Waiting With God

2 Peter 3:8 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. Last month, not only did the church need to get new tags for the bus but Stacy and I had to tag our vehicles as well. Now, you would’ve thought that I would have exercised the “Killing Two Birds with One Stone” approach with this but I suppose I am a glutton for punishment! I must enjoy wasting my life away standing in lines. I went to the Butler County Courthouse one week to tag the church bus and then went back the very next week to tag our vehicles.

On my first visit I found myself in line waiting for two hours. And the whole time I sat there, I kept kicking myself for not bringing my other documents to tag my personal vehicles.

The next week I arrived to the court house to find myself in the worse line I had ever been in waiting to tag vehicles. I stood in line on that day for two and a half hours. And I kept thinking how crazy it was that I was standing in this extremely long line just to pay money for a couple of stickers.

Someone needs to do a study and find out how much time Americans spend in line waiting to tag their vehicles each year. I mean, come on, we put a man on the moon, invented cell phones, the internet, and the sport of wrestling. It just seems to me that there has to be a way to tag your vehicles without standing for hours in line. How long does it take to type a few buttons on the computer. And as I think these things, I am reminded that I could have avoided all of this waiting and stress by simply going on the internet a month earlier and tagged the vehicles earlier, thus avoiding wasting 4 and a half hours of my life standing in lines. I just I hate waiting and anything. I don’t like waiting for food when I’m hungry. I don’t like waiting in traffic. I don’t like waiting in the store. I don’t like waiting for the Kids and Stacy to get ready. I don’t like waiting for green eggs and ham. I don’t like waiting Sam I Am.

God's idea of timing is often different from our own. The truth is that God's character, and the lessons he wants to teach us about waiting.

VIDEO: Waiting With God

Let me share with you a personal story that started this sermon on Waiting With God for me.

Illustration: Last Sunday afternoon we were hit with a major hail storm weren’t we? Stacy and I were on our way home from El Dorado when we were hit. I can’t really remember seeing that much come down that fast ever before. Driving in it was almost like a Hollywood film except we were in it.

Illustration: We got home safe and I was just simply amazed at all of the hail on the ground. Once it stopped I went outside to check things out. I went to our koi pond and had to readjust some of the rocks that had been pelted by the hail and I noticed my largest and oldest koi laying outside of the pond lifeless with mud stuck all over him.

I have to tell you, my heart sank. I ran over and picked up his lifeless body. I decided to wash some of the mud off of him so I placed him in the pond and began rubbing the gunk off of him and realized that he had a little bit of life in him as I saw his mouth slightly move. I let him go and he just floated to the top of the water, not moving. He was a dead fish.

I went inside and told Stacy that our fish was dead but didn’t know what to do with him. She said one word. “Pray”. Stacy prayed with me that God would bring life back into our fish. Now, I know this sounds a bit crazy but she told me to have faith. So that’s what we did. We prayed.

I then tried to run back outside to see the fish but Stacy stopped me and said, “Wait”. Stacy told me to just wait, have faith, quit checking on the fish and leave it in God’s hand and to continue praying. She told me to have faith that the next day, the fish would be alive, swimming around but I had to be patient and keep praying.

That night was a tough night. I kept going out to check on him whenever Stacy wasn’t around and every time I did, it was the same thing. I saw a dead floating fish. But I did keep praying throughout the night.