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The Christian life is a life of waiting. We live in the last days, and every day we wait for the return of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Peter 3:12). As we wait for His return, we wait on the Lord amid the struggles and miseries of life in this fallen world.
We are by nature impatient, self-centered, and demanding. In our sin, we seek instant gratification, but in Christ, we are made willing to wait on God. The more we grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord, the more we come to understand why He makes us wait. Waiting on the Lord is trusting Him in all circumstances. That is why waiting on the Lord is sometimes harder than obeying Him. Waiting on the Lord through lengthy and painful trials can sometimes be so trying that we do not have adequate words to explain our heartache and misery—even to those who love us most.
Yet many of us know that it is often during trials that we come to cast ourselves more fully on the Lord. At such times, we come to understand what our Lord taught the Apostle Paul through his own misery: “But [the Lord] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9–10). It is often that the Lord gives and takes away because He is teaching us to wait on Him, to lean more dependently on that which can never be taken away—namely, Himself.
Christians never graduate from the school of waiting. God calls even mature Christians to endure trials, for as we do so, we are reminded of the blessedness and joy of leaning on our Lord. Whether we are young or old, the Lord is teaching us that it is not simply that we wait but how we wait. For we must not wait with clenched fists and frustrated hearts but must learn the blessing of waiting on the Lord and the discipline of waiting with humility, hope, and joy. As the Lord teaches us through Isaiah: “He gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might He increases strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall, but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (Isa. 40:29–31, NKJV).