Are You Impatient with God?

Are you impatient? Are you even impatient with God? After all, we believe our own prayers should be answered instantly. When they are not, we begin to grumble with impatience. Our culture is addicted to instant gratification. We expect immediate answers to our problems. We do not like to wait for anything.

According to Isaiah, “Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:30-31, ESV)

Matthew Henry writes of this verse: “They shall walk, they shall run, the way of God’s commandments, cheerfully and with alacrity (they shall not be weary), constantly and with perseverance (they shall not faint); and therefore in due season they shall reap. Let Jacob and Israel therefore, in their greatest distresses, continue waiting upon God, and not despair of timely and effectual relief and succor from him.”

Waiting requires submission to God’s Word and God’s Will. We are in His service, not He in ours. Complaining and impatience are contrary to God’s work in us. Our obsession with self results in weariness. Waiting on God, however, results in a thriving spirit – “renewed strength.” Divine power overshadows our weakness as we “wait for the Lord.”

Waiting on the Lord requires trust and self-discipline. Our own powers are insufficient to carry out God’s plan and purpose. Paul writes, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:9-10, ESV) Self-sufficiency must be put aside in order to receive the overcoming strength of our Lord.

Charles Spurgeon writes, “If the Lord Jehovah makes us wait, let us do so with our whole hearts; for blessed are all they that wait for Him. He is worth waiting for. The waiting itself is beneficial to us: it tries faith, exercises patience, trains submission, and endears the blessing when it comes. The Lord’s people have always been a waiting people.” In other words, waiting on the Lord enables us to become what God wants us to be.