Hope for the Wait

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

I'm Liz.

It's my first time here.

I am a mom, so I should probably on Mother's Day introduce you to my family, put up a slide with their cute pictures.

I'm just not gonna do that.

So uh instead, I'm gonna tell you a story that makes me sound slightly sportier than I actually am.

And then we're gonna get into the Bible together.

We're gonna get real honest and get to know each other real well.

And then at the end, what I'm hoping for, what I've been praying for, is that we will all leave this place with a good, solid reason to walk out those doors with more hope than we walked in them.

Does that sound good?

Okay, then let's let's go.

Um, okay, so a couple years ago, for my birthday, my husband and I left our kids at home and we decided to hike Hafdome.

It's a California tradition.

Uh, we had both done it before, but we hadn't done it together.

We woke up at 2 a.m.

in the pitch wilderness dark to set out on this hike with nothing but headlamps and the moonlight to guide us.

And as the sun rose, this is what I saw.

Now it had been years since I'd done the hike before, but I realized we were wildly ahead of schedule.

We must not have realized how incredibly quick we were hiking in the dark until the path, instead of going towards the peak, took a sharp right turn, went downhill the opposite direction, and I realized we had basically just started.

Actually, the trail winds way around and comes up the other side.

And I don't know if you've ever done half dome.

Um, and maybe it's been a while, maybe you know exactly where this part of the trail is.

Um, but even if you haven't, I wonder if you know exactly where this trail is.

When you come up to the goal that you'd been waiting for, and it is right in front of you, and suddenly life sweeps you off in the opposite direction of where you wanted to go, and you realize that the wait ahead of you is going to be longer than you've mentally prepared yourself for, maybe going a completely different direction than you had set out in.

When that person who you were sure was the one wasn't, when that job interview that you'd gotten to the final round in and had really let yourself get way too excited about just didn't work out.

When you went in to the doctors for a little headache and found yourself waiting for test results, we've all been swept off our feet.

And even if you haven't experienced that kind of wait in your life, we all spend a good chunk of our time waiting.

We're all gonna wait sooner or later.

Maybe you're more of a if only waiter.

If only I was out of debt, then if only I had my person then.

If only I could take this step in my career, then and it feels like your real life is on the other side of this weight that you're stuck in, and it's easy to get stuck.

I was talking with a friend of mine recently who is waiting to find the right person, and she's done the math.

She knows that not everyone gets married, she knows that even fewer people are happily married.

And when she looks around her, she doesn't see a lot of options, and she's come to the point where I've come to many times in my life before where you realize that God never promised to give us what we want.

He doesn't owe us anything.

So, how do we sit in a wait when we don't actually know if we're really waiting for something?

Like it's waiting in line is hard enough, but you know that the line is going somewhere.

Waiting in the wilderness is really hard because you don't know quite exactly where we're going.

I I can tell you that there's two things that I have tried to do to make waiting easier for myself.

I can also tell you uh that neither of them work at all.

Um, but maybe you've tried them too.

The first one is to try to hope more, just to really try to hope for this thing more, to plan, to aim, to line yourself up, to move towards that direction, to do whatever you can and pray and try.

And somehow when we do this, we end up tying our hope around a thing, a person.

But it's really actually a fantasy.

It's something that doesn't even exist yet.

And unfortunately, false hopes that aren't tethered to any reality, they crash and burn every time.

And they're confusing and painful when they do.

But maybe you've done that before and you've been burned, and then you might be tempted to do the other thing.

Or at least that's where I ended up was actually hoping less.

Deciding that maybe if I just didn't care as much, maybe if I just gave up.

At first, it kind of looks like trusting God, like, hey God, whatever you're gonna do, I'm gonna be happy with.

And choosing to live a hopeless life is not what God called us to do.

There is a third way.

And if we do, we will find ourselves if we can if we can leave this lurching path of Yosemite and make our way to Mount Carmel, we will find ourselves with Elijah, who is in actually the same boat.

Um, if you turn in your Bibles on your phones, or if you have it with you, to 1 Kings 18, we're gonna drop into the middle of a story.

And I'm just gonna catch you up because it may be a while since you turned your pages to this part of the Bible, or maybe this is all new to you.

But Elijah was a prophet, which means he was a messenger between God and humans.

And uh he um told the king of Israel, it is not gonna rain until I say so.

Because the king and queen were incredibly evil at this time.

And the the hope was that God's people would recognize we have completely taken for granted the way that God is providing for us.

And if that goes away, we will realize that all of it was because of God and we'll come back to him.

That didn't happen.

But even though that didn't happen, even though the land lived in drought for three and a half years without ever turning back to God, God came back to his people.

In fact, um, where we come, we're just coming to the tail end of where on this very mountain, Mount Carmel, Elijah called down fire from heaven and it came.

And God showed up.

And if there is any time in Elijah's life that he could have been tempted to hope more, to just assume that God is on his side, everything is working out, it's all good, God's gonna take care of it, and have positive thinking that this drought is as good as over.

Now is the time when he could have done that.

He also could have just said, like, hey, man, God just showed up in such a big way, and these people should be happy for it because they'd never even held up their end of the bargain.

He doesn't owe us anything more.

He's gonna do what he's gonna do, and we're gonna be grateful for it.

But he doesn't hope less either.

He chooses a third way.

If you'd look at 1 Kings 18, 42, Ahab went to eat and drink, but Elijah went up to the summit of Carmel.

He bent down on the ground and he put his face between his knees.

Elijah prayed.

We're gonna move through this section of scripture and find these tracks uh that will form the soundtrack of how Elijah models waiting for us.

And I wonder if it will resonate with you the same way that it has with me.

It's really unclear as Elijah prays, whether he had some word from God that there was gonna be rain that the narrator doesn't tell us about, or if he didn't at all.

But either way, he's praying.

The biggest clue that we have to what's going on here is actually in James 5, in verse 17 and 18, it says that Elijah was a human being as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it wouldn't rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the land.

Then he prayed again, and the sky gave rain, and the land produced its fruit.

And the inescapable truth is that Elijah was human just like we are.

And James is telling the early church that it's not just the big fancy people who get their prayers answered.

God hears all of our prayers, and believe it or not, our little human prayers can move heaven and earth.

Not because of how good we pray, but because the God who we're praying to.

And here's the deal: I I used to be overly optimistic about this.

And and then I thought that when the prayers didn't happen and the miracles didn't explode everywhere, that I was doing it wrong.

But prayer changes everything.

And it starts with us.

I have found that prayer isn't just the fastest way to get what you want.

In fact, it rarely is, but it is one of the fastest ways that I can get on alone.

Because God is with us, but it doesn't always feel that way.

And man, there is something deeply lonely about being stuck in a wait.

When we pray and invite God into our wait, when we invite him into our tension and everything that's going on, our unmet desires, our fears, that is an incredibly intimate place for us to be with God.

I um I was once in a wait, and um it felt to me like I was sitting on a bench in a sports game and just watching everyone else play.

Now, bear with me because I am the last person who should be allowed to use a sports analogy up here.

And I will probably get this wrong, but just roll with it.

Um I it just sort of felt like somehow I was on this bench and I'm just watching everyone else on the court or field or whatever do their thing.

And there's some people who I am genuinely cheering for.

And I'm watching some people mess up, and I'm just dying to get in the game, and I don't understand why I am stuck on this bench.

And there are lies that I believe on this bench, that somehow I'm not good enough to be in the game, or somehow the coach is holding me back because he doesn't trust me, or I can't keep up with the other players.

I think as I was holding this image and sitting in it, one of the things that I realized is that in those seasons when we feel like we are stuck on the bench, we are sitting right next to the coach.

That's where he is.

He's on the sidelines, in the dugout, other sports word, other sports word.

And like that's when we are closest to our coach.

And sometimes the reason that we're on the bench, it's not because we're not good enough.

It's not because the coach didn't like what we had to offer in practice last week.

It could be that the coach is inviting us to that space.

And he wants us to rest because he's planning to send us in at the end, and he knows what we can do on a full tank.

It could be that he's inviting us to sit on this bench because we're close to him and he's got this clipboard with crazy stuff written on it.

And he is watching a totally different game than we are watching when we're on the field.

And he's inviting us to see the game in a different way, to see things the way that he sees things, in a way that we can't see when we're so busy and wrapped up and in the middle of it, but we can when we step back and spend time with him.

There's a million reasons why it's important to spend time on the bench.

But how would it change the way that we felt if instead of being stuck there and held back, if we were invited there, and we were with our coach who didn't need us to be winning, to be proud of us.

And we wouldn't even really know that unless we spent this time here.

The truth is that sometimes we want to shortcut our weight because waiting is not fun and it's not easy.

So we don't realize that even if we can shortcut it, even if we do, we are shortcutting ourselves from things that we don't even realize.

Let's uh we are never as alone as we feel when we're waiting.

When we pray, we realize that God is with us and we are with Him.

But also it's a unique environment, a unique opportunity for us to invite others into our wait.

It feels very, very vulnerable to let other people know that we're waiting for something, to let them see us in our not yet place.

But there was a couple years ago a friend of mine who got into Harvard and he announced it at a dinner.

And I think he expected all of us to say, congratulations, you're amazing.

But I was furious.

Because here's the thing: I don't know a lot about business school, but I'm pretty sure they don't just call you and say, Hey, you're in.

He had to fill out an application, he had to decide he wanted to go.

And I just thought, I cannot believe that he did not trust us to wait with him.

That he was more interested in impressing us with what he had done than in inviting us to hold this with him, even if it ended up being in disappointment.

Because disappointment is heavy and it's not meant to be held alone.

When we pray and we invite God into our weight and we invite others to pray with us and invite them into our weight, things are already changing because we're no longer alone.

If we keep reading in um in verse 43, Elijah is praying, and so what is happening?

Well, he says to his servant, go up and look towards the sea.

So he went up and looked, and he said, There's nothing.

Elijah is praying on his knees with his face pressed to the ground.

And he sends his servant to go look at the horizon and see if God is sending rain.

And the servant comes back and says, There's nothing.

I don't know how many times I've looked at the horizon and seen nothing.

There's no houses I can afford, there's no people who look like they're gonna be my best friend, there's no jobs that are the right fit for my weird background.

There's nothing.

And this posture that Elijah has is not just one of humility and supplication, but if we look at other places in the Bible, being down on the ground with your head to the to the floor, it's also a posture of grief.

Because sometimes the reason that we look and we see nothing is because there's a giant hole left by what used to be there.

And sometimes waiting is what we experience on the other end of loss and grief.

And we're forced to be in this space where life is never going.

Going to be the same.

And we talk about drought all the time in California.

But back when this drought happened, the economy and the access was totally different.

This drought was devastating.

The crops weren't growing.

People didn't have water.

Terrible things were happening.

People died.

And even if the rain came, it wasn't going to get rid of all of that loss, of all of that pain.

It wasn't going to bring anything back.

And one of the ways that when we when we wait and if we spend that time in prayer, like grief is often a part of it.

Whether that's being angry or lamenting or just holding the pain.

God is so much more comfortable with our pain than we are.

He can hold that and he can hold us even when there's nothing.

But here's the truth about nothing.

It's actually never nothing.

We can feel like we are in the pitch dark and there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

All it is is darkness.

But when nothing is happening, something big is usually happening.

It's like if you were a seed and you were in the dirt, all you would know was complete darkness, and you may not perceive the amount of nutrition that was soaking into you, the imperceptible ways that you were growing, or the fact that there is a gardener on top of that soil who is tenderly taking care of you to bring you back to new life one slow step at a time.

And sometimes God's time feels slow.

If we keep reading in verse 43, it says that seven times Elijah said, Go back.

Seven is the number of perfection in the Bible.

And so as he is on the floor and and he is sending his servant to look and see if God is doing anything, and all that there is is nothing.

Some of us have prayed and we've looked and there was nothing and we gave up.

Or we waited and there was nothing twice and then we gave up.

What have you given up talking to God for?

Because you waited and prayer didn't work.

Seven times Elijah sends his servant back.

Seven times because God's timing is perfect, and it's very rarely ours.

If there's something that you have stopped talking to God about that you have given up hope for, I would just encourage you to go back and look again.

I did that with some friends of mine earlier, and one of the sections invites us to pray about something that we stopped praying about.

And um, and one of the women in the group started praying for something that she had completely given up for.

And two months later, after our Bible study had ended, she texted a picture to our group.

And the little seedlings of new hope and new life in this area that had felt totally dead, that she'd utterly given up on, they were coming back to life.

It was so amazing to celebrate that with her.

Keep praying.

Go back and look again.

Maybe it's not that your prayers didn't work.

Maybe it just wasn't time yet.

If we keep reading, it says that on the seventh time the servant reported, there's a cloud as small as a man's hand coming up from the sea.

And then Elijah said, Go and tell Ahab, get your chariot ready and go down so that the rain doesn't stop you.

Before it started raining, the king needed to move.

They're in the desert, and this sand is about to turn into a giant mud pit.

And there are times that you need to make a move before you're ready or before you're sure.

Because the rain is coming.

Are you allowing yourself to be so stuck in your weight now that even if you get what you want, you're gonna be stuck still?

There might be ways that God is inviting you to get ready.

The truth is that the thing that we're waiting for has so much power in our lives.

More than we consciously realize that it has.

When nothing is happening, something is happening.

Your right now is not forever.

And lastly, God's imagination is so much bigger than ours.

Ephesians 3, 20 through 21 says, Now to him who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think or imagine, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever.

Amen.

Because hope, hope is not a dream that something will happen.

Hope is the anticipation that there is good in our future.

And I know that no matter what I am waiting for, of the infinite futures that could possibly be what's next, I know that there is not a single one of those futures where God does not exist.

I know that there is not a single one of those futures, even in disappointment or grief or loss, where God's goodness cannot find me.

And that is the hope that Elijah leads us towards as he prays.

That is the hope that we're invited to remind ourselves in and settle in as we pray and invite God and invite others into our wait.

There's another prayer that I've borrowed while waiting.

Sometimes when I'm in the thick of my own wait, it's hard to come up with my own words to pray.

And I love to borrow this prayer from Henri Nowen.

The mean time can be such a mean time.

And so I hope that we can close by praying this prayer together.

I'm gonna pray it aloud once over us, and then I want to leave some space for you to pray it or your own version of what it would look like right now to invite God in to the place where you're feeling stuck, to the thing that your heart most wants and doesn't know if you'll ever have, to the thing that you're not sure if you'll be okay without.

And see if we can receive from God some hope while we wait.

And then as after we close, the band is gonna come up and sing a blessing over us.

I would just encourage you to receive what is being sung over you and also to sing loudly over those around you because there's plenty of us who just need to be unalone today.

Let's pray.

Dear God, I want so much to be in control.

I want to be the master of my own destiny.

Still, I know that you are saying, let me take you by the hand and lead you.

Accept my love and trust that where I will bring you, the deepest desires of your heart will be fulfilled.

Lord, open my hands to receive your gift of love.

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