In today’s sermon – Better Wait on God – we’re going to take a look at the faith that is impatient. Not waiting on the God can be very harmful to the believer! So, let’s wait on Him. My key verse for today’s sermon will come from Deuteronomy, it reads:
“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.
Deuteronomy 29:29
Last week, we took a look at the faith that is content and how we ought not to let our content faith become complacent faith. At first glance, this scripture seemingly has nothing to do with faith. There is some meat to this scripture that we’re going to chew on today.
Faith, I tell you, is a battle of logic versus the spiritual (the supernatural). We are told to wait on the Lord and if we do so, He will renew (give us) our strength (Isaiah 40:31). However, though we know this scripture, it is a struggle for us to have patience with God. To us, logic dictates that nothing will be accomplished if we are sitting around and waiting for something to happen.
This logic indeed may be true, but that is logic that we can apply in the natural world – not the supernatural world. God created rules for us to live within, and many of those rules we have come to observe and recognize. Science itself is an observation of these rules that the Lord created for us to live within. God, however, works outside of those rules because He is God and the One who established the rules in the first place.
Our key verse tells us that there are secret things that belong to the Lord our God. These secret things that belong to the Lord bother us greatly. Why? We can’t stand the things that we do not understand; those things drive us crazy because we want to know everything. However, God did reveal the workings of some things to us as I’ve stated. For example, we understand the “rising” and “setting” of the sun; we understand how the gravity of the moon creates both high and low tides. Science is the affirmation of the things we’re able to witness (the things revealed) happening over and over again.
Science, however, cannot affirm God because science is unable to test the Lord. Why? Because the Lord has not fully revealed Himself to mankind. Therefore, where science can help establish the logic of the working order of things revealed, it takes for mankind to take a leap of faith when it comes to the Lord. The workings of God goes beyond our logic (
An atheist twitter spam account tweeted something to me about, “how can I claim to know everything about God?” Nobody knows everything there is to know about the Lord. However, He has revealed parts of Himself through scripture and I choose to believe scripture over the ideas we can create in our head.
The Lord tells us to wait on Him – to have faith in Him. However, let’s get a little frank here, not all of us wait on the Lord, do we? We start waiting on the Lord, and then we’ll say, “God taking to long.” We think to ourselves that the Lord is not moving fast enough! If we are not thinking that, we think even worse; we start thinking that the Lord is simply not there for us at all.
We say to ourselves, “I must go ‘harder’ than anybody else,” and so we start to hustle. We put waiting on God to the side. We put our faith in the Lord to the side and we start to hustle more than anybody else. At this moment, we are certainly not content in our faith and we are certainly not being unwavering in our faith. Little do we realize the grave mistake that we have just made and how much this mistake may have actually set us back.
I want to show you how this is very similar to when Jesus and the disciples were out on the sea (lake) as it is recorded in Matthew 8:23-27 and Luke 8:22-25. While they were out to sea, they found themselves in a strong windstorm (Luke 8:23). This storm was so powerful that it was tossing their boat and filling their boat with water. We are told that Jesus went into the boat and went to sleep! (If rest is good for Jesus, I imagine that it’s also good for us as well).
While all of this is going on, let’s imagine that these fishermen were doing everything they could do within their power to not have to disturb Jesus from His sleep. I want to imagine that a few of them maybe even got a little upset (frustrated) that Jesus was somehow managing to sleep through this storm. They go to wake Jesus up out of fear that they were perishing.
In Matthew’s gospel, it is recorded that Jesus said to the disciples, “Why are you fearful, O you of little faith?” After saying this, Jesus rebukes the wind and the water and delivers the disciples from the storm at sea. Often times, we get just like the disciples did in this situation. By this, I mean that we try to take on things by ourselves when we know that we are not capable nor have the power! We panic and feel that everything is on us because we’re worried about what God is not doing at the moment. Worrying about what the Lord is not doing is not our place!
Remember, many of the Lord’s works are secret to us. We fear that the Lord does not care about us, but this is also
Faith, as I said last week, certainly requires us to put forth action, but our action must be inline with the Lord. Too often, we end up getting out front of God – something that should be impossible – however, we prove that it certainly is possible. God allows for this to be possible. How? Well, the Lord will simply wait for you to get right in your faith in Him.
We must be careful not to let our faith become an impatient faith. We are told (Proverbs 14:29) that the impatient man exalts folly. What does this mean? When we’re impatient, have noticed how often we make mistakes? Mistakes are the calling of the impatient man, therefore, the calling of impatient faith is full of folly (mistakes). Mistakes help us to is certainly sound logic, but they can also whoop our butts in the supernatural (spiritual).
We must learn to slow down both in the natural and definitely in the supernatural. Not only will we fall into mistakes spiritually, due to our impatience, but our impatient faith can cause us to even be blocked from blessings that the Lord has ready-made for us! If the Lord is having to wait for us to get right in our faith, how can He deliver us our blessing? We get so busy hustling, that we still miss out on the blessing coming from God!
I preached a sermon a while ago about not being blocked