Hi everyone, welcome to the daily Word of Encouragement. I'd like to give you a word of encouragement today based on something that we usually lack and that's called patience. We're usually not patient people. We're usually these horn honking, microwaving, next-day delivery, fast-food eating, express lane, shopping, Amazon, Prime kind of people.
Lewis Mead says, waiting is the hardest work of hope. Most of us do not like waiting very much at all. And we usually want Jesus to show up into our lives at the time where we're suffering, going through storms, or even ahead of the problems in our life. But sometimes God wants us to learn to wait.
I want us to consider the fact that most people in the Bible, you should end up doing one thing, waiting. Sometimes things happen fast. Other times they don't, for good reasons. God doesn't always move at our crazy, frantic pace.
Some of you guys are waiting on things right now that are very serious and difficult. You might be a single person right now whose hope Scott has a marriage plan for them, but you're beginning to lose hope because you haven't met anybody yet. And now we can't even go outside and meet everybody, so you're kind of freaking out. You might be a childless couple who has been desperately wanting to start a family for a long time already.
You might be a deeply depressed depressed person waiting for the next morning when you can wake up and want to live and have that desire to live. You might be a person who's overcome with fear and panic over the COVID-19 pandemic and wish that God would just hurry up and fix everything and take everything back to normal the way it was. Every one of us at some point in our lives will have to learn to wait. Waiting may be the single most difficult thing that God ever calls you to do.
So it's frustrating when we go to the Bible sometimes and read and we find that God is all powerful and all knowing, right? But He keeps us waiting. Let me read some encouraging scriptures to you. First one is Psalms 2714 and it says, wait patiently for the Lord.
Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the Lord. Second one, dimensions chapter 3 verse 24 and 25 says, the Lord is my portion says my soul. Therefore I have hope in Him.
The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the person who seeks Him. And Psalm 33 verse 20 and 21 says, our soul waits for the Lord. He is our help and our shield for our God rejoices in Him because we trust in His holy name. Listen, let me give you a biblical example of a couple of them.
God comes to Abraham when he's 75 years old and tells him that he's going to be a father and he's going to be the ancestor of a great nation and then makes him wait 24 years for that promise to be fulfilled. God shows up in Moses' life and tells Moses to leave his people out of Egypt and into the promised land but he then ends up leading them around in circles for 40 years in the wilderness before they get to the promised land. So usually when we hear the word faith, we think of taking steps of action. But in the Bible, waiting is also considered faith.
The Old Testament promised the Messiah that would come and it's a generation for Jesus to be born. But even at the arrival of Jesus, that did not mean that the waiting was over. Jesus was born into the world as a baby. It took time for Him to grow and He didn't even start His earthly ministry until He was 30 years old.
And after He lived, taught, He was crucified and resurrected after another three days, right? He was about to ascend into heaven and His disciples asked Him, they say, Lord, when are you going to restore the kingdom? Is it now? In other words, they're asking Him, Jesus, when can we stop waiting on everything to be restored?
And then Jesus, instead of answering their question, has one more command to give them and He tells them, do not leave Jerusalem, wait for the gift of My Father. And the Holy Spirit comes, right? But all this took time. And from the Old Testament to the New Testament, we're commanded to wait, wait on the Lord.
So the question we're asking ourselves is why? Why does God make us wait? If He can do anything, why doesn't He bring us relief and help and answers like right now when we need it? And I think it's like Ben Patterson puts it.
He says, what God does in us while we wait is as important as what it is we're waiting for. Thank you so much for watching and I encourage you to remain patient and trust in the Lord. Listeners to the daily fire. Apply the work and make today.