If the Lord says to do this, let’s do it now!

I don’t wait well but I’m learning that there is nothing better in life than waiting on the Lord.

A few years ago we moved from our church in Iowa to Kansas to fulfill a call the Lord laid on my family’s and another family’s heart. Like I said earlier, once I know the Lord has said to do it, I’m ready to run. But the pandemic put a full stop on our plans to move down to Kansas. About half a year later the door opened for my family to make the move. We finally made it!

Now that we were in Kansas, I began to pray and ask the Father if we could start the ministry work now. The response I heard was, “wait.” I continually asked the same question in prayer and received the same response for two full years. This was one of the hardest things I’ve done. 

Certainly, some have longer seasons of waiting than my family and I, and others have shorter ones, but the natural question arises: why do we wait? Why must we wait on the Lord? For this gathering, I made a short list that is by no means exhaustive.

One of the reasons we wait on the Lord is because Jesus is our King. The Lord asks us to wait because we often forget that we’re not in charge. I am guilty of this. I like to make plans and ask the Lord to get on board. But the reality is that God is up to building his own kingdom, not ours. The book of James says it this way:

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” – James 4:13–15 (ESV).

Sometimes we wait because we forget that Jesus is King and our goal is to help build His kingdom.

Other times we wait because our heart needs to be realigned. It only takes one Sunday afternoon of watching football on TV to start messing with my heart. During the commercial breaks, there are all sorts of commercials. Suddenly that truck that I didn’t know I wanted starts to look really nice. Then it starts working on my desires and before long I want that truck and a bunch of junk.  Simply by seeing a few commercials my heart became discontent. My desires were misaligned.

This is why I love Psalm 37:4 – Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.

I need to wait on the Lord so that my heart will be realigned, to be reformed back to Christ and his desires rather than deformed into the way of the world.

We also must wait because power comes after waiting. We often forget this and wonder why we feel stuck in our faith. The invitation into what Jesus calls the abundant life is to wait. 

In Acts 1:4-5 we read, “And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” And Jesus continues in v. 8,  “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit Comes upon you.”

The disciples were told to wait to receive power. But what kind of power is Jesus talking about? This is not power to go and dominate others, nor is it the power to win arguments. This power is not coercive. The power Jesus gives is the power to be faithful witnesses of what Jesus has done. It is the power to live life properly according to our Creator. It is the power to be free from the bonds of sin and the power to proclaim life and liberty to those just beyond the gates of hell. We were designed to live in the power of the Holy Spirit. We will never have the power of God in our lives if we are unwilling to wait on Him.

The natural question that arises should be: How do we wait on the Lord, or how do we wait well? The answer is almost too simple for many of us to try. We literally need to make time and space to give Father, Son, and Holy Spirit our full attention. To give God our full attention so that we can revere him, honor him, and glorify him is worship. One of the ways we wait on the Lord well is by giving our God our full attention and nothing less.

Giving God our full attention sounds good, but how do we do that? For those who need a practical avenue to live this out, we should look no further than the fourth commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” 

If you want to wait well, if you want to live a life that is in tune with the Holy Spirit, learn to Sabbath well. Learn to stop, to cease from your striving. Learn to recognize that you are not God in a real sense. Learn that you need rest. I challenge you to take the command to Sabbath for a whole day seriously and to give God your full attention during that time. Once you get a taste of real Sabbath you will never want to go back to living how you did before.

Another way to wait well is to wait in prayer. Yes, it sounds cliche but prayer is literally the avenue into the presence of God. We imitate the disciples who told Jesus to teach them to pray. We should be students of prayer because prayer is more than speaking. Prayer is oftentimes waiting and listening. In prayer we are tuning ourselves into the one who has already spoken and continues to speak. We must learn to wait in prayer

While we wait in worship and in prayer, you should be soaking yourself in the written word of God. Take time to study your Bible so well that you know and understand the God of your salvation. You should read it by yourself, read it with your spouse, your friends, and certainly with your church. By waiting in the word of God, you will learn how to focus your attention not on yourself, but on the one who matters most.

Ultimately, if we sum up why we wait, it’s because we need God, not his stuff or his benefits. We just need him. And we can wait well or not. We can busy ourselves with sports, activities, Netflix, social media, and everything else, but we’ll miss God if we don’t take the time for him. So, waiting on the Lord is the invitation into a deep relationship with our God, and that is what we are created for.

Warrior On!