04-07-13 Still Waiting...

Phil. 2:12 So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling;

Phil. 2:13 for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.

...for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure...

It is God Himself who steps into our lives

and creates within the Christian

the WILL for His good pleasure.

He gives us eyes to see

just a little bit of our world -

the need

or the hurt

or the pain

or the effects of evil,

and gives us a heart desire

to somehow make a difference,

to bring good,

to bring healing

where once there was only evil and brokenness.

With most of us

it begins with a heart longing

to find healing

and freedom from evil within ourselves.

Not just a fear of consequences

or a guilt-driven belief that we should be better people,

but a heart-longing to be like our Lord,

a hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Then, as that healing becomes

a growing part of our lives

He gives us eyes to see the pain

and the bondage in those around us

and gives us a desire

to touch the lives of others as well.

And He wills within us His good pleasure.

But our Lord doesn’t stop there.

Paul tells us that He not only WILLS,

He also WORKS for His good pleasure within us.

In other words,

He not only gives us the desires

for healing within ourselves

and those around us,

but He also brings that healing

into reality.

He works both in us and through us

to accomplish what He has given us a desire for.

But there is a third ingredient

in this WILLING-WORKING process

that God accomplishes in our lives,

an ingredient that Paul does not touch on in this verse,

but an ingredient that is powerfully illustrated

in the biographies we have recorded in the Bible,

and also mentioned specifically in a number of other passages.

That third ingredient is a time of WAITING,

and I told you two weeks ago

that it appears to be a nearly universal principle in Scripture that

between the WILLING and the WORKING is the WAITING on the Lord.

Now, I did make some comments about this waiting thing two weeks ago,

but as I’ve thought about it

I think this whole area needs more attention.

So this morning I want to take us back into it again

and look more closely

at why it is such an essential part

of God’s careful working in our lives.

We have already talked about the way

this principle is so evident

in the lives of God’s greats in history.

We’ve seen Moses at 40 years of age,

raised in Pharaoh’s own household,

trained in all the best that Egypt could offer,

a part of the inner workings

of the heart of the nation,

suddenly realizing it was all wrong.

We’ve talked about how God began to WILL within him

a longing for the freedom of his own people from their slavery to the Egyptians.

And we’ve seen how Moses took that longing,

and established himself as the obvious choice to lead his people to freedom.

He rose up and killed one of the Egyptian guards

fully expecting his people

to rise up with him

and revolt against their oppressors

and follow him to freedom.

But no one followed.

And Moses had to run for his life

out into the desert

where he lived until he was 80 years old.

Then, after waiting 40 years,

God stepped into his life again

and said, “Now, lets try it MY way.”

Between the willing and the working

there’s the waiting.

Abraham was 75 years old

when God promised him a son.

Then, for 25 years Abraham waited,

until, at age 100 Isaac was finally born.

Between the willing and the working

there is the waiting.

King David was anointed King of Israel

when he was still in his teens.

And then, for the next 14 or 15 years

he waited.

Some of that time he waited in the desert

while Saul stalked him

and tried repeatedly to kill him.

It wasn’t until he was 30 years old

that he ascended to the throne.

And between the willing and the working

there was the waiting.

The Apostle Paul met the Lord on the way to Damascus in about 31 or 32 AD.

For a few weeks or months

we see him sharing his testimony,

proclaiming his allegiance to His Lord.

And then it all came to a screeching halt,

and for 10 years God just put him on the shelf.

He drops out of the New Testament record.

For 10 years Paul just waits,

and learns,

and grows

and rethinks his entire Jewish heritage.

And between the willing and the working there was the waiting.

So WHY?

Why is the waiting thing

such a huge part of God’s dealings with us?

And is there anything we can do

to shorten that waiting period?

Well, lets start with the WHY

because it’s the easier of the two questions.

When we come to the Lord

He creates a new heart within us.

Along with that new heart

comes those new desires we’ve been talking about.

Those desires, just like the heart itself,

are perfect and pure in every way.

The problem comes in that

once those desires enter our life through our new heart

they are then processed by a mind

and an emotional system

that has been trained to think and feel

by our old self-centered spirit.

Why, when Moses first discovered within himself

the desire to lead the Hebrew people

into freedom from Egyptian slavery,

WHY did he begin by trying to engineer

a political and social revolution?

Because, when God’s desire within him

was processed by all of his reasoning processes

that had been trained for 40 years

in Egyptian political and social strategies

it was the obvious,

logical,

reasonable answer.

No one would have disputed

the wisdom of his approach.

No one alive had more perfect credentials for the job.

That’s what our mind does with the desires God places within us.

It tries to figure out how we can pull this thing off for God.

How can we use our skills,

our resources,

our personality,

our creativity

our ABILITIES to make it happen?

When Peninsula Bible Fellowship began 30 years ago

I knew what we needed to do

to be a successful church.

I had a mental blueprint

of what we needed to look like.

One of the things on my list

was to make certain everyone was involved in a home fellowship group.

So we took the entire church

and divided up the congregation

and assigned everyone to a group.

And then we tried to make them work.

I had a number of other “essentials” on my list as well.

All of them good,

all of them reasonable,

all of them logical,

and most of them the product of my trying to fulfill for God

the desire He had placed within me.

That’s what so often happens

when His desires

get processed by our mistrained minds.

And when we find we can’t pull it off,

when we find that we cannot do for God what we believe needs to be done,

usually, rather than questioning our flesh-based means

we go back to the Goal

and then try to convince God it’s a really good goal...

“Lord, You are the one who’s given me the desire for this -

You are the one who has given me

eyes to see what needs to be done.

Now please, bless my efforts for You here.”

I can tell you now

something I couldn’t even admit to myself during those early years -

I reached a point in my relationship with our fellowship

where I would have done anything

to get out of here.

I’d given it my best shot,

and it just wasn’t working.

I had failed miserably as a pastor.

That much was obvious.

The things I was trying to teach

no one seemed to understand.

We were going nowhere

and accomplishing nothing of value

and I just wanted to leave.

Do you know why God has us wait?

Because waiting is probably the most effective tool He has

for prying our little flesh fingers

off of the desires He has placed within us.

When the flesh hears about the concept of waiting

it responds by saying,

“OK, Lord, I’ll wait, but how many hours,

how many days is it going to take?”

But the examples we see being offered us in Scripture

tells us that, more often than not,

God measures our waiting

not in hours,

or in days,

but in years.

With Paul it was 10 years,

with Abraham it was 25,

and with Moses it was 40...YEARS!

I can’t tell you exactly when

my flesh began to let go of us as a church.

It happened gradually.

But I can give you a little test

that may help.

When we find ourselves beginning to think