“Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.” Psalm‬ ‭27:14‬ ‭NIV‬‬‬‬‬‬

What does it mean to wait on the Lord? It doesn’t take long when following after Jesus to realize that our prayer life is often times ineffective not because the father doesn’t hear our prayers but because the way we pray often times reduces the God of the universe to a gene.

Unfortunately that flawed mindset often affects how we respond to God after we have “sent up our three wishes.”

I think that often times when we wait on the Lord we are in a state of hoping that God shows up. Waiting for him to move. Waiting to see if He is going to answer our prayers before we have to decide whether or not we should take the situation into our own hands.

I think that in order for us to fully grasp what the Psalmist David meant when he said to “wait for the Lord” we need to look at the Hebrew word for “wait” to see if it gives us a deeper insight into what he meant. The word for wait in the Hebrew is the word Qavah; according to the Strongs dictionary it can means to wait patiently but it can also mean to bind together by twisting, to collect, to expect or to gather together.

When we wait for the Lord hoping that He will show up and answer us we are carrying with us a sense of doubt. After all there is a chance that He might not show up, or at least He may not show up in the way we expect Him to.

Let’s take a minute to change our mindset. How different would not only our prayer lives be but also our spiritual lives be if instead of waiting for God to show up we asked God to bind our will with His?

What if waiting meant to gather ourselves to the heart of God instead of thinking of what to do if He doesn’t show up? To wait on the Lord is to confide in Him, binding ourselves to his will, understanding that his ways are higher than ours.

I encourage you my friends to not lose heart and to wait for the Lord!

David Waddle is Pastor at the Lynchburg First Church of Christ.

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