Oswald Chambers "Prayer is two-fold: definite asking and definite waiting to receive." |
In the middle of some very definite waiting of my own, I have been made to understand that the waiting has a purpose deeper than testing and correction, even deeper than learning to trust God and wait on His timing. I now believe that through this sometimes interminable-seeming waiting, God's primary focus is on revealing His own heart.
"Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful," says Hebrews 10:23. Hoping without wavering is virtually impossible when you see your whole world churning like a cyclone. I find that telling myself to remain calm and hopeful only adds to the stress of a crisis, because when fear trickles in despite everything, I inevitably spend the next day or two reprimanding myself for having let my God down yet again.
Was the writer of Hebrews more fearless and unwavering than most of us? Possibly, but I think the key is at the end of this statement:
for He who promised is faithful
We are to put our focus not on hope, but on the Object of our hope. Whatever He has revealed about Himself is true, regardless of whether we're experiencing it to be true just yet. This is the holy "place" of waiting.
It's not about how unwavering we are. In fact, the other day God actually used a particular scripture passage to tell me that He would much prefer to have me simply come to Him and say, "I'm afraid!" He already knows I'm afraid, so this makes perfect sense -- honesty is a wonderful place to start.
So, God's focus is not on our unwaveringness, it's on our learning to trust that He truly is who He says He is. This is one of the reasons we're so often made to wait. If I don't yet know a particular thing about His nature by experience, I can be very sure He wants to teach this to me. It can (believe me) take the better part of a lifetime to move from an intellectual understanding of God's faithfulness or love or peace to a visceral, personal "now I know this about You!"
Have you noticed? Oswald Chambers actually refers to the "definite waiting" as part of prayer itself. Not surprising, since prayer is not just a means of requesting things from God, it's the means by which we may know God.