In this video. Dr. W. Robert Godfrey looks at what the Psalms teach us about waiting on the Lord.
Well, the Psalms train us in a variety of ways and one of the ways that the Psalms do that is to call us to wait on the Lord. Patience, we read in the New Testament is a virtue, is a gift of the Holy Spirit; and many of us realize that patience is difficult to cultivate. We are—maybe in part because we’re Americans—an impatient people. We want to get things done we don’t want to wait. But the Psalms in a variety of Psalms call upon us to wait.
We see that in the Psalms of Ascents. For example, Psalm 130, 131 are calling on God’s people to turn to Him; to wait upon Him; to trust in His timing. And that’s part of the great issue, isn’t it? What is God’s timing? What do we understand about God’s timing?
At the very same time that some psalms call us to wait, other psalms contain the prayer to God: “Hurry. Come quickly. I need deliverance now.” And so, part of the glory of the Psalms is that they reflect different circumstances of our lives; different conditions, different moments of our lives. Sometimes we sense the value of waiting and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we want God to hurry.
And our theology tells us God’s timing is perfect, but our experience tells us we have a sense that things should be faster or slower. And the Psalms, I think, then help us as we read a variety of psalms to begin to reflect on our own sense of timing and how we need to depend more on God’s sense of timing. I