Gentle Reminders
Follow Jesus & Wait on Him…
Do you feel overwhelmed by your circumstances? Are you afraid of life moving too quickly, of changes happening so suddenly that there’s no time to adjust? They may be changes you’ve wanted for so long, but now that they’re here, it’s scary because you don’t feel equipped. Maybe you’ve finally gotten the promotion, but now you don’t feel right for the job. Maybe you’ve entered a new relationship
after getting over heartbreak, and you think you have to close yourself off to guard your heart better than before. Maybe you’re moving away from home, from everything familiar, afraid of loneliness and of putting yourself out there in order to form new friendships. Maybe a dream that you’ve chased and poured hours of time and energy into is finally coming true…that book being published…that artwork being sold…that acting role landed…that business you started that’s about to have its grand opening. But now that the dream is becoming reality, you wonder, “What if I fail? What if everything falls
through the cracks? How am I supposed to handle this on my own?” Suddenly, the dream come true brings about big change. Good, necessary change but change nonetheless.
Perhaps you’re in a different boat, and you fear the changes you desire will never happen. You’ve been waiting for the promotion, for the relationship that leads to marriage, for the financial stability to own your own home, for that pursued dream to come true, and you’ve lost track of the years and the seasons of seemingly unanswered prayer. You compare everyone else’s thriving gardens to your small one. You’re afraid that everyone else is somehow ahead in life, and you’re stuck. You’re the caboose of the line, and you always have been, and you might as well get used to it as life passes you by.
Oh, sweet friend, I have been in both boats–the scary big changes and the waiting. Both are hard. Both can be frustrating. The hardest is when both big changes and waiting on the Lord collide. Here’s what I mean: Maybe the Lord is in the midst of answering your prayer, and a big change is coming, one that’s going to be so good and God-glorifying and wonderful and also going to involve a lot of work and commitment and sacrifice. Yet even when God pulls you out of one waiting season, He places you in another waiting season. For instance, I chased the dream of becoming a published author. I waited on the Lord. After five years, He is answering. But that answer still involves a great deal of trust and waiting on the Lord as I work with my publisher to edit/fine-tune my books. There was a process in the desire and pursuit to get published, and there’s now a process in being published. In both processes, God has called me to wait on Him. To trust.
The process never stops. Your very life is “in process”. God is constantly refining your faith, constantly pruning the areas of your life that need pruned, constantly planting and watering, constantly transforming you into more of His likeness, and constantly asking and inviting you to wait on Him.
God calls us to “walk by faith, not by sight” (II Corinthians 5:7). While He calls us to go and make disciples, you and I must trust that He will continue to guide our feet along the journey. He calls us to go, but He doesn’t always tell us where or how to get there. He just says, “Go.” But so often, we mistake His “Go” for “Lead the way.” God opens a door, and we either start trying to run ahead of Him (consequently falling flat on our faces), or we fearfully twiddle our thumbs and question if His open door is the right one. Neither of those choices are the right ones, because both stem from a place of doubt in the One who knows where He is leading us.
Dear friend, God is always on His throne. Always leading. Always at work. He always goes before us. And all He requires of us is that we follow Him, trust His process, and wait for His guidance as He writes our story moment by moment and step by step. We actually shouldn’t separate God’s command to “go” from His command to “wait”, because they go hand-in-hand. Throughout the entirety of our Christian walk here on earth, we are called to go, to walk with the Lord and wait expectantly and with an abundance of hope for His leading, provision, wisdom, and opportunities to scatter seeds of Truth and encourage others to follow the Good Shepherd.
John 15:16 (NASB) says, “…I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit and that your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you.” In doing a word study of “remain”, I discovered the following definition: “To abide, to endure, to be held, to wait for, to continue to be present” (blueletterbible.org, emphasis added).
It’s such a comforting reminder that all God expects of us is complete trust in His process in the here and now. We can only ever be in the present, but sometimes, even without realizing it, we dwell on the past or strive after the future. When we do this, we try to steal the pen from God’s hands. Notice the word try. I can tell you from experience, it never works, and it only leads to a cul-de-sac of worry and stress that God never intends for His children.
You can live a full life in the here and now, abiding in Christ Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of your faith, without ever having to carry a planning book. Why? Because for starters, the only book you need is God’s Word!! And because God holds His plans for your life in His hands. That’s the safest place for them to be. His hands are the safest place for you, too.
Isaiah 49:16 says, “See, I have engraved you on the palms of My hands…”
So go. Live your life. Follow Jesus. Remain. Wait on Him. Trust. Endure the trials and changes as they come, because God will use them to strengthen your faith. Take more joy in God’s process rather than the final result, because the result is not up to you…And thank goodness! Thank goodness that the outcome of all situations lies safely in the hands of the perfect God with the perfect plan who is perfecting your faith, all while promising fullness of joy.
Our God is holy, high above us. In the going and in the waiting, He will never lead us astray. Rest in that. Rest in Him…and live!
Up Next: “CHOOSE TO TRUST GOD”
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