God Waiting on You to Wait on Him

God Waiting On You to Wait On Him

Luke 2:25-32 Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. 26 And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. 27 And he came in the Spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him according to the custom of the Law, 28 he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, 29 "Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word; 30 for my eyes have seen your salvation 31 that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, 32 a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel." ESV

Luke 3:2-6 during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness. 3 And he went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 4 As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, "The voice of one crying in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. 5 Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall become straight, and the rough places shall become level ways, 6 and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'" ESV

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It sounds funny to say that God would be waiting upon anybody, after all this is the God of the Bible who in the Old Testament revealed Himself as Jehovah/Yahweh, the all-sufficient one. “I Am that I Am” is how He revealed Himself to Moses. In other words, I don't need anybody or anything to be complete and I have in myself everything that I could ever want. He is Jehovah God, the self-sufficient One. And yet even as He made that revelation, He was doing so to a man whom He had just called and beseeched to go be His mouthpiece to Pharaoh. Jehovah, the One who needs no one else to be complete, yet was revealing that trait in the process of recruiting a human being to speak for Him. Yahweh, the all-sufficient One who is everything within Himself, yet was waiting in a burning bush as He spoke this line, and the all-powerful One who can do all things by His own power, yet was waiting on an ordinary man to catch on fire within as the bush was without. The God who needs nothing and can do all things, yet wanted a man to go into a specific situation and to prepare the way for Him as His mouthpiece to Pharaoh. Make no mistake about it – it was God who spoke the loudest message to Pharaoh and it was God who brought the plagues upon Egypt – yet this God wanted Moses first to go and prepare the way for Him.

I'm drawn to such scenes as this in the scripture because they are so shocking once you get past the familiarity of the story and begin to realize what was really going on. I'm drawn to such scenes because they illustrate very viable, basic truths of God's kingdom that are in effect in our lives today. Nobody has a robe or sandals on today and we are not on some mountain in the Judean wilderness today and the calendar has changed from B.C. To A.D., and yet how God dealt with Moses is still how God deals with us. Oh, you might not have a bush burning and speaking to you and some other minor details might be different, yet the heart of the matter is identical because we find the same scenario played out over and over again throughout all of man's history and God's dealing with it. There is a great God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and self-sufficient who wants to do great things upon earth and in our lives and yet He chooses to work through the very limited and faulty agency of humans. And as such, in many of our lives – as it was with Moses, so it is with us – God is wanting to be active and He's wanting to do the miraculous and He's wanting to rearrange circumstances and even impossible situations, and yet He's waiting on us. And His hands are seemingly tied in our lives as He awaits our reaction, our obedience, or even our answer.

Think of it with me: Could God not have come down and appeared in any image that He liked and that would have commanded Pharaoh's respect? Could not God have assumed temporarily, say, the image of a great Sun Man and marched blazing with fire and glory into Pharaoh's throne room and shook the pyramids with a mighty, “let my people go!”? Of course He could have. And yet note carefully the manner in which God chose to operate: the One to whom all power belongs looks carefully until He finds a man whom He feels that He can entrust with such power and then offers it to him with a commission. In this case, the man is Moses, a murderer-fugitive on the run who is approaching his eightieth birthday and whose mug is on the most-wanted list of Egypt. A man with insecurities, particularly in the area of speech is the one the Omnipotent chooses to be the voicebox of His glory! The man who has been spurned particularly in Egypt is the One God chooses to commission to walk into Pharaoh's palace with the news. And here is God who wants to and who will use great power to set the children of Israel free against seemingly impossible odds and yet He is waiting on this man to believe Him, to believe in Him, to listen to Him, to answer Him, and – most importantly – to act upon what He has said. Jehovah waiting on us!

This is the peculiar way that the Almighty moves upon earth. Could He have not built the ark in a split second command and let it descend to earth in a shower of glory so that everyone would have no doubts as to its origin? Could not the One who said, “let there be light” and suddenly light shone into darkness and who spoke this wonderful world and even the law of gravity into existence just said, “let there be an ark” and the ark appeared? Do you not think that God would have done a better job of it? Don't you think that the tar and pitch job would have been more consistent throughout? He's God, so if He wants to wipe the world out and start over, then that's His business, but what of this method of providing salvation! If you want to save someone, then why not just do it? Why does God look until He finds one man whom He thinks that He can trust and then verbally deliver this strange command with detailed plans? And then we have this portrait of a great God waiting on Noah to finish the thing. And we have no record of God speaking to Noah or doing anything obvious on earth from the time that He spoke Noah the blueprints until after Noah had completed the boat. After Noah had prepared what God had detailed, then God spoke again and then God began to speak to the animals and caused them to come in kinds, two-by-two, and seven-by-sevens. After the drawing had become a reality through man's blood, sweat, and tears in obeying what God had decreed, then God speaks again and tells Noah to get on the ark. We have this portrait of God waiting on a man – for quite some time – and rather than using His awesome power to fulfill it, almost withdrawing His power for a time as man does what has been decreed and then in the end everything changes and we find that now Noah is waiting on God and that's exactly when God speaks and everything begins to move. And from all of this we discover a principle of how God moves: He is waiting on us to get to a place where we are waiting on Him and then He does great and mighty things! God is wanting to work so therefore God is waiting on you and I to get to the place where we are waiting on Him.

We could find this theme in almost every story of the Bible for it is God's modus operandi! He could have prepared a tent of habitation or a temple in heaven and let it descend to the earth could He not? In fact, He will one day do that with a golden city, the New Jerusalem. Yet in the Old Testament, we see God descending upon Mount Sinai in order to give the children of Israel the plan for preparing Him a tabernacle, and then we see God's Spirit distant and waiting on them to get the place ready until they reach the place that they have obeyed His decrees and now God is no longer waiting on them, but they are waiting on God and what happens? The great shekina presence of God descends and fills that place with its glory and splendor and the great presence that shook Sinai now dwells with them in life! It turns out that God was waiting on them to wait on Him!

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Such is the story of John the Baptist and our text. What a waiting game this was and how it flipped back and forth! Of course, John the Baptist was born six months before Christ and thus began His public ministry under the auspices of Mosaic Law six months earlier as His 30th birthday came first. John was the prophesied one who would come in the spirit of Elijah. He was the One who whom Isaiah spoke of that is quoted by Luke saying:

John's ministry was the ministry of preparation, a ministry that is sometimes overlooked in our mind's eye but one that Jesus elevated with His own assessment of John's work. Think of it: John never performed a miracle. His legacy is especially bleak when you compare him to prophets of old. John never prayed for people and had them see the chariots of heaven. John never raised anybody from the dead. Think of comparing him to very prophet whom he was supposed to embody: all of the great miracles that Elijah worked in opposing Jezebel and the evil Ahab. John never called fire down from heaven. John had to hunt out locusts and wild honey to eat and never had a raven bring him bread. John never stopped up the rain or brought it back through prayer. John never outran a chariot. Not one deaf ear was unstopped and not one blinded eye was ever opened in this man's ministry. And yet Jesus' assessment of him was this, “there is none greater than John the Baptist.” Our Lord said, “He was the greatest prophet up to this time.” And though it hurts our minds to fully grasp it and though it goes against every carnal and natural way of thinking, yet John was greater than the others because John's ministry was the ministry of preparation. And by Jesus' own commendation, apparently the greatest work of a prophet, preacher, or saint is to prepare others for God to come and work and do!

John came to “prepare the way of the Lord.” It's deva vu all over again! Here's Jesus who is Jehovah become salvation. This is Emmanuel, God with us. Don't listen to modern opinions that get you fuzzy on the basic facts of Jesus' identity – the gospel writers in these opening pages as in our text are making a very definitive statement of who Jesus is because it was Jesus Christ for whom John was the forerunner and preparing the way for and yet that Isaiah scripture very clearly says “Jehovah.” The Gospel writers knew what they were saying and they all agree on this point: John came to prepare the way for Jehovah and He did that by preparing the way for Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is Jehovah God of the Old Testament come to this earth in flesh! Jesus is none other and none less than the great God of the Old Testament robed in flesh to dwell among men!

But with that revelation comes the realization that it's the same process all over again. For John is being sent to prepare the way for Almighty God. Listen again to Luke's words from our text:

Luke 3:4b-6 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. 5 Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall become straight, and the rough places shall become level ways, 6 and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'" ESV

When John comes on the scene, there has been a whole of nothing, miracle wise, going on among God's people. When John launches his ministry, he inherits a track record of a whole lot of zero that's been happening spiritually in the outwardly manifested promises of God. God's been in flesh on earth for almost thirty years – check that, God's been setting everything up for four hundred years; wait, check that, God's been working for 5,000 years on this plan of redemption and here as John comes on the scene, God is waiting around. God is waiting around, waiting on somebody to speak forth and began to go before His coming and prepare the way. Again, and I know that I'm saying this over and over again, but think of the great marvel it is that the God who has all power, even to be able to overshadow a virgin and have her conceive would even need someone to go before Him at all! And there is only one answer for all of that speculation of why He does this: God doesn't need us, but God chooses to use us. Did you catch that? God doesn't need man's cooperation in theory, but God has chosen to work it this way, to almost limit Himself in most times to this method so that you and I can be a part of what He is doing and come to know Him through it. He doesn't have to need us, but rather He wants to need us. And thus, He often waits on us.

And so here we are: God has come in flesh and wants to launch a great and fantastic ministry like the world has never seen and yet God is waiting on this man to go before Him and prepare the way and to “make His paths straight.” I would think that such a phrase would almost be sacrilegious except that it is in scripture. Is the Lord's ways crooked? No, not as it pertains to Him, but in our lives, often we make His way crooked. What I mean is that our actions have the ability to either facilitate His coming and His moving and His work being done or to shut it up and stop up the flow of the supernatural and blockade the will of God. Our actions and our decisions and our directions and our leanings and our declarations and our desires either help God's Spirit of blessing to flow freely in our lives or it damns it up! You are either preparing the way of the Lord in your life and making His ways straight or you are hindering His ability to work much like a curvy, treacherous road impedes the speed of travelers upon it.

Let me preach to you, today! This same phrase is used elsewhere in scripture by another preacher in an altogether different setting. Listen to this scene from the hand of Luke in recording the ministry of the Apostle Paul:

Acts 13:6-12 When they had gone through the whole island as far as Paphos, they came upon a certain magician, a Jewish false prophet named Bar-Jesus. 7 He was with the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, a man of intelligence, who summoned Barnabas and Saul and sought to hear the word of God. 8 But Elymas the magician (for that is the meaning of his name) opposed them, seeking to turn the proconsul away from the faith. 9 But Saul, who was also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him 10 and said, "You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord? 11 And now, behold, the hand of the Lord is upon you, and you will be blind and unable to see the sun for a time." Immediately mist and darkness fell upon him, and he went about seeking people to lead him by the hand. 12 Then the proconsul believed, when he saw what had occurred, for he was astonished at the teaching of the Lord. ESV