Waiting upon the Lord is an active, not passive, practice of trusting God, maintaining hope, and seeking Him, even while life continues. It involves staying in constant prayer, actively working and growing, worshipping God, and trusting His timing and promises. This spiritual discipline allows believers to renew their strength, grow in trust, and see God’s purposes fulfilled in His own time.
Key aspects of waiting on the Lord:
- Active engagement: It is more than just waiting in inactivity. It means actively walking in step with God, praying diligently, and seeking His will while remaining in the present moment.
- Trust and hope: Waiting is an act of trusting God’s goodness and faithfulness, even when you can’t see His work. It involves holding onto hope in Him and His promises, knowing that your wait will not be in vain.
- Strength and renewal: The Bible promises that those who wait for the Lord will renew their strength (Isaiah 40:31). This renewal enables believers to face challenges with energy and perseverance.
- Spiritual discipline: Waiting on God is a spiritual discipline that helps develop trust and a deeper relationship with Him. It’s a time to learn, grow, and rely on God’s strength rather than your own.
How to wait on the Lord:
- Pray consistently: View prayer as a way to connect with God, express gratitude, and seek guidance. Don’t stop praying out of cynicism or impatience.
- Actively engage: Don’t halt your life. Continue to work, learn, and grow. Use the waiting period for personal and spiritual development.
- Worship: Focus on God’s greatness, love, and power. Worship can bring peace and joy, helping you to remember who God is.
- Rest and be still: Be still before the Lord and wait patiently. This involves releasing fear and not taking hasty actions, while trusting His process and timing.
- Hope and believe: Hope in God’s promises. Even when circumstances are difficult, hope in Him provides strength and transforms the waiting period.
The waiting period! Let me share: In a ‘delivery room.’ Prior, father’s waited to be ‘told’ the results of his wife’s delivery… Before ultrasound or medical tests to determine sex/genetics etc. Imagine how it used to be! Even in this present day STANDING IN THE ROOM!
Waiting for…”Congratulations! It’s a…”
Our lives are pretty similar…tests, a job interview, a business trip…
Hold on!
Our lives HAVE been written out by The Author! Every occurrence, people we meet, circumstance…are ALL divinely mapped out.
Chance? Biblical teaching views “chance” as a result of a lack of human knowledge, not a reality outside of God’s control!
What Does It Mean to Wait Upon the Lord
What does it mean to wait upon the Lord? I have asked myself this question many times when I have found myself in a season of spiritual, emotional, and physical weariness, and exhaustion.
This question was especially on my mind in the days and months after I experienced the greatest loss of my life. Then I needed to make a major transition from a happily married wife to a widow and from living in the beautiful country of Austria to moving to my home country, Bulgaria.
The Lord kept speaking to me with this wonderful promise in Isaiah:
“But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint”. (Isaiah 40:31, KJV).
This verse promises a renewal of the strength of all those who wait upon the Lord and this is what I needed then and need every day. So what does it mean to wait upon the Lord?
What does it mean to wait upon the Lord
The Hebrew word for “wait upon” or in the NIV translation “hope in” means originally to “bind up with”. This means we make a deliberate choice to bind up with the Lord, to fasten ourselves…
We put our hold on the Lord and don’t let Him go until we receive His provision, solution, deliverance, or answer.
Waiting upon the Lord means fixing our gaze on Him: on His invisible and eternal qualities, on His character, and His love.
This is an act of faith and trust in Him; an attitude of expectancy that He will surely show off in our lives so we can experience His presence and care.
Waiting upon the Lord is a kind of testing
To wait upon the Lord in all situations and every day of our lives is a kind of testing. This testing stretches our faith and helps us live focused on the invisible, eternal realm.
Testing our faith is a very good and beneficial thing because it leads to testimony. We learn to know from experience…
The Bible teaches that God is sovereign over all things, including events that appear random to humans, which are ultimately part of His comprehensive plan. Therefore, while humans experience the unpredictable nature of life, believers are called to trust in God’s providence and recognize that He works all things, both good and bad, for a purpose.
Key concepts
God’s sovereignty: The Bible consistently presents a view of God’s absolute control over His creation and all events within it.
Proverbs 16:33 states, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord”.
– This means that even outcomes that seem to be pure chance, like the roll of dice or the casting of a lot, are ultimately determined by God.
– Human perspective vs. divine reality: What appears as randomness or chance from an earthly viewpoint is not so for God – Who knows all things and has a comprehensive plan.
Ecclesiastes 9:11 famously notes that “time and chance happen to them all,” indicating that unpredictable events occur to everyone, but this is not the final word on their meaning or cause.
The events in the lives of figures like Joseph and Esther illustrate how seemingly random, negative circumstances were used by God to accomplish His purposes.
A call to faith and action: Acknowledging God’s control does not mean passivity. Instead, it encourages a balanced approach of diligence and trust.
The unpredictability of life (time and chance) can serve as a motivation to seize opportunities for good, as life is fleeting.
It is a call to humility, recognizing our limited knowledge, and a call to faith, trusting in God’s plan even when it is not fully understood.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines “luck” as follows:
1. The chance happening of fortunate or adverse events. 2. Good fortune or prosperity; success….to gain success or something desirable by chance: “I lucked out in finding that rare book.”
The main question is, do things happen by chance? If they do, then one can speak of someone being lucky or unlucky. But if they do not happen by chance, then it is inappropriate to use those terms. Ecclesiastes 9:11-12 states, “I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all. Moreover, no man knows when his hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them.” Much of what Ecclesiastes shares is from the perspective of a person who looks at life on earth without God, or life “under the sun.” From such a perspective—leaving God out of the picture—there seems to be good luck and bad luck.
A runner in a race may be the swiftest, but because someone in front of him stumbles, he trips over him and falls and does not win the race. How unlucky for him? Or a warrior king may have the strongest army but some “chance” arrow shot up into the air at random by a no-name enemy soldier just happens to pierce his armor in its most vulnerable location (2 Chronicles 18:33) resulting in that king’s death and the loss of the battle. How unlucky for King Ahab? Was it a matter of luck? Reading the whole of 2 Chronicles 18, we find that God had His hand in the matter from the beginning. The soldier who shot the arrow was totally unaware of its trajectory, but God in His sovereignty knew all along it would mean the death of wicked King Ahab.
A similar “chance” occurrence takes place in the book of Ruth. Ruth, a widow who was caring for her widowed mother-in-law, seeks a field to glean grain to provide for them. “So she went out and began to glean in the fields behind the harvesters. As it turned out, she found herself working in a field belonging to Boaz, who was from the clan of Elimelech” (Ruth 2:3). Elimelech had been the husband of her mother-in-law, Naomi, so Boaz was a relative of hers and was generous to Ruth. As Ruth returns home with a great deal more grain than Naomi expected, “her mother-in-law asked her, ‘Where did you glean today? Where did you work? Blessed be the man who took notice of you!’ Then Ruth told her mother-in-law about the one at whose place she had been working. ‘The name of the man I worked with today is Boaz,’ she said. ‘The LORD bless him!’ Naomi said to her daughter-in-law. ‘He has not stopped showing his kindness to the living and the dead.’ She added, ‘That man is our close relative; he is one of our kinsman-redeemers.’” (Ruth 2:19-20). So Naomi did not see it as a “chance” occurrence but as the providence of God, as do others later on (Ruth 4:14).
Proverbs 16:33 states a general principle: “The lot is cast into the lap, But its every decision is from the Lord.” This refers to the use of casting lots (similar to the tossing of a coin or the rolling of dice) to settle certain judicial cases. The case involving Achan in Joshua 7 is an example in which the principle of Proverbs 16:33 is used to find the guilty party. Proverbs 18:18 states something similar: “Casting the lot settles disputes and keeps strong opponents apart.” Again, the idea is that God’s providence plays the determining role in the results of the casting of lots so that judicial conflicts can be resolved no matter how great the contention. Proverbs 16:33 would indicate that something as random as the rolling of dice or the tossing of a coin is not outside of God’s sovereign control. And, therefore, its results are not merely of chance.
God’s sovereignty involves two aspects. God’s active will or sovereignty would involve something He causes to happen such as the leading of wicked King Ahab into battle (2 Chronicles 18:18-19). Ahab’s death was not merely the result of a randomly shot arrow, but as 2 Chronicles 18 reveals, God actively directed the events that led Ahab into battle and used that randomly shot arrow to accomplish His intended will for Ahab that day.
God’s passive will involves Him allowing, rather than causing, something to happen. Chapter 1 of the book of Job illustrates this in what God allowed Satan to do in the life of Job. It is also involved in the evil that God allowed Joseph’s brothers to do to Joseph in order to accomplish a greater good, a good not apparent to Joseph until years later (Genesis 50:20).
Because we do not have the curtains drawn back to see what is taking place in heaven, we cannot always determine whether God’s active or passive will is involved in the events of our lives, but we do know that all things that take place are under the umbrella of His will, whether active or passive, and, therefore, nothing is a matter of mere chance. When a person rolls the dice to play a board game, God may sometimes cause the dice to land a certain way, but more often than not in such inconsequential matters, He may allow the dice to land as His laws of nature would determine without any active involvement. But even when He is not actively involved, how the dice land is still under His sovereignty.
So it is for any event of life; no matter how small (Matthew 10:29-31) or how large (Daniel 4:35; Proverbs 21:1), God is sovereign over all (Ephesians 1:11; Psalm 115:3; Isaiah 46:9-10), and thus nothing is merely the matter of chance.
From an earthly perspective, things may seem to happen at random, but throughout the whole of Scripture, it is clear that God is in control of all of His creation and is somehow able to take the random acts of natural law, the free will of both good and evil men, and the wicked intent of demons and combine them all to accomplish His good and perfect will (Genesis 50:20; Job chapters 1 and 42; John 9:1-7). And Christians, specifically, are given the promise that God works all things, whether seemingly good or bad, together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28).