“For the greatest, most profound, tenderest things in the world, we must wait. It happens not here in a storm but according to the divine laws of sprouting, growing, and becoming.” God is in the Manger by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Last December, in the Advent season, I was reading God is in the Manger devotional by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and on day two he wrote the below: 

Waiting is an Art 

Celebrating Advent means being able to wait. Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. Whoever does not know the austere blessedness of waiting- that is, of hopefully doing without- will never experience the full blessing of fulfillment.” 

O Lord God, make us into waiting artists that love You so deeply and so faithfully. O Lord, nothing is too difficult for You (Jeremiah 32:27), we have seen the mighty works of Your hands and we have believed. And we still believe.

Not yet

I have been dreading to write this post for months. Maybe you will see why later. I am a woman who ignores what I feel like God is instructing me to do. God? Please never stop saving me. 

I like comfort. I am not a big fan of unknown territories.  So the “not yet” and the “in-between” seasons are not my favorites. God has been heavenly good to me. And I never ever want to stop being thankful for God’s love and faithfulness towards me despite the sin that still lurks inside my heart. 

Through Jesus Christ, we have been saved (Isaiah 53), we are being saved (Philippians 2:12), and we will be saved on the final day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6). 

The moment we repent and decide to follow Jesus as our Lord and Savior, God saves us from our fallen nature and from our stone cold hearts and He immediately gives us a new heart. A new heart that the Lord gives us is a heart that obeys Him, responds to His love, and continually submits to His authority. 

“…if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says, “whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame. For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich to all who call upon Him. For “whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Romans 10:9-13 

“I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all yours idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.” Ezekiel 36:25-27

So, as people of the Cross, surely, we have been saved by the mighty power and grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we still live in the “not yet” in the here and now as we wait for our bodies to be raised from the dead (Romans 8:23). 

“So now you aren’t lacking any spiritual gift as you eagerly await the unveiling of the Lord Jesus, the Anointed One. He will keep you steady and strong to the very end, making your character mature so that you will be found innocent on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is forever faithful and can be trusted to do this in you, for He has invited you to co-share the life of His son, Jesus, the Anointed One, our King!” (1 Corinthians 1:7-8)

As we wait 

This past summer, God answered a prayer that my family and I had been praying for, for three years. I don’t know about you but waiting for God to answer fervent prayers that have been desperately prayed can sometimes feel agonizing. And if we are being honest, presenting God with requests that He is purposefully delaying to answer is crushing in every sense of the word. As we pray, we are to be confident in faith that God is able to do the miracle we are praying for, for as Jesus Himself said, “if you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes” (Mark 9:23). 

All things are possible for those who believe. 

Let those words linger longer in your mind, heart, and soul, please? 

All things are possible for those who believe. 

When I start praying for something, I fervently believe with all my heart that whatever I am praying for is more than possible, but the problem becomes when those things I am praying for start taking “longer”. It’s at this point that my belief starts waning. I can’t tell you how many times I have prayed, “I believe Lord, help my unbelief” (verse 24). Do you know one of the beauties of the Bible for me? We get to see men and women who struggled with things that we too sometimes struggle with. The Bible is not a book of fairy tales detailing the lives of men and women who lived perfect lives. No, the Bible is a book full of imperfect people who had a perfect God. And this perfect God is ours too. What a grace! What a mercy! 

Back to our text, in Mark chapter 9 from verse 14, we see a father with a son with an unclean spirit coming to Jesus for healing. Verse 22 the father tells Jesus, “…if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us”. To which Jesus replies, “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.” 

How do you know you have not stopped believing for what God has promised you? As you wait longer for God’s promises, how do you keep unbelief from sneaking into your heart? 

After Jesus tells the father that all things are possible to him who believes, “’Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”’ Mark 9:24

Our God sees the crying out of our hearts and responds. Our God is moved by a broken and contrite spirit. O God how could I ever thank You enough? ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart— These, O God, You will not despise.’ Psalms 51:17

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!

Linger Longer 

Please, don’t birth an Ishmael when God has promised you an Isaac. Isaac was the son of promise all along, but when the waiting took longer than anticipated, “Sarai said to Abram, “See now, the Lord has restrained me from bearing children. Please, go in to my maid; perhaps I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram heeded the voice of Sarai.” Genesis 16:2 

God doesn’t need our help to bring His promises come to pass. This is an obvious fact, right? But I have been guilty countless times of trying to help God. And you know how detrimental this is? You will never be satisfied with a shortcut. Sarai is proof. She ended up hating the woman she told Abraham to have a child with. “Then Sarai said to Abram, “My wrong be upon you! I gave my maid into your embrace; and when she saw that she had conceived, I became despised in her eyes. The Lord judge between you and me.”’ Genesis 16:5

Ishmael was a son birthed through Sarai’s maid. Isaac was the son of the promise that was destined to be born from Sarai and Abraham. 

O the mercy of God! Jesus, thank You for never leaving us alone, gracious Father. 

“And the Lord passed before Moses and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, Now the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”’ Exodus 34:5-7

Thank You God for being merciful. Thank You for being gracious. Thank You Lord for being longsuffering. O God, thank You for abounding in goodness and truth. 

Our actions are never without consequences though, brothers and sisters. Linger longer in God’s presence to avoid helping God, which actually turns out making things worse, pretty please? Let Him strengthen you as you wait. Let Him renew your hope as you wait. Lingering longer in God’s presence will surely keep us from coming up with our own plans. How, you ask? Because He will satisfy your longing as you wait for Him. 

Please, never settle for anything lesser than God. Never settle for anything but God’s promises. And this sometimes means lingering longer in God’s presence. Besides, where else would we rather live Savior King but Your presence?

Just like Job, let us linger longer and wait for God. 

“Job will settle for nothing else than God Himself. Finally God “answered Job out of the whirling: ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me’” (38:1-3). “I will question you.” God takes the initiative not with answers but with questions that give a new perspective to everything: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (verse 4). I counted sixty-one questions that God asks in the 123 verses of his response to Job. These God-questions come to us and penetrate layer after layer of complacency, rationalization, suffering, and ignorance, and they wake us up to his word of creation and redemption all around and in us, making it possible for us to say with Job, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee.” As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Eugene H. Peterson

In your not-yet, as you wait, linger longer in your Savior’s presence. He desires your full attention as He saves and He redeems you. 

She grew more steady and patient as she waited longer for her God.