Waiting

Last week we talked about enduring faith. Enduring faith. And we talked about how when we're on a journey of faith, most of the time when we think about enduring faith or persisting faith, we think about a face that kind of looks like this, right? Just like I need to try to have faith.

And last week we talked about how there's actually a road that we can walk on with the Lord of enduring faith that looks like smiling, it looks like joy. Joy at the beginning, joy in the testing and joy in the breakthrough or the lack thereof. And so if you haven't listened to that message, I wanna encourage you to listen to that message, but I'm really building off of last week, and I wanna talk about waiting. Man, so many of you guys love waiting, right?

All of you people love waiting. And you know, we're all waiting in some form. In some form or fashion, we're waiting on something. We're waiting on a breakthrough, we're waiting on a promotion.

Some of you are waiting on retirement. Some of you are waiting for clarity. You're like, man, I want direction, I don't know which way to go, and I just need clarity as I'm in waiting. Some of you are waiting for children.

You're waiting for healing, you're waiting for that big opportunity. Where you're going, man, I'm just waiting for that blessing that just keeps on getting kicked down the road a little bit. And so, you know, as we're in waiting, many of us don't know how to carry our hearts in waiting well. And we see all throughout the scriptures, there's problems with that topic, and you're not alone if you're struggling with your waiting and with your process.

And I think there's a lot of people that are waiting for spouses in our community. So let's all stand, we're all gonna stand. I'm not gonna put anybody on blast or anything, all right? This is an important moment right now.

This is very important. We're gonna pray, okay? We're gonna pray. Are you ready to pray with me?

Father, we thank you for sending single men to every day in the name of Jesus. Lord, we're believing for the full package, man. The total package, man, men that have jobs, men that love you, men that aren't passive. Lord, that's what we want.

Lord, we have so many single ladies. We ask that you bring the single men in Jesus name. Amen. All right, go sit down.

Let's go. Yes. My goodness. I think we found out that we have like three to four hundred single women that are part of our community.

We took a census and we were like, oh no, four hundred single women. Where are the single men? Okay. Won't he do it, right?

Okay. But there's all throughout the scriptures, there's examples of waiting, right? So we have like Abraham and Sarah, they're waiting for children. We see Moses and Moses is waiting in the wilderness for 40 years and then he walks up into this mountainous area and there's a burning bush there.

Then he leads the nation of Israel into freedom and waits for 40 more years in the wilderness. And we see all throughout the Old Testament that the people of Israel are waiting to come back from Babylon. We see they're waiting for Jerusalem to get restored. They're waiting for the temple to get rebuilt.

We see that all throughout the Old Testament, there's an anticipation for a Messiah that the people have got are waiting for him to show up. They're waiting. We see Zechariah and Elizabeth waiting as they're wanting children. Then John the Baptist, he comes and then he's waiting.

Do you remember him waiting? He's waiting in prison. And he's going, Jesus, are you the Messiah? Or should I wait for someone else?

Because this isn't lining up with my expectations of what I thought was going to happen. I thought it would be sooner than now. How many of you know that you learned pretty quickly in life that the Lord isn't in a hurry like you are? Have you learned that yet?

You started thinking like, man, that breakthrough is about to happen right now. And then it doesn't happen. You're like, man, Lord, do you understand my timing? And the Lord's like, I do.

I do understand your timing. And I'm just not a hurry. And then you're like, really? And he's like, yeah, I'm just totally at rest and at peace.

And you're like, but I'm stressed out. And you start projecting your stress on the Lord. And it's just like, for some reason, he doesn't get stressed out when you're stressed and you're overwhelmed. And so we see, as we look at the Scriptures, then we see Jesus waiting.

I mean, that's just mind blowing, God waiting. Even the Father, he's waiting on things. And there's actually things that God won't get that he desires. Have you ever thought about that?

God introduces his free will into the picture. And he is worthy of every single soul loving him. But because he's going, no, I want it to be authentic, real love. He's actually opened himself up to not get what he desires.

We're talking about the God that has all power and he's not going to get things that he wants. He desires that all men would come to the saving knowledge of him and it's not going to happen. He's waiting. And he's waiting for us.

I mean, since the garden. Yeah. God's been waiting. We see in the book of Revelation that he's been waiting for that moment where God's dwelling place is with man.

God the Father's waiting. Jesus is waiting. I mean, can you imagine Jesus before he's sent down to the earth by the Father? He's waiting.

He's like, Lord, Father, is it time? Father, are you going to send me now? You so love. We so love the world.

Is it now? He gets sent. He waits in a womb for nine months. And then for the next 30 years, he waits.

Can you imagine 90% of Jesus' life? 90% of his life on the earth is spent waiting. In Nazareth, he's waiting in hiddenness for 90% of his life. 90% of his memories in the backside of Israel in Nazareth and nobody knows about him.

What? Like, I thought I was going to hit it big. Like, I thought I was going to go viral. I thought I was going to become one of those influencers that just makes money.

I thought I was going to be one of those Amazon marketing people that just make passive income. TikTok talks about it. I thought I was going to be the guy. I thought I was going to make $100,000 a month off of doing TikTok.

And you're like, why have I not arrived? Jesus, why are you holding out on me? He's like, I spent 30 years in waiting. And we're just like wanting it to get microwaved.

You know, wanting our day of appearing to just happen now, wanting to hit it big, wanting to be known, wanting to be seen. And the Lord's like, man, you're really waiting for a lot of things, aren't you? We see Jesus waiting to go visit his dead friend Lazarus. We see Jesus waiting after he rises from the dead and he's waiting while he's walking with his disciples on the road to Emmaus.

And he's just waiting and not showing himself, like not revealing himself. So they just don't know that it's him. And he's just kind of playing with him a little bit. And he's waiting.

He's waiting on the beach as his disciples are out in the boat. And he says, hey, throw the net on the other side. And he's just like giggling to himself because he remembers the first time that he met Peter. He's just waiting, waiting until they put it on the other side.

And then all the fish fill up the net. And he's just kind of, and he's just, and then Peter jumps out. He's like, it's good. Right?

He's just so excited. He's waiting for them to notice. Oh, it's him. God that waits.

I want us to become a people that wait like Jesus. I want to be a man that waits and doesn't fall into grumbling like the nation of Israel. How many of you know that the nation of Israel, they're waiting in a wilderness for 40 years. And there is so much grumbling and complaining that it actually hinders them from getting what they're waiting for.

There's a way to wait. And I just want to just break us free. You're in good company. Just like last week, you're in good company.

If you've been praying and believing in faith and you haven't seen a breakthrough. And we're like, hey, the heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11 didn't see the breakthrough. You're in good company. You're in good company that you're waiting on things.

You're in good company as we look at the scriptures. Everybody was waiting and they were waiting longer than they thought they were going to. Can you imagine being 90 years old and still waiting for a child? My goodness.

God wants to be with us in our waiting and he wants to show us how to wait. So let's turn to Psalm 130. Psalm 130. There's a passage that I believe is just a perfect place for us to start as we learn about what the Lord's design is for waiting.

Once you get to 130, just say amen. All right. It says this, out of the depths, I cry to you, O Lord. O Lord, hear my voice.

Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my please for mercy. If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with you, there's forgiveness that you may be feared. I wait for the Lord, my soul, my mind, will, and emotions they wait.

And in his word, I hope my soul waits for the Lord. More than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning. Oh, Israel, hope in the Lord. For with the Lord, there's steadfast love and with him is plentiful redemption and he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.

Wait for the Lord, like watchmen, wait for the morning. That word, wait in Hebrew, it's kava. It's kava. Everybody say kava.

Kava means waiting as if you're lying in wait, like lying and you're going to ambush someone. Like waiting intentionally. How many of you grew up with a sibling and you'd be coming around the corner and they were waiting for you to scare you? The worst, right?

Or maybe you've been to a surprise birthday party and you're like, hey, they're coming, they're coming, they're coming, right? You're waiting intentionally. You're waiting with a tentative anticipation and expectation. There's an intentional waiting that's happening.

See, oftentimes when we think waiting, we think passive, like, okay, roll over, wait until this thing is done. But the Lord has a different design for how we wait. It's intentional waiting. And actually, when we look at Psalm 130 in this picture of watchmen, it can be two different, you know, scholars think it's two different parties that is being talked about with waiting.

Either it's the priests that are waiting until the sun rises to do a morning sacrifice or it's a military role that you wait on the walls of the city because you are watching to make sure that the city is safe and you've got the night watch. And you're waiting until that sun rises because you're like, I'm tired. I want to go. How many of you have ever had that?

The last hour of your shift, some of you nurses and doctors, you got that 12-hour shift, you're ready to go home, right? Okay, none of you? None of you feel that way. It's like 12-hour shift.

I'm good. I could go another 12. All right. So that waiting is an intentional waiting, but there's also this confidence that you have.

When they know the sun is going to rise, don't they? It's like sure, it's set. And that's what the Lord is wanting us to actually get clarity when we're waiting that there's hope and faith and confidence. Like, oh, I know you have my best in mind.

I know that you work everything for the good of those who love you. And I'm in this tension of waiting, but I have confidence in the waiting that you're going to turn it for good no matter what happens. There's a confidence because the sun always rises, right? And so there's this expectation of waiting.

It's like when Israel was waiting for the Messiah or an example of this is Anna and Simeon. In Luke 2, there's this woman named Anna who spends over 50 years going into the temple and waiting and fasting and praying for 50 years because she knows that she knows the Messiah is coming. Mary and Joseph bring baby Jesus. He's eight days old.

It's his circumcision day, okay? Very exciting for Jesus. And Jesus gets carried into the temple and Anna is going, this is the one that I've been waiting for. I've been expecting you for the last 50 years.

As a widow, I've been waiting for the bridegroom. I've been waiting with love in my heart. I've been fasting and praying for this moment. There's that confident expectation that it's like it's intentional expectation.

The other definition of kava is actually a binding together. It means to be bound together. It's like in Genesis, this word is used in Hebrew. Kava is used actually in the first chapter when God is creating and it says that he gathered the waters.

You remember that's like all the waters are over the face of the deep and then what God does is he gathers them up and that's how we have bodies of water and dry land because God decided I'm going to gather all the waters to be a sea here and I'm going to gather the waters here to be the oceans there. This picture is a gathering together or a weaving together like a rope gets weaved together. What the Lord is saying when he's saying wait, he's going, there's intentional, it's almost like a waiter or a waitress intentionally wait on a table. There's an intentionality of serving and waiting but there's also this element of in your tension you are meant to be bound with him.

You start realizing that I've been waiting for my circumstance to change but I haven't exactly been waiting on the Lord. We can be waiting on our circumstance to change for a long time and you know what usually happens? We enter into victim mindset and we enter into grumbling perspective and we get offended and we get bitter because it's not in our timeline and when we want it and how we want it and what we want it's just not happening so we start getting restless and the Lord's going hey let's have you wait on me and then we're going to get bound together in love. And I want you to know that your waiting season that you're in is actually a divine set up for you to fall in love with God.

You're like man I don't like that strategy though. I don't like that that journey of waiting and it's like hey we all got it. This is our journey. Our journey is the journey of waiting.

We see the disciples, what are they doing? Jesus is a sins in heaven, what are they doing after you sins? They're waiting. They're waiting for 10 days and as they're waiting they're doing something, what are they doing?

Does anybody know what the disciples are doing? They're praying. The pastor knows that they're praying. There's 10 days of waiting.

Jesus is a sins in heaven. He says I want you to wait in Jerusalem and what do they do? They know that waiting is actually praying. That's the revelation that we need to hear today.

Waiting in God's mind means praying. Waiting means connection with him in the tension. Waiting means like the 10 virgins. They are waiting but they're getting oil and the oil is gained through waiting and praying.

It's an intentional leaning and going I'm going to be bound together with you in this waiting. It's like what happens when you pray, when you're in that tension of not seeing something happen, you start getting revelation of who God is. See, if you go through a waiting process, through the waiting, you actually get matured in your love for him and you get revelation that you would have never gotten if you hadn't been in that waiting season. It's like a, okay, I'll look at these examples here.

Let's say you're waiting for promotion and you're going, man, Lord, I'm believing for promotion in my company or a job change that's going to promote me and you're going, I'm just in waiting and I'm really unhappy at my job. Okay? You're like, I need a promotion because I hate this. The Lord actually wants to take your waiting out of victim mindset through connection with him.

And what he's going to do is he's going to begin to reveal, if you go, Lord, I want to know you as the God of promotion. You can just take what you're believing for and you can go, Lord, show me and teach me about you being the God that promotes. And then through that lens, you start doing just a study of all of the people that God promoted and you start diving into the topic of promotion and you start realizing, oh my goodness, every time he promotes them, there's something, there's some type of trial that they go through. It's like promote David and then David gets hunted on the most wanted list in Israel.

I'm like, oh no. Promotes Jesus, Jesus goes in the wilderness and is 40 days and then he gets tempted by Satan himself. You're like, oh no, right? And you start looking at all the promotion of Joseph and he gets this dream.

You're going to be king or you're going to be royalty and all of your brothers are going to bow to you and then he gets told into slavery. But you start getting revelation on the God of promotion and how he promotes. And you start going, man, I love you as the God of promotion. And it just changes how I think about promotion.

Because what happens is you start realizing that the waiting is actually working character in you for that breakthrough that's coming. Because what happens is if we got the breakthrough right now, some of us, do you know what promotion or breakthrough happens, what it does is it brings things to the surface. If you grow an influence, that exposure is going to expose what's underneath the surface. And so it's important to understand that the waiting is actually a process of you changing, but you also fall in love with him.

You getting to know him better and it's actually binding you to him. It's tethering you to him so that when the breakthrough happens, you're not in love with the breakthrough more than you're in love with him. Because what happens is when you're in the waiting and you're going, Lord, I want the desires of my heart. And then the Lord says, hey, delight in me.

Even what happens is you delights the Psalm 37 reality. As you delight in the Lord, he gives you the desires, but those desires actually get melded into his desires. And all of a sudden the delighting in the Lord, it actually points to him and you begin to go, man, even if I don't get the breakthrough or the thing that I'm believing for, I get you. And that's actually what the Lord does.

He works in us, this waiting to go, Lord, even if I don't see the breakthrough, I get God. I get you at the end of this story, I get God. No matter what happens, even if it's just like the Hebrews 11, even if I don't see the breakthrough, I get God at the end of this. I was counted worthy to maybe not see the breakthrough and still love him anyways.

And I'm not saying that he's holding out on us, but I'm just saying some of our waiting is just like circumstantial. We're just waiting for the circumstance to change and it's out of our control. So much of life is out of our control, but we can control how we wait. Are we going to wait offended and bitter and get colder hearts as the months and the years and the decades continue?

Or are we going to get more tender? More like warm blanket every time that person walks in, it's just like the tender, teddy bear, lover of God. It's like, who's that guy? Oh man, you should hear their story.

And it's this journey of waiting and still loving God, still loving the people around them. We see that the Lord was teaching David how to wait. And as David got this anointing of he's going to be the king, then he waits 15 years to be crowned king. He's anointed king and then it's 15 years till he gets crowned king.

And what he does in that gap is he's waiting in caves. He's in fields, but he's praying and waiting and worshiping. And all of the Psalms that we're even singing and reading tonight, it's actually coming from seasons of waiting. It's coming from those places of tension when it seems like nothing is lining up the way that it should.

And I'm in this broken world and everything seems to be in chaos and the Lord's going, that's exactly where I want you. So you can actually be found leaning on me, your beloved, and then you're going to fall in love with me and our love is going to be unshakeable. And I'm not saying that he's organizing or orchestrating the pain because he's not the one behind your pain, but man, you're going to find him in it because he works all things for those who love him, not because he's working out all of that stuff and he's going, yeah, I'm going to teach them a lesson. No, he's not after teaching you a lesson, but there's connection that he's after, not because he needs it, but because he knows that you need it.

He's such a good leader and he knows how to lead us in that tension. He's the God that waits. We look at Jesus and it's in this moment of he's on the eve of getting betrayed and he's, you know, the soldiers are on their way from the temple and Jesus is found doing what he's found praying in a garden. You would think that he'd be like taking up arms, starting to think about himself, starting to just prepare mentally for the suffering that he's going through, but what he's found doing is he's found praying in the waiting.

And I want to call us into that place of prayer and connection with God because I think many of us have been waiting, but we haven't been praying and the Lord's going, would you turn it into conversation? Would you actually go there with me? Because what happens is Isaiah 40, it's not those who wait on their circumstances will have their strength, it will be strengthened and they're, they're going to be raised up on wings like eagles. Do you know that that's not waiting on your circumstances to change?

It's actually waiting on the Lord. Those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength and you're going, I'm feeling weak and the Lord's going, I know you need to wait on me. In other words, let's have some connection in your waiting. Let's connect.

Let's talk about it. Why don't you be raw about it? Why don't you be real about it? Why don't you not just whitewash things and why don't you just stop being so plastic because you've been plastic going, I've got to be religious.

Thou art the Lord and Lord bless me and bless them and would you be blessing us? It's not the only language. It's like, hey, just talk to him. Stop it.

Would you just be real? Would you just be authentic? Would you just be yourself with him? You go, Lord, I'm going to let it all hang out.

I'm not feeling very good. I feel depressed. And the Lord's like, I know. You're like, well, aren't you going to correct me?

He's like, no, I'm with you. Lord, I'm feeling down and discouraged and the Lord's like, come here. You know what I'm saying? We're just like, so I got to, I got to pull up my bootstraps and just like get it together for God.

And the Lord's like, stop it, please. Let's be together in it and let's not sit in the wilderness. Let's not sit in that place of valley. Let's go through it.

But the only way we're going to go through it together to get to the table where I'm going to prepare a table before you, in the presence of your enemies. The only way that that's going to happen is if you allow me to lead you through it rather than making a home there in the valley. You're not destined to stay there, but he is there with you right now if that's where you're at. And it's okay to just be authentic and real about it.

We're so long at the church. We've always felt like we have to have it all together. There's a lot of nice people in the room, right? A lot of smiley people.

And you're like, man, I don't feel like that. That's okay. You don't have to feel like that. First of all, it's not about feelings, but it's like you can be raw and authentic and real with where you're at with the Lord.

Most of these people maybe aren't going to understand. Like nobody understands what you're going through. Even your family, your closest friends, they don't truly get it. All the intricacies of it all, but he does.

And it's in that waiting that you're going to build history with him. Some of you need history in the waiting. And that history that you're going to build with him, that history is actually going to be a foundation for the next 20, 30, 40 years. I built history with God in my place of pain.

And then the Lord's going to multiply your story of I brought my pain to him. This is how he spoke to me. This is what he said. This is what he did.

This is what I learned about him in the process. And now I can actually make disciples because I have a story. And it's not just a salvation story. It's like a story of faith.

We all need hundreds of stories with God that we can disciple into others. And it's not just a salvation story. Well, I used to do this and I used to be hooked on drugs. Now I'm not.

Yeah, God's faithful. No, no, no. You have a story right now that's getting written in your waiting. And the question is, who are you going to wait with?

Are you going to just isolate, be by yourself, be trying to just be strong enough to get through, or you're going to welcome someone into it? And then be together in it. Binding yourself to him. There's a, as we're binding ourselves to him, there's a beholding of him.

Like I talked about, it's like, you're the God of promotion, right? I'm like, beholding him in that. He's unraveling it. And then what happens is you start becoming a son or daughter of promotion.

You start promoting people around you. You start actually celebrating and honoring people around you. Even when you haven't seen the promotion yourself, you start becoming a person of promotion because you've been beholding the God of promotion. Because beholding is the key to actually becoming.

So you come out on the other end of the waiting for promotion. Maybe you got the promotion, but you changed as a person to be somebody that's not in poverty mindset, but you become the promoter in your mindset. And all of a sudden everybody feels celebrated by you whenever you're in the room. Not because you're trying to get something back, but it's just what he did in you because he transformed you.

So you're not a needy promoter. You're a generous promoter. You're not a strings attached person because you're a need. No, you actually found a place in the wilderness where he worked inside of you, his promotion.

God wants to work inside of us, his character, his nature. It's all on the table for you. Don't leave it on the table. He's preparing a table for you right now in your season of waiting.

Don't leave it on the table. There is so much goodness. He's been cooking things up. How many of you know that God isn't really the fast food type of God?

Man, he's more like the crockpot type of God. He's just crockpot in your season right now. And you're like, man, this is taking a long time, but I tell you this, that roast, my goodness, it's going to be tender. It's got all those seasonings built within it.

It's going to just be, you don't even need a fork. It's just going to melt. It's just going to be, it's so delicious. He wants to actually crockpot your season so you have such a tender heart at the end of it that you're going, my goodness, I'm just feeling refreshed.

I feel energized. I feel strengthened. I feel so tender. I could get cold.

I could get hardened. Or have you ever had that, if you have kids, you get that cheeseburger from McDonald's in the back. We don't even make Donald's ever. And that burger is like, why didn't you eat the whole thing?

But half of it, three quarters of the burger is still on the floor. You find it. How hard is that burger? See, we're used to fast food breakthrough.

And the Lord's like, I want it to be tenderized. I want slow cooker breakthrough in your waiting season. I want to respond to the Lord. Let's stand.

I want to respond to the Lord. We get him in the end. Is that not right? As you seek his kingdom first, all these things get added to you.

You can spread out. Just get some elbow room. I want to tell a story at close tonight. We've been on this building journey and a couple months ago, maybe six months ago, we were driving home from school as I picked up the kids.

And the Lord just reminded me of this property that's just north of the cities. And I don't know if you know those people. And maybe some of you are those people in the room where you have this house and every other property next to you has gone industrial. It's like warehouses.

But you're like the one person that's holding out. You're like, I'm not selling this house until the day I die, right? Okay. So there's this house that's north of the cities that as we're in this building search, I actually knocked on the door and said, hey, I don't know if you'd be willing to sell.

They're like, for sure, no, I'm going to die in this house. I'm like, okay, great. There's this older lady. And we're driving home from school.

And the Lord says, I want you to go to that house. It'd been like three or four years since I've been to the house. He says, I want you to go to that house. So we pull up to this house and this long driveway and Harvey and I get out because we see a guy sitting in the front yard and he's sitting on a tree stump.

And we approach him and his name is Gary. And Gary is sitting there on this tree stump and we just strike up a conversation. I learned that it's one of the worst days of his life because his mom has dementia and she's accusing him of stealing stuff and she's kind of going crazy and he's just in this place of hopelessness. And I begin to share the gospel with Gary and it just end up giving him my information and praying over him.

And I realize as I'm leaving that we've been on this four year building search, the seven year old man is sitting on a tree stump in his front yard. We've been on this four year building process search and the Lord leads me to go and have Harvey and me walk up to him and he's like, cool, what do you want? And for us to begin to start sewing into Gary's life. And we begin to start praying for Gary.

Katie had him on her prayer list. She was praying for Gary every single day. As a family we start praying for Gary. We haven't, you know, we don't visit his house for maybe a couple months.

And then the Lord highlights to us in the place of prayer. As we're praying for the building process, he highlights Gary us again. And we felt prompted both separately of each other that we were supposed to go over to his house on Tuesday. Not this day, like it was a couple months ago on Tuesday.

And so we go to Gary's house on a Tuesday, walk up, knock on the door. He's like a little hostel and then he's like, oh, he's soft and he's like, oh, yeah, I remember you. And we learn that he has no one. No family, no friends, no one in the world that if he died, no one would know.

And we're the only people that actually know and learn that it was his birthday the next day. And we're like, oh, my goodness, Gary, get ready, right? And we're just like, Gary, what kind of cake do you like? What kind of dessert?

What kind of food? And we just start like, and he's like, no, no, no, please don't come. And he's like rejecting it, right? Well, the next day we show up with the kids and we've got all this stuff.

We're just like ready to celebrate. And he's just like stiff army the whole time, doesn't let us in, doesn't want anything to do with us. And we leave those things. We leave a card on his front step and we leave the cake, right?

And we start praying for Gary more and more and we're still praying for Gary. And I just want you to know that your journey and we visit him on Thanksgiving, we're giving him a pie. It's like praying. What type of pie, Lord?

It's like cherry pie. All right, we're giving you cherry pie. We're just writing these and we're just asking Holy Spirit as a whole family. Lord, what kind of treat should we get Gary?

Okay, Oreos, fried chicken. Okay, Lord. And we're just asking him questions. And what's happening as we're praying is that we've started to realize that our world waiting journey on the building is actually more about Gary than it is about a building.

And we're starting to realize that it doesn't matter if we never get a building, this whole thing shuts down. If Gary got saved and met Jesus, it would all be worth it to us. It all be worth it. And you will, as you're going on the journey of waiting, there's actually people on the journey that are going to meet Jesus because you're in waiting.

We counted as a privilege that we might be the very first ones after 70 years of Gary living. We might be the very first ones that have ever mentioned his name in the throne room. There's people in your sphere of influence that have never had their name mentioned in the throne room before other than Jesus as the great intercessor. What a privilege to wait.

What a privilege to have all the detours. All the delays. I'm so thankful for every delay. It's meant that I get to sit and see the Zacchaeus sitting on the tree stump, looking for the Lord, having never known anything about him.

What a joy to have the delay that I get to know him is the God that loves Gary. The God that sees the seven-year-old men of our city that have never known love, that reject it because they don't understand that type of love that just keeps on showing up on his doorstep every couple weeks. God's calling us to be a people that wait. God's calling us to be a people that are bound together with his heart, that are intentionally waiting and expecting that we would get to know him while we wait.

Let's just pray if you would, would you put out your hands? Lord, I thank you that our waiting sometimes has little to do with us. Lord, I thank you that our waiting journey is a big story. I just believe that the Lord wants to take this and make it practical for us.

He's actually wanting to take your season of waiting, whatever you're waiting for. Maybe just bring that to the forefront of your mind, what you're waiting for. I want us to invite Holy Spirit into that place. Maybe it's the first time that you've actually just invited Holy Spirit as the helper into your waiting journey that you're in.

Just in your own words, just be like, I welcome you or I give you access or whatever language that feels authentic to you. Just open up. What I want us to do is just allow the Holy Spirit to highlight one practical way that you can wait and pray in your season of waiting. One way that you can actually turn your season of waiting into connection.

For me, we're on this building journey waiting and we're waiting for other things other than that, but I felt like the Lord highlighted that I was to pray for five minutes before every business call. I was supposed to just have connection time before every call on the property. Lord, give us your idea of how we can connect in the waiting. I'm just going to allow a couple moments here for you to just dialogue with Holy Spirit.

It doesn't have to be profound. It can just be simple. If you're not hearing anything from the Holy Spirit, that's okay. You can just make a decision.

You can just go, Lord, I want to do this. Something that we see in scriptures is that as we are in waiting seasons, as we look at Jesus and we look at David and we look at the people of Israel, what they did when they waited as they always set up a tent. They set up a tent to meet with God in. They set up a tent to encounter Him in Jesus.

He goes to the garden, his favorite place to pray on the eve of his betrayal and the eve of on the night of his betrayal, what he's doing is he's going to the garden, his place of prayer. His favorite place to connect with the Lord is where they find Him. They find Him at Mount all of that, his favorite place to talk to the Father. The Lord is taking your season of waiting and he's going to turn it into a garden of connection He's going to set up a tent to encounter in the middle of your waiting season.

In the middle of your waiting on your circumstances, he's going to turn it into a binding together, waiting journey where you're waiting on the Lord and there's intentional connection happening. I just declare that over each of you that you are going to experience such great connection that waiting is going to be a joy rather than a drag. Lord, I say that waiting is good for me. I say that I want slow cooker love.

I want the waiting that slow cooks me in tenderness. Lord, I just declare over your sons and daughters that these are the ones that will wait with tenderness. Lord, these are the ones that will have the revelation that they're waiting on a greater day, waiting on a day that you're waiting on is the bridegroom where you will split the sky. And so Lord, even as we wait for our circumstances, we'll continue waiting on your return as you wait with eager expectation, as you kava in heaven.

Lord, we say that we want to kava in return as your bride. We want to be bound together in love, longing for you to return. We say that we want your way of waiting. That's what we want.

And Lord, we thank you for all the garys. Thank you for all the future garys that are represented in this room that will get to know you because we are in waiting. We say yes to having our eyes up to see you and to see all the zakias of our city waiting to get a glimpse of who you are. It's the greatest weight in human history is the weight of your heart as you look at the lost sons and daughters that have not met you.

We love you. Mark us with your heart as we wait in Jesus name. Amen.