Waiting Upon The Lord Part 1 Series

Isaiah 40 verse 31, “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary, and they shall walk, and not faint.”

We must condition ourselves to listen to the Lord’s voice because every decision, everything we go through in life; if we fail in this, then when we will get into much unnecessary burden which will turn into worry and disaster. And then we will have to retrace our steps and then try to recover the losses but it’s a big unnecessary burden and at some points, it can be spiritually fatal. So it’s very important to take this to heart that waiting upon the Lord is a critical characteristic of a believer that follows the Lord Jesus Christ. We need to wait upon the Lord.

So what does this mean? What does waiting upon the Lord mean? We know what the word wait means. It means to “stand by”, it means to be “patient”, it means to “watch”, and look for something. That’s what wait means: to stand by, to stay still and with it; watch, look for, etc. But, waiting upon the Lord is not just standing by and looking. But there’s more to it than that. It also means that we are actively engaged in the impossible through the Word and the promise of God, through the power of God. Whatever is coming against us, whatever is impossible, whatever looks hopeless, whatever looks uncertain, whatever looks like we cannot get in our own strength; when we wait upon the Lord, the whole heaven opens up.

The creature that the Lord used here to liken to our waiting is the eagle. And parallel to the eagle’s experience is the Christian’s experience. And there are three things that we can say about the eagle that parallels the believer’s experience in waiting upon the Lord. And the Lord used the eagle for a very specific purpose. There are three things that we can draw from the Word of God is; when we wait upon the Lord, there is transcendence. There is a transcendence; there is a rising above, there is a going beyond, beyond the material limits, beyond the usual limits, we go beyond to another realm altogether, and the eagle does that. The eagle flies higher than any other bird. It flies higher than any other creature naturally. And it seems as if it glides for hours up in the sky that it is in a world of its own, transcending time and space, far above the mountains. In some cases, it is there flying at an altitude where it is completely beyond the usual experience of other birds or other creatures. And it glides there gracefully for hours sometimes at a time.

And so we also, when we wait upon the Lord, we are going beyond our own experience; our own ability, our own foresight, everything that we know, the best strengths that we have; we are surpassing that, we are going beyond that. Because we find that we cannot do many things, only God can do. So we shut ourselves in and when we are in with the Lord, waiting on Him, then we transcend our own material experience, there the Lord can do wonderful things. As we know, everything that is physical, everything that is material, everything that you see has a spiritual origin. Everything that we see has a spiritual origin and there are spiritual forces at work all the time.

As we heard in the worship, faith is a spiritual force. It’s something that happens and it is immaterial to the natural realm but it is the spiritual substance of that which we need. So it’s something that is definite and it is substantial but it is in the spiritual domain. So, in the spiritual domain when we wait on the Lord, certain things happen. We transcend the normal experience, we are going beyond ourselves. There are many people in many religions, who try to invoke the gods or the presence of that which is above themselves or outside their experience by many incantations, they chant, they do all kinds of things. Sometimes, they work themselves into a frenzy, as the worshippers of Baal, when they cut themselves thinking that, that would please the gods. People do many things, but God says all we need to do is wait upon Him.

The second thing that happens is we get transformed, just like the eagle, we get transformed. What do we mean? The eagle goes through a process called molting. And in the molting process what happens is, that the eagle actually begins to lose its feathers. It begins to rub off the talons, its sharp claws, on the rocks and it begins to actually break its own beak. So that all of these things are useless and the eagle becomes in effect completely weak, completely vulnerable to any attack. What happens is the eagle actually goes through a period of renewal. But to the observer that is worldly and carnal, even some scientists, believe that the eagle gets depressed during that time. But not knowing the Lord and the Lord's ways, how He created the eagle, they fail to give glory to God and so they minimize the renewal stage. The molting process of the eagle, as it waits in private, and it happens in private and that’s the reason why scientists don’t have much knowledge about that because it is in private that the eagle goes through the molting process.