Wait for the LORD
The strength of waiting
The wilderness is mostly waiting, and waiting is the one thing we are sure must be wasted time. We read it as helplessness, as the season where nothing counts, the dead stretch between the last thing God did and the next. So it lands strangely when David, hunted and hemmed in, ends his psalm not with a plan but with a command to himself: wait for the LORD, be strong, let your heart take courage, and again, wait for the LORD. He says it twice, as if he has to talk himself into it. And Isaiah, to a people worn down by exile, makes the wait a promise rather than a punishment. The ones who wait for the LORD are not the ones who run dry; they are the ones whose strength is renewed, who rise on wings like eagles, who run and are not weary. The Hebrew word underneath has the feel of a cord drawn taut, an expectant straining toward God. Biblical waiting is not the absence of effort. It is effort pointed in a direction we are not used to pointing it: not forward, into action, but up, into trust.
“Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; yes, wait for the LORD.”
— David — Psalm 27:14 (WEB)
“Those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary.”
This is Disorientation, and it asks the hardest thing the wilderness asks: to wait. Not idle waiting, but the taut, expectant kind pointed toward God. The phase tells you the wait is not lost time before the renewal; the wait is where the renewal happens. Be strong, take courage, and wait.
You experience the wait as failure. The days bleed past, nothing visibly moves, and a quiet verdict forms in you that this season does not count, that the real living will start once God finally acts. So you fill the silence, or you despair in it, and either way you treat the waiting itself as the problem to be solved. Scripture refuses that reading. It calls the wait the very place strength is renewed, not drained. The eagle's wings are not promised to the ones who outran the wilderness; they are promised to the ones who learned to wait inside it. This does not make waiting passive.
To wait on the LORD is strenuous work, the daily refusal to bolt ahead of Him or collapse behind Him, the discipline of keeping your heart courageous when nothing rewards the courage yet. Stop grading this season by how little is happening on the surface. Something is being renewed in you that no burst of activity could produce. Wait, and let your heart take courage. Something is happening in the waiting that could happen nowhere else, and it is the renewal of a strength you cannot manufacture by moving faster.
The Church in the wilderness wants to act, to fix the disorienting quiet with programs and strategy and ceaseless motion, sure that anything is better than stillness. But there is a strength available only to the people of God who learn to wait on the LORD, expectant and unhurried, refusing to run ahead of Him. Across history the renewals that lasted were rarely the ones the Body engineered in a panic; they grew from seasons of taut, faithful waiting that looked from outside like decline. Before a watching world that measures everything by visible motion, the waiting Church is not the failing one. Its strength is quietly renewing for the running that is not weary, in a time the LORD alone appoints.
When everything else is paused and unmoving, the LORD Himself does not pause. What cannot be shaken is His faithfulness to the ones who wait for Him, the renewal He promises that no delay can cancel. The wait will end; the One you wait for will not.
- Where am I treating this season of waiting as wasted time rather than as the place God is at work?
- What am I doing to fill or escape the wait that I might need to lay down?
- Can I believe that my strength is being renewed precisely in the waiting I want to be over?
Lord, I am tired of waiting, and I keep counting these days as lost. Teach me that waiting on You is not nothing, but the place You renew what I cannot renew myself. Make my heart strong, give it courage, and hold me steady until You move. Amen.