Trust
Ashley Watts
I don’t know about you, but sometimes waiting for the actuality of God’s word or promises to come to pass is a process. Sometimes it’s long and in that waiting time…my humanness starts to show up.
Tiqvah (Hope) means waiting— (Psalm 42:11) waiting in the actuality of God’s will coming to pass. It’s assurance that what He spoke, He will do. It’s knowing and having hope in God. My faith rests in Him. Yet my faith sometimes rubs up against my humanness of wanting things instantaneously.
We live in a world where everything we want is basically at our fingertips. We want things so quickly that if a web browser takes more than 5 seconds to load, we get mad…oh just me? Amazon delivers overnight, sometimes even the same day. We want instant approval or satisfaction, even our kids’ games give them instant rewards for passing levels or defeating other players. Our world wants quick, instant, and often God works opposite of the world. Not that he doesn’t want to bless you, or affirm you, but God also wants to prepare you. To make sure you are developed enough to hold the blessing. God isn’t a magic genie where we can just “rub the lamp” whenever we need or want something. God is our father. He wants a relationship with us, he wants to teach us, help us grow, develop our faith, and deepen our trust in Him. This rubs up against our culture of instant.
I’ve found that waiting for the “not yet” of our lives can feel long, and endless, and doubt can start to creep in. Waiting is hard. We don’t like to wait, and we don’t like the uncertainty of waiting. This is natural (to our humanity) and in this space, God works our “wait muscle”. In this in-between space of what God is doing and where we are now, we are refined, we are stretched, and we are shaken of all the areas that God wants to heal, set free, or develop. In the wait, our misconceptions of God come to light, our faith is deepened, and our trust is developed. In the wait, our relationship with God is grown.
God is the God of “already”. All his promises are yes and amen (2 Corinthians 1:20). He has already accomplished everything in the spiritual realm, and some of it is manifested here on Earth, we see it, we experience it, and some of it is “not yet”. In this space of waiting on God, on trusting his word (logos- the Bible) and his rhema word (now word- spoken to us), gratitude is essential. Let me explain.
Gratitude looks back. Gratitude focuses on the “already”, what God has already done in our lives or the lives of others. The Bible is full of God’s faithfulness. The Bible is full of stories of God’s redemption, his healing, and his grace. If we sit and look back, our lives carry the same marks of grace, healing, and redemption. Some of us are living in the answered prayers of yesterday. Some of us are walking miracles. Some of us are testimonies of God’s faithfulness and love. If you are breathing…you are one of them.
I’m not saying you need to have a perfect life to be a miracle, I’m saying you have experienced a touch of God. You have walked through trials, and you are still here. You have faced the giants and not backed down. We don’t have to wrestle real giants or face persecution that the first-century disciples did, we live in a different world. A lot of the battles we face are in our minds, in our relationships, or in our circumstances. If you are honest, like me, God has walked you through a lot.
I was on the lake one day waiting and praying for my “not yet”, if I’m being honest, I was complaining. When God puts a dream and a promise in your heart it’s incredible. As you wait and pray into what he is showing you (as we should), your heart begins to grow toward God’s will, and the waiting period sometimes gets a little too long for our preferences. I have been praying fervently for this for 5 years, but in actuality, I’ve been praying this same prayer for 17 years. My heart has grown, my faith has been challenged, God has revealed a glimpse of his plan, he has spoken, he has reassured me, and I still want it on my timetable— like instant…like now.
As I was pouring out my heart to God, as I was asking yet again for it to be now. I felt God say, “I don’t want you to waste your days begging for what I already gave you. I said it’s coming. Trust me. I want you to enjoy now.”
How do I do that? I asked him. (You might be asking the same questions) Some of us are waiting on big things; some of us are waiting on healing in our minds, bodies, and even relationships. How do we wait?
I felt the Lord prompt me toward gratitude. A little frustrated, I started saying everything that I was thankful for. I was thankful for this beautiful morning on the lake, my coffee, summer, and the sunshine. I am thankful for my life, health, and my children. I’m thankful for my family, my friends, my home, my car, and my career. God has truly provided for me financially. He has redeemed my heart and my identity. He has walked me through the fire and I’m on the other side, not even smelling like smoke. God has been with me. I am eternally grateful for his presence.
It was at this moment on the lake that I saw the two-fold of gratitude. Not only does gratitude shift my focus from what I don’t have to what I DO have. It reminds me of the faithfulness of God. It builds trust, if he did it once, he will do it again. If He has walked me this far, He won’t leave me now. Gratitude focuses on what I do have and deepens my faith in the wait for what God said He would do. Gratitude is the “already” in the middle of the “not yet”. It’s the balance to faith— or rather it is the solid foundation on which our faith sits.
The Bible tells us a story of this, Joshua was walking the Israelites across the Jordan. They were walking into the promised land; you can read it in Joshua 3-4. God told Joshua to direct the priests carrying the ark to walk into the Jordan River. As they walked in, the water stopped flowing up steam and the water piled up.
First, I want you to recognize that God was already 10 steps (or more) ahead of them. The water didn’t stop when they stepped in. It had to have stopped upstream, so when they stepped in, the dry ground appeared. This isn’t the point I’m trying to make, but it’s a good one anyway. God is upstream ahead of you. He is working on your behalf, getting you ready and the situation ready for you to walk into it.
Let’s continue. As the Israelites walked through on dry ground, God instructed Joshua to have each leader of the 12 tribes of Israel take up out of the river a rock.
Joshua 4:5-7
“Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”
In essence, God wanted the people of Israel to have a marked moment, a stone(s) of remembrance of the faithfulness and goodness of God. He was giving them a physical sign of gratitude and faith that they could tell the future generations. This sign of remembrance is the same thing I want you to do with gratitude. We build our faith in God on the solid rock, Jesus… I want you to walk back through your life with a perspective of gratitude and see the faithfulness of God. Have a marked moment. Take a “stone” or 12 stones up out of the river and set them as a remembrance of the faithfulness of God in YOUR life. Fix your focus on Jesus, with gratitude see what he has already done and who he is.
This perspective of “already” gives us the foundation for the “not yet”. Gratitude and remembrance of the past sit in tandem with the waiting that we feel. We don’t need to wait in agony, frustration, and desperation (although sometimes I have…) we can wait in faith. We can wait in hopeful expectation, that what God said, He will do. It might not be now, it might not be the way I think, but God is faithful, that’s his character. If He said it, He will do it. We get to partner with him in the waiting, we get to grow deeper with him, we get to declare HIS will as He reveals it, and we get to see the faithfulness of God play out.
To trust God is to trust His voice, His ways, and His timing. He hasn’t failed yet, and He won’t. This is the tension we get to sit in. This is the tension in which life happens. In this space, our faith needs to lead.