08-01-10 A Time To Wait

We are going to pull out of our Romans study for this morning

and spend our time with one of the greats from the Old Testament.

We are going to spend most of the next few minutes

with one of the Psalms of David.

And with that Psalm I believe we are also going to find

the answers to some questions

that some of you may have been asking yourself

and not even known you were asking.

Do you know what Christian growth really is?

It is the process of discovering

the way things really are.

When I was in perhaps the 4^th or 5^th grade

I made a remarkable discovery.

I discovered that the teacher’s Arithmetic book

was not like my Arithmetic book.

Until I made this discovery

I had just assumed

that my teachers just automatically knew the answers to everything.

It was a logical assumption.

They always knew the answer

to every question you ever asked them.

They were the ones who graded all the papers

and all the tests.

They just knew things.

And when it came to Arithmetic

I just assumed that when my teachers looked at problems that I would agonize over for hours

they just looked at the problem

and knew the answer.

But then one day I noticed something.

I discovered that the teacher’s Arithmetic book

was not the same book the rest of us had.

The Teacher’s book

had a special section in the back,

a section that contained the answers

to every arithmetic problem in the entire book.

It even had the answers

to all of those horrible long division problems,

and to the story problems,

and the answers to adding and subtracting those fractions that didn’t have common denominators.

I wanted one of those books so bad,

the ones with all the answers in the back.

When we enter this world

our society hands us one of those books with all the answers in the back.

It is not an Arithmetic book.

It is our society’s book of life.

It contains what our society believes

are all the really important questions about life,

and the answers our society believes fit with those questions.

But what most of us never realize

is that nearly all of the answers

in the back of our book of life

are wrong.

In fact, not only are the answers wrong,

but even a lot of the questions are wrong.

One of the first questions the book asks is,

“How can a human being find happiness?”

Because the question is in our society’s book of life,

we assume it must be one of the most important questions we can ask.

And then we turn to the answer section in the back of the book

and find the answer written out,

“Happiness always comes to those

who have physical beauty

or popularity,

or wealth,

or power.”

And then, like the good students we are,

we plunge into the pursuit

of the answers given to us,

never questioning whether or not the answer, much less the question is right.

If I were to ask those of you here this morning

what you really need right now

to fix your life,

to make it better,

more than a few would say,

“Well, I just need a little more money,

or a little more success,

or a little more of what money and success can buy.”

And please don’t think I’m being critical.

We were all given the same book to start with,

and these are the answers we find inside it.

But one of the fringe benefits

of our entrance into a Father/child relationship with God through Christ

is His offer to replace that flawed answer book with one that has the right answers.

Now that sounds good,

but there is a problem -

you see, we’ve all been using that old answer book for years,

and in the process

we have already memorized the answers

to all of the really important questions.

And unless we’re careful

rather than checking the new book for the correct answers

we will just continue to rely on the answers

we have already memorized.

Well, this morning I want us to turn our attention

to one of the answers in our new answer book

that it would be easy for us to miss.

And before we look at the answer

it would make sense for me to give you the question -

“Why doesn’t God always answer me

as soon as I call out to Him for help?”

And what I will share with you in the next few minutes

is only going to be part of the answer to that question,

but it is a crucial part.

To get us to the answer we are looking for

I’m going to take us to the 27^th Psalm

and let David lead us through his discovery of the answer we’re looking for.

We are going to begin with Psalm 27:7

and we pick up David’s thinking

right at that point

where we so often find ourselves.

He says,

PSA 27:7 Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice, And be gracious to me and answer me.

Now, we don’t know what specific struggle David was facing when he wrote those words,

but it doesn’t matter

because we certainly understand the cry.

His request isn’t complicated,

it isn’t confusing.

It is a simple, agonizing cry to God for help.

God! Hear me!

Please Hear me!

I’m in pain.

I’m in need.

I’m in confusion.

If ever I needed a God, I need Him now!

Please be gracious to me

and answer me.

And any Christian who has ever hurt

has prayed that prayer.

That is not a prayer that grows out of religion.

It is not a polite little repetition

of “Our Father who art in heaven...”

It is not a prayer that grows out of business as usual in the religious world.

It is certainly not something we find jotted down in tidy form

at the top of our prayer lists,

or offered as a prayer request

during our public prayer times.

That cry is the cry of a desperate man,

a man who cannot help himself,

a man who needs a very real God.

PSA 27:7 Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice, And be gracious to me and answer me.

And I think when He prayed that prayer

the first response he heard from his God was silence.

Nothing changed.

The pain he was feeling continued.

The enemies who were attacking him

continued their attack.

The sense of helplessness

that prompted him to cry out to his God

still remained.

And I think that

because of what I see David doing next.

The next thing he says to his God is this:

PSA 27:8 When You said, "Seek My face," my heart said to You, "Your face, O Lord, I shall seek."

Do you know what I think that is?

I think that is David’s tactful way of saying.

“Look, Lord! You’re the One who told me to turn to you!

You’re the one who promised to be my strong tower,

my hiding place,

my Deliverer.

YOU are the one who said, “Seek my face!

Turn to Me in your hour of need.

Let Me show Myself strong on your behalf!”

And then David says in effect, “My heart leapt at Your offer, Your invitation.”

...my heart said to You, "Your face, O Lord, I shall seek."

I love that.

I love it when I see David doing

the same thing I so often do.

You see, David began with one goal in mind -

He wanted His God to fix something that was broken in his life.

David’s goal was obvious - Hear my cry!

Deliver me!

And when his cry is not followed immediately

by the Lord’s instant intervention,

he then tries to negotiate with God,

to manipulate Him somehow.

He says, “Look! You’re the one who started this whole thing.

You’re the one who called yourself God!

I’m just taking you at your word.”

And once again

his cry to his Creator

is followed by silence!

The pain still continues.

The enemies still attack.

The cause of the turmoil remains.

And then the desperation sets in -

the sudden terror that always comes

when we think perhaps

our God doesn’t care,

or will not answer.

Our family loves the Anne Of Green Gables series, both the books and the tapes.

There is a line spoken by Marila to Anne

the day this orphaned girl comes to stay at Green Gables.

If you know the story,

you know that Anne’s vivid adolescent imagination

causes her to over-dramatize all of life.

And, as Marila and Anne are walking up the stairs to Anne’s room

Anne makes some comment

about her reaching a point of utter despair.

Marila responds with this incredible line.

She says, “To despair is to turn your back on God.”

That is the best definition of despair I’ve ever heard.

As long as God is,

there is hope,

there is a future,

there is a reason to go on.

But then when we begin to believe

that God is not there,

or does not care,

the terror of despair sets in.

I hear some of that terror

in David’s next words.

PSA 27:9 Do not hide Your face from me, Do not turn Your servant away in anger;

Oh my God! Please don’t hide from me,

don’t turn me away in anger.

It’s just what we do, of course,

when we first encounter God’s apparent silence in the time of our need -

we look at all of the reasons why

we really have no right to His help.

There are so many really good reasons

why He should ignore me,

why He should be ticked at me,

why He should hide His face from me.

But then David once again

begins to remember the truth.

Of course there are so many reasons why God should not care,

why He should not hear,

why He should not answer.

But no person ever has or ever will

earn the kindness

or the love of our God.

He pours His love out on us

simply because He loves us

not because of anything,

but in spite of it all.

And then David finally begins to remember the truth:

You have been my help; Do not abandon me nor forsake me, O God of my salvation!

I remember Lord!

You have been my help in the past,

you have been my salvation,

and you will be again.

And then he affirms

what we all know when the hard times really come -

there is no human being alive

who can do for us what needs to be done.

David takes it to the extreme.

He says,

PSA 27:10 For my father and my mother have forsaken me,

Even my parents cannot now meet my need.

But then he affirms

what he knows to be the truth.

But the Lord will take me up.

And then in verses 11 and 12

I see a major change taking place inside David.

In those verses He says,

PSA 27:11 ¶ Teach me Your way, O Lord, And lead me in a level path Because of my foes.

PSA 27:12 Do not deliver me over to the desire of my adversaries, For false witnesses have risen against me, And such as breathe out violence.

...Teach me Your way...

Rather than focusing on what he thinks God should do FOR him,

he turns his attention to trying to understand

what God wants to do IN him.

And the battle David describes in that 12^th verse

is the same battle we all face

during those times of turmoil in our lives.

“For false witnesses have risen against me,

and such as breathe out violence...”

Those false witnesses are all the lies that attack the truth about our God,

lies such as...

I’m not really the sort of person God would love.

I’m not good enough for Him to involve Himself in my life.

He doesn’t even notice me or my pain.

My past will determine my future,

where I have failed before I will fail again.

Nothing has really changed inside me.

Only special people

with special qualifications

receive special treatment from God.

Only fools put their faith

in a God they cannot see.

The only resources I will ever have

are those within myself.

Lies...all lies.

And those are the real enemies

that seek to destroy us,

the ones that have the power

to do great violence against us.

It isn’t our circumstances,

as painful as they may be at times.

It is what we believe about those circumstances,

and especially what we believe they are telling us about our God,

about who He is,

about what He is like,

and about how He relates to us in Christ.

And then David ends this Psalm

with his final bold affirmation of the truth God has been moving him toward.

PSA 27:13 I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord In the land of the living.

Our God both can and will deliver us here and now,

in this world in which we live.

And we will know His goodness

not because we have any claim on it,

but simply because He is absolutely, eternally GOOD.

But that is not where the Psalm ends.

It ends with that truth I promised you

when I first started talking.

It ends with that unexpected ingredient

in so much of our interaction with our God.

David says,

PSA 27:14 Wait for the Lord; Be strong and let your heart take courage; Yes, wait for the Lord.

Wait for the Lord.

Be strong.

Let your heart take courage.

Yes, wait for the Lord.

And here is one of those crucial missing answers

that was never in that first answer book given to us at birth.

There are changes that God cannot accomplish within us

through any other means

than by His requiring us to wait on Him.

Waiting forces us to deal with the lies that are defeating us

in ways that instant answers could never do.

Only through waiting

can we ever discover

that what we really need,

what we really long for,

the only thing that has the power

to fill the void within us,

and to heal the hurt

is God Himself.

We begin our churning process

believing that what we need is THE ANSWER.

If only the pain would stop...

if only the enemy would go away...

if only this person or that person would change,

then everything would be good.

But the truth is,

what we need most of all is not THE ANSWER,

what we need is our God,

and the change we need

is not a change in our circumstances,

it is a change in our perspective on Him as our Creator.

And with most of us

that change can only come

through His requiring us to wait.

I don’t know why it is,

but most of the time

our healthiest interactions with God

grow out of a sense of helplessness and desperation.

Waiting creates that desperation within us.

We, like David, tend to begin most of our communications with God

by telling Him what we want.

Only through that waiting process

is He able to bring us to the place

where we stop telling Him what we want

long enough so that He can show us

what we really need.

We begin by wanting our God to bless our way,

to place His stamp of approval on our plan for success.

Only when He remains silent

will we finally reach the place

where we will cry out with David,

“Teach me Your way, O Lord...”

Not my way, but Yours.

There are numerous passages throughout Scripture that talk with us

about both the value

and the necessity our waiting for the Lord.

And with all of them

there is the assurance

that the waiting is only for a season,

and once God has accomplished in us

the work that needs to be done

He will show Himself strong for us

in just exactly the right way.

I love the way Isaiah said it in Isaiah chapter 40.

ISA 40:27 Why do you say, O Jacob, and assert, O Israel, "My way is hidden from the Lord, And the justice due me escapes the notice of my God"?

ISA 40:28 Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth Does not become weary or tired. His understanding is inscrutable.

ISA 40:29 He gives strength to the weary, And to him who lacks might He increases power.

ISA 40:30 Though youths grow weary and tired, And vigorous young men stumble badly,

ISA 40:31 Yet those who wait for the Lord Will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not become weary.

Amen.