Waiting on God

How long have you been waiting for God to answer your prayers? How long will it be before His promises are fulfilled? I for one easily get impatient.

Here's a lesson for us in waiting on God, praying continually, and trusting He will act in His time:

After three years, I went up to Jerusalem. Later I went to Syria and Cilicia. Gal.1: 18, 21

Paul was a man of action, who didn't let the grass grow under his feet. Immediately after the stoning of Stephen, he went to the high priest, asking for letters of authority to the synagogue leaders in Damascus so that he could arrest any there 'who belonged to the Way'. Confronted by Christ on the Damascus road, however, and called to proclaim the gospel, Paul 'at once began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God'. Same man, same urgency.
The book of Acts compresses the time that Paul spent in Damascus. But in his letter to the Galatians, Paul says that it was not until the third year after his conversion that he went to Jerusalem (Gal.1:17-18). The urgency of the Acts narrative dissolves into an indeterminate time spent in 'Arabia'. When the Jerusalem visit finally happened, Paul no doubt felt that his time had come, and he recalls in Acts 22 (v.17-18) his dismay when, as he was praying in the temple, the Lord told him to leave immediately because his life was in danger. Accompanied to Caesarea, Paul was then sent up north to Tarsus, in the province of Syria and Cilicia, where he spent the next ten years.
Whether in the desert east of Damascus, or in Syria and Cilicia, this passionate, driven man spent up to fourteen years in obscurity, before his primary ministry opened up before him. Bear in mind that by this time - in an age when life expectancy was low - Paul must have been well into his 40s.
Why did God allow - or ordain - these long delays? Reading between the lines, we can deduce that Paul needed teaching - first, to understand the gospel in all its richness, and second to learn to submit his will and his temperament to the lordship of Christ.
God's sovereign purposes may well conflict with human reason, with our passion for plans and programmes. In our driven age, let us not fight against delays, but use times of unemployment, sickness or disappointment creatively, with gratitude, to learn more of God and of what it means to be conformed to the image of his Son.
thanks to Helen Parry (LICC)