Like Watchmen Waiting for Sunrise

Imagine serving on guard duty for the walled city of Jerusalem at the time of King David. Also imagine you have been assigned to keep watch from sunset to sunrise. You walk the wall, peering outward into the darkness. No electricity, no flashlights, just the cold night sky to illumine your steps. As evening turns to the dead of night, life in the city goes quiet. Now you discharge your duties in complete silence with little to interrupt your own thoughts. With no wristwatch to mark the hours, time slows, crawling forward. Your mind is fixed on one consummate hope – to see the sunrise. This will change everything. This is what your heart longs for, what you ache to see even as you traverse the wee hours of the morning.

This image of the watchmen waiting for the sunrise illumines the Psalmist’s understanding of what it is like to wait on the Lord:  “I wait for the Lord, my soul does wait, and in His word do I hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than the watchmen for the morning; Indeed, more than the watchmen for the morning” (Psalm 130:5–6). To wait on the Lord is to long for breakthrough even more than the watchman longs for the sunrise.

I am reasonably confident that EVERY person reading this right now has at least one area in his or her life that requires waiting on God. Are you facing an impossible challenge and in need of a breakthrough? Are your eyes red from crying for God to bring your prodigal home? Have you been crushed by a steady stream of disappointments that make you wonder if God will ever come through? Are your days defined by a medical crisis without resolution, a daunting project that looks like it will never be completed, a great wall of uncertainty that fills your heart with fear, or the persistent denial of a blessing from God for which your heart has ached for years? Then you know what it means to wait on God.

I have collected below a series of recent articles from Light-Work that speak to the art of waiting. If you want to know more about a particular principle, click on the corresponding link and it will take you directly to the relevant article.

Waiting on God can be better accomplished with the support of others with a heart for God. Why not find a friend or loved one who is in God’s waiting room? Think of this article as the table of contents to a study guide for you to use together. Pick a principle from those listed below, and then talk through how it relates to each of your experiences. Perhaps you can use these principles to minister life and encouragement to each other. The very last link is a short testimony of how God concluded a season of waiting at “Fleming Central” that we call “Four Years to Daylight.”

Deprivation Principle: God sometimes withholds the very good He intends for us, for a season, precisely because He is using deprivation to prepare us to receive His gifts.

Perfect Moments Principle: Because He loves us, God chooses the perfect moments in which to give His gifts.

Good Gifts Principle: If even despicable men give their children good gifts, how much more will our Father give perfectly appropriate gifts to His children who are asking?

Receptivity Principle: As we wait on God, our hearts are opened to learn things from God that cannot be otherwise grasped.

High Risk Principle: When waiting on God in an escalating crisis, the longer the period of waiting the stronger the pull toward the fiction that God doesn’t care.

Faith Principle: When waiting on God in an escalating crisis, I can neutralize fear by fixing my faith on these twin truths, God loves me like His son (John 17:23) and God is with me always (Matthew 28:20).

Praise & Safety Principles:  When Jesus is our Master and Teacher and we are waiting for His rescue in a dire situation, (1) God might take things from bad to worse in order to prepare us for greater worship and (2) we do not need to be afraid of the situation.

Testimony: Here is our personal story of a season of waiting on God.