God’s Waiting Room
Pastor Leslie A. Rutland-Tipton
I had ten minutes to make it to my meeting. Which was perfect, because the meeting began in ten minutes. And even though I left the house late, I was, now, right on time. And then I hit the traffic, oddly enough, right at my exit. I thought, “It’s just a slow light today...no problem.” Ten minutes later, I was still on the exit ramp, just a few places from where I had been...ten minutes ago. As I crept toward the signal, I tried to see what was holding us up. Ah, yes, the traffic coming down my exit street is creeping along, creating the backup on the ramp. I finally made it onto the boulevard, and just two blocks down saw the problem. Construction crews, working at rush hour at 9 am in the morning had the street down to one lane, while they tore up the corner of a sidewalk, digging for some unknown treasure. The questions came flying into my mind. And if I could show them to you, they’d be in all caps. Yes, I was shouting in my mind. “Why are you doing construction during rush hour?” What could be so important that you have to constrict the lanes?” “Why are only two guys working and three watching?” I had to wait, and I wasn’t happy.
In today’s scripture readings, we see another story of a couple of people who weren’t so happy about waiting.
You’ve probably heard the story hundreds of times. But there are a lot of us waiting right now. Waiting for an answer to a doctor’s report, waiting for a job, waiting for a partner, waiting for answers, or understanding, or justice.
We are all waiting.
Ultimately, we are waiting for Messiah to return. All of creation anticipates his return. Sometimes, when we are suffering, we think it’s cruel of him to make us wait so long. Yet, we wait. We are in God’s waiting room. And there are plenty of chairs.
We are all waiting. So while we’re waiting, we might as well gain some understanding, right? So pull up a seat and get comfy.
Abram and Sarai were waiting.
Open up your Bibles to Genesis 12, where we read this morning.
12 The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.
2 “I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.[a]
3 I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”[b]
4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Harran.
Key point: Abram was seventy five years old
God said to Abram, “I want you to go from your country to a land I will show you, AND, I will make you into a great nation.” In other words, “Abram, you’re gonna have a kid.”
Wow, great news! The expectant father, right. At seventy five, and fatherless, Abram must have been elated. And please with his relationship with God. So Abram obediently leaves his father’s country, and in verse six we see that when Abram arrived at a certain place in Canaan, God said, “ “To your offspring[c] I will give this land.”So he built an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him.
And now begins the waiting.
Lots of waiting.
Waiting for a child.
Waiting for a very long time.
9 chapters of Old Testament waiting. Anybody here had to wait nine chapters of Old Testament waiting?
We don’t like to wait, do we? In fact, we’ve become a very impatient people. We want it, and we want it right now. Fast food lines have timers in the drive through so that they can achieve a median time of processing the customer through the line. We have smart phones that can get us an answer on google in 4.5 seconds. We don’t even have to wait for bills in the mail anymore. We can jump right on the website of our creditors and pay what we owe right now. Or even better...take the time to set up your bill pay at your online bank, and you can pay all of your bills in about 3 minutes. You could be paying bills right now for all I know.
We don’t like to wait. We are an impatient and selfish generation.
And, as we see from Sarai and Abram, they didn’t like to wait either.
16 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; 2 so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.”
Abram agreed to what Sarai said. 3 So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. 4 He slept with Hagar, and she conceived.
When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress.5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.”
6 “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.
7 The angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. 8 And he said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?”
“I’m running away from my mistress Sarai,” she answered.
9 Then the angel of the Lord told her, “Go back to your mistress and submit to her.” 10 The angel added, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count.”
Abram and Sarai became impatient waiting on God, so they took matters into their own hands and did what God was supposed to do. They made a child.
But look at what that did.
We see in that short bit of scripture that I just read despise, anger, marital strife, and mistreatment. But there’s also a little tidbit I want us to see in there. Back in verse 2. Sarai said it...listen:
“ so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.”
We always want to focus on the “OH NO, she’s telling Abram to commit adultery!! AHHHHH!!” Guys, Hagar was their slave, which meant she was property, Abram’s property. In that culture, no problem. That’s not the point today.
It’s these words from Hagar that point to the problem...perhaps I can build a family.
Perhaps I can
I...that little word that packs such a big punch in our spiritual lives.
The third vowel of five, but clearly the most powerful and the one that gets us into the most trouble.
I...me, myself, and I
And look at the trouble the word “I” got Abram and Sarai into.
And I know, because I know from my own life, that when I take control back from God, I get into trouble.
WE have to remember that God is in control, we are not. He is the creator of the universe. He made everything! And when we think we’ve been waiting too long, we mess things up.
So let’s go back to our reading for some perspective. There are two things I want to encourage us to remember while we are waiting.
1. God said
Chapter 12, verse 1…. “The Lord said…”
There is power in the spoken word, especially God’s spoken word. God said.
God said to Abram that He, God, was going to make him into a great nation.
We forget that a lot. We forget that “God said.”
In Genesis 1, God said “Let there be light”
God said “let us make man in our image” in genesis 1: 26
Hebrews5:5... “5 In the same way, Christ did not take on himself the glory of becoming a high priest. But God said to him,
“You are my Son;
today I have become your Father.”[a]
God’s word is creative, meaning, when God says, thing happen.
But we forget that God said. And just like Sarai and Abram, we get impatient.
G. Campbell Morgan said, “Waiting for God is not laziness. Waiting for God is not going to sleep. Waiting for God is not the abandonment of effort. Waiting for God means, first, activity under command; second, readiness for any new command that may come; third, the ability to do nothing until the command is given.”
That last part is the key...the ability to do NOTHING until the command is given.
The purposes of God often develop slowly because His grand designs are never hurried. The great New England preacher Phillips Brooks was noted for his poise and quiet manner. At times, however, even he suffered moments of frustration and irritability. One day a friend saw him feverishly pacing the floor like a caged lion. "What's the trouble, Mr. brooks?" he asked.
"The trouble is that I'm in a hurry, but God isn't!" Haven't we felt the same way many times?
Hebrews 6:12 encourages us in this:
imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.
Never forget what God has said to you. Because, point number 2.
2. When God says He will, He will
When God tells us He is going to do something, He’s going to do it. We see this over and over in scripture.
God told Moses he was going to deliver the Israelites, and He did it.
God told Joshua in a dream that He was going to make him rule over his brothers, and he did it
God told Noah to go and build an ark, because he was going to flood the earth, and he did it.
God told Jesus to be sacrificed, because through Jesus God was going to reconcile mankind to himself, and HE DID IT.
When God says, God does
Numbers 23:19 tells us that:
“God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?”
God comes through, every time, right on time.
It may not be the way WE want it.
It may not be when we want it.
It may not be how we want it.
It’s the way, and when, and how God wants it, and it’s to our best interest to grow into a people who understand that. A people who see that God’s interests in our lives are much greater and much more powerful than our interests.
When God says, God does
