God gave an oath to the nations; He is saying to the people that they are a witness to the promise He is making to them of magnificent blessings of more than they can imagine possible. God promises so much for lives, and we know that He wants good things for us, yet so often we can’t imagine them for ourselves, or how God could bring them about for us as individuals. Yet here we read that He is says, ‘’you shall not be ashamed who wait for me’’.

Often there is a fear within us that when waiting we are going to get left out. As Christians we wait for different things, things that feel missing, a gap in our lives or circumstance that we want filled and we are waiting for God to fill it. We often look into the future thinking ‘’if only this or that would happen we’d be happy’’ We might be waiting for God to change a circumstance in our lives that is causing us pain, or to deal with a sin or part of our nature that we are struggling to cope with. We might be wanting to be used in a particular way and are waiting for God to use us. All these things and wants can leave us feeling restless, and it is within this restlessness that we can find it very hard to wait on God. It is not in our nature to be patient and in fear of being ashamed and getting left behind we try to push ahead and sort things out for ourselves. We start to believe that things will never change for us, or that God’s promises are not for us, we become discouraged by these thoughts, and fail to see that they are lies. God promises, using the nations as witness, that if we wait on Him we will not be ashamed, not lose out or fall between the cracks when we wait on Him.

Waiting on God means to trust that He will take us through no matter what the circumstance, it means to rely on Him and go to Him with our problems first. So often our instinct is to try to sort our issues in our own flesh or go to God once and give up when we don’t get an instant answer.

‘’Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?’’ (Galatians 3:3)

We start out waiting but as times goes on and we feel we are waiting longer than we’d like in discomfort, we become discouraged and rely on our own strength. God wants us to keep coming back to Him and listen to His will for our lives, not race ahead in our minds and own will. God wants us to come to Him and rest. A big part of the issues is that we assume if only this or that would happen we’d be fine then, but there is almost always something that we will want or feel is missing, and God wants us to find His rest no matter the circumstance and wait on Him in His strength. God uses our situations to change us, yet we wish away our lives whilst waiting for things to change as we look into the future, and in doing so miss making the most of what God has for us now.

God’s timing is perfect, and it is often as He brings us out of a situation and we look back, that we see that He was as work in us and our lives the whole time. He trains us in the waiting to rely on Him.

‘’But those who wait on the LORD Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.’’ (Isaiah 40:31)

Amen.