Waiting Reminds Us of Our Need for God

It is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.
–Philippians 2:13

Why does God make us wait? If you are in a waiting place right now, why has God ordained that as a part of His plan for your life? Waiting reminds us of our need for God.

Sometimes waiting is a result of failure. At some point in all our lives, we are going to fail. Before we can move forward in life, God often calls an intermission. Throughout the Bible, God called intermissions for those who failed. Moses’s intermission was the forty years after he killed the Egyptian soldier until God said it was time to lead the exodus. The Israelites’ intermission was the seventy years they spent in Babylonian captivity after turning away from God before they returned to the land. Peter’s intermission was the seven weeks after his denial of Jesus Christ and before he preached that great sermon at Pentecost.

Intermission is the period of time between our failure and our future. Maybe your intermission is the time between the end of a relationship and the beginning of a new one. Or it may be the time between the termination of a job and the beginning of a new, more fulfilling career. Or perhaps your intermission is the time between a moral failure and the restoration of your reputation and relationship with God. We all have intermissions. We want to rush to the next big thing, but God says, “After failure, you need to take some time. I am putting you in a time-out to reassess the causes of your failure and also to renew your relationship with Me.”

Sometimes God wants us to wait because of successes we have experienced. If we think we are responsible for the good things in our lives, God sometimes calls a time-out to say, “Remember who really is accomplishing all these things.” In his short career as the University of Texas head football coach, Charlie Strong had to bench linebacker Malik Jefferson. After a successful game against Notre Dame, Malik began to get, as we say in Texas, too big for his britches. He began to think he was responsible for his successes. During the next few games, the offenses ran over Malik, and Coach Strong had to bench him to remind him that he won or lost not as an individual but as a team. Malik said about that time, “I wasn’t trying to get better. I thought everything would be handed to me, and I had to realize you have to work for things.” After a few weeks on the bench, Malik came back into the huddle and once again became known as The Predator.

Sometimes God says to us, “All these good things happening in your life are not because of you; they are because of Me.” As Paul said in Philippians 2:13, “It is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” Waiting is sometimes necessary to remind us of our need for God not only through our failures but also through our successes.

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Today’s devotion is excerpted from “Secret #3: Wait on God’s Timing” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2017.

Wescott Eberts, “Texas LB Malik Jefferson on pre-benching attitude: ‘I wasn’t trying to get better’” SB Nation, November 7, 2016.

Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Copyright © 1960,1962,1963,1968,1971,1972,1973,1975,1977,1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.