Waiting on the Lord

Exodus 24:15-18 Then Moses went up into the mountain, and a cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the LORD abode on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days; and on the seventh day He call to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. The sight of the glory of the LORD was like a consuming fire on the top of the mountain in the eyes of the children of Israel. And Moses went into the midst of the cloud as he went up into the mountain; and Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights.

Patience is hard to learn and hard to practice faithfully in our daily walk. However, God requires it of us. As I was reading through this passage again in Exodus, the weight of Moses sitting on the mountain for six entire days before the Lord spoke to him hit me. He had to patiently wait for the Lord for six days. Imagine sitting on this mountain top, probably with the most basic of provisions, if any at all, waiting…waiting for the Most High. Waiting in respectful fear and trembling. Most of us can’t even wait a few minutes in a grocery checkout line without feeling imposed upon.

Often we do as we please with our lives and run to God for a few minutes of prayer in our time of trial and want an answer right away. It is not that simple. Moses prepared for six full days of waiting before experiencing the awesome presence of the Lord! Moses had to wait six days before the Lord called out to him and then he stayed in His presence thirty-four more days.  Why are we surprised we need time for the Lord to prepare us to receive His blessing?

God had a pretty solid relationship with Moses by this time, don’t you think? He had given Moses marching orders to go back to Egypt and confront Pharaoh, persist against all natural odds, gather up the people of Israel, lead them to the side of the sea and across to the other side with an army chasing them. Now Moses sat alone on this mountain top waiting for the Lord to give him instructions for leading this ungrateful group to the Promised Land. I’m thinking Moses probably appreciated the break from the masses and was quite willing to wait because, looking at what lay ahead…who’d want to venture into that without God’s instructions? Moses was a man of God but he was not a dummy either! He knew God was his strength and source. Yes, my guess is Moses was very willing to wait on the Lord.

We may never be instructed to take an entire nation out of the country holding them in bondage, but we are told to come into His presence in prayer and petition. Regardless of what constitutes our ‘Egypt’, we need to understand that waiting on the Lord will never be something we can control, nor should it be. How arrogant we can be? Moses might have come down from that mountaintop with something other than the Ten Commandments had he been as arrogant as Christians today. Are we no more than modern day golden calf builders?

We have all been guilty from time to time of deciding that God was taking His own sweet time to answer us, so we jump to conclusions on what His answer may be. Sometimes it is blatantly what we wanted it to be in the first place…sometimes it is the extreme opposite of what we wanted so we hang our heads in despair at God’s ‘no’. Had we been willing to wait, we would get His real answer.

When my kids and then grandkids would come to me with a request I needed to think about, they would be frustrated when I said as much. They wanted a favorable reply and they wanted it right then. I would respond by saying again I needed time to think about it but if they wanted an answer right now, the answer was no. At that point, they were usually more inclined to say they could wait. Perhaps our Abba, Father is teaching us the same lesson.

The Lord is preparing us for great things, learning to wait on Him is a valuable lesson. Spend more time seeking Him and worshiping Him over watching the clock you foolishly tried put Him on. Keep waiting at His feet. He will meet us with the perfect answer in His perfect time. We can learn a lot from Moses.