Tag Archives: waiting

Covid-19 Nuggets of Hope, Eschatology, Holiness, Holy Spirit

Nuggets of Hope 18 – Go Buy Oil

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Go Buy Oil.

There are some who would say that this is a great time to buy oil stocks, when prices are at historic lows due to the COVID-19 crisis. That may be good financial advice, but it’s not the focus of this blog. Rather, in the midst of the current crisis, I want to encourage you to buy oil for the lamp of your spirit, while you still have time.

It’s clear from Scripture that before the return of the Lord, pressures will increase in society. The current crisis is not the end of the age, but it is a reminder that God has promised to shake all things prior to the return of the Lord. How we position our hearts is of the utmost importance.

In Matthew 24-25, Jesus is teaching on the end of the age, and he tells a parable to encourage us to keep our lamp of faith burning. The context of the parable is a typical first century Jewish wedding.

In a traditional Jewish wedding, after a year of betrothal during which the bride and groom were to remain separate and sexually pure, the groom would go to the bride’s parent’s home at an undisclosed time, to fetch her, and bring her to his father’s house where a place had been prepared for her. The friends of the bridegroom would await his return. When he returned with his bride, there was a loud shout of rejoicing, and the wedding festivities could begin.

The ten young women in Jesus’ parable were among those awaiting the bridegroom’s return. They were all invited to the wedding festivities but in the end, only five of the ten made it to the feast. It got late, they got sleepy, and five of them ran out of oil for their lamps. While they went to get more oil, the bridegroom came, the wedding feast began, and they missed it. Misty Edwards tells the story in this powerful song.

Jesus describes five of the young women as wise, and five as foolish. The foolish ones didn’t bring extra oil, but the wise ones did. The wise ones wouldn’t share their oil with the foolish ones, because they didn’t want to miss the wedding feast. Jesus doesn’t criticize them for this. In fact, he praises them.

So what has all this got to do with us, you may ask? Plenty. In the midst of this pandemic, it’s easy to get frustrated as we wait for it to be over. But the boredom of waiting is actually a spiritual opportunity which we shouldn’t miss. Jesus has instructed us to stay watchful and spiritually alert as we wait for His return. The key question for us is whether we will stay awake, with our lamps lit, ready for that day. Your lamp of faith and prayer can’t run on someone else’s oil. You have to have your own relationship with God. You can’t borrow someone else’s. The Holy Spirit is available to all believers, but some cultivate His presence in their lives while others run mostly on their own resources. It’s up to us whether we invest in our relationship with God. No-one else can give you their prayer life.

The pandemic will end eventually. Other crises will follow – some bigger, some smaller. Every challenging season that tests our faith is an opportunity to check our oil supply. God is willing to give us all the oil we need, but we have to seek it from Him – and it’s best not to wait for the last minute. If we want to be able to stay steady in challenging times, it’s up to us to develop the stamina we need. If you haven’t been cultivating your life in God, this is a great time for a reset. Right now we still have time to go buy oil for our lamps. Don’t waste the opportunity. One day, it will be too late.

 

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Basic Principles, Covid-19 Nuggets of Hope

Nuggets of Hope 16 – Hidden with Christ

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Waiting.

For those of us whose main assignment is to stay home, the waiting is one of the hardest things about the COVID-19 pandemic.

For many Christians, this pandemic exposes our drive to be rescuers. Surely there’s something we can do! Surely we can fix this! If only we hold enough online prayer meetings, gather enough online worshippers, fast enough, we can turn this thing around.

For the more activist-minded, this can take other forms. If only we can sew enough face masks and disinfect every surface within reach, we can fix this thing.

Of course I believe that God can be in all these activities. I have been blessed many times by online worship, and I have prayed for the online prayer meetings held by others because I believe that God can use them to reach desperate people. And I have great appreciation for anyone who is investing time and energy finding ways to serve – including making face masks. But I have a confession to make. Two confessions, in fact. I haven’t made a single face mask. I also haven’t followed most of the online prayer meetings to which I’ve been invited, as excellent as they no doubt were. If I had, I wouldn’t have been able to keep up. And as I myself have sought the Lord, the direction He has given me is to quiet my soul, to wait on Him, and then do what He shows me to do – which may not be what He has shown someone else to do.

What if that’s the first and most important thing God is asking of all of us, all the time? What if that’s always what He has been asking of us, not only during COVID-19?

Jesus had quite a lot to say about this. He said that He could do only what He saw His Father doing. And in case anyone should think that method of operating only applied to Him, He also had this to say.

My sheep listen to my voice;
I know them, and they follow me.
John 10:27

What was Jesus doing between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday? We know that His Spirit wasn’t dead, because of what He told the repentant thief. In the midst of his own agony, Jesus promised this broken man,

Truly, I say to you,
today you will be with Me in Paradise.
Luke 23:43

He was waiting. He was waiting in a good place, in a heavenly place, but He was waiting until the time set by His Father, when the three days would be fulfilled. The grave was still sealed. His body was still in the grave, awaiting its resurrection. And even after His resurrection, and the outpouring of the Spirit, He is again waiting for another time that has been set by His Father, when He will return for His Bride.

The same thing applies to every believer in this age. We are waiting. We aren’t just waiting to go to heaven. As wonderful as heaven is, it’s not our final destination. We are waiting for all things to be made new.

For you have died,
and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 
When Christ who is your life appears,
then you also will appear with him in glory.
Colossians 3:3-4

In the same vein the Apostle John assures us,

Beloved, we are God’s children now,
and what we will be
has not yet appeared;
but we know that when he appears
we shall be like him,
because we shall see him as he is.
1 John 3:2

Our flesh – our old nature – doesn’t like to have to wait for things. We like everything to happen right away. But in the rhythm of Easter weekend, there is a pause between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday that mirrors, in a small way, the long extended pause in which we currently find ourselves, between the Day of Pentecost and the Day of the Lord. We have hope, we know Jesus is alive, we know He is with us, but we are still waiting.

All of us are waiting eagerly for the COVID-19 pandemic to be over. That will be a day of great rejoicing, but those who belong to Jesus are awaiting something far better. We are waiting for the redemption of our own bodies, and we are waiting for the restoration of all things. We are waiting with hearts full of hope, because we have a promise. We are promised that when we see Him, we shall be like Him.

O Happy Day!

 

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Basic Principles, Eschatology, Faith and Finances, Intimacy with God, Reflections on Life

Why we wait

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Many of you know that my last IT consulting contract ended almost three months ago. Since then, Marion, Bethany and I have been living on reserves, and I have been waiting on the Lord for new work.

There have been several “near misses” in this process. There were a couple of contracts that I could have had, but turned down. Others, however, seemed attractive to me. I was confident that I could have done the work, and I wanted to win the bid, but it went to someone else. Since no circumstance in my life is outside of God’s control, and I have been actively and intentionally submitting this whole process to Him, I can only assume that the delay is part of God’s provision.

Let me be clear. My family and I have been in no real financial distress during this time. The wrestle for me has not been about managing finances, but about trusting God’s promises and fully co-operating with His purposes. A little over a year ago I received a major prophetic word while visiting International House of Prayer. Part of the word was that I would be like Joseph, a financial storehouse for others. So, my rational mind tells me that it is not helping me achieve this goal to see my reserves get eaten away by a three-month hiatus in work.  But sometimes God allows us to go through a season where our circumstances seem to contradict the word we have been given. This is not a bad thing. In fact, waiting for God’s promise is a necessary process. It’s part of how God builds faith. He is the one who will fulfil the word, and He will do it in His way. My part is to be a man of faith, to act on the word I have been given.

There are preachers and teachers who would like you to believe that faith means expecting all your hopes to be fulfilled in this life, in this age, without any delay. That may be what our human nature would like to believe, and it may be how Hollywood celebrities like to live their lives, but it’s not what the Bible teaches and it’s not true to the experience of God’s people, past or present.

Yes, it is true that when Jesus healed people, he didn’t make them wait. He healed them on the spot, no delay. But it’s also true that Jesus himself had to wait for his most important desires to be fulfilled (see Luke 12:49 for one example of this).  He knows what it is like to long for something that is coming, but is not here yet. Jesus longs for his wedding day – the great day when he returns to claim the earth as His own, wed his Bride, banish evil and establish his throne openly. But he is waiting for the Day appointed by his Father (Matthew 24:36).

The other day I saw a video clip produced by Voice of the Martyrs in Nigeria. That beautiful, fertile, potentially prosperous yet troubled land is increasingly being plagued by the scourge of militant Islam. Boko Haram, a jihadist group that has already killed hundreds of Christians in the northern part of Nigeria, is now threatening to start attacking the mostly-Christian south as well, using methods such as food poisoning. Their declared goal is to turn Nigeria into an Islamist state by killing all the Christians in Nigeria who refuse to convert to Islam (there are over 80 million Christians in Nigeria, about half the population of the country).

The video clip showed numerous heart-wrenching examples of the suffering of Christians in the areas where Boko Haram’s campaign of terror has already been unleashed. But it also showed signs of hope. VOM has been standing with the church in Nigeria, providing help to displaced persons and the families of martyrs so that they can rebuild their lives. I was struck by the determination of Christian leaders in Nigeria not to give in to intimidation. One of the leaders interviewed on the video clip declared that the reason for the campaign of terror is that Christianity has been growing through evangelism in the mostly-Muslim north, and Muslim leaders are afraid of losing control, so they resort to fear tactics.

Why does God allow such things? Because the Day of the Lord is not yet here. In the meantime, we have an opportunity to testify to Jesus’ death and resurrection, and invite people to put their hope in Him. For those with eyes to see, there are signs of the Kingdom everywhere – but there is also great suffering in many places. This is nothing new or strange; in fact Jesus predicted it. The battle between darkness and light will not be resolved until Jesus returns.

In the meantime, in both easy and difficult times, we live in hope. God is calling us to be a pure bride, free of mixed motives, with our eyes fixed on our bridegroom who is surely coming. If we are in a season of peace and prosperity, we thank God for it, and seek to use it for His glory (a real challenge in a culture that constantly tempts us with immediate self-gratification in myriad guises). If we are in a season of adversity, we place our hope in Him and seek the grace to remain faithful. David advises us not to fret in such times, for “better is the little that the righteous has, than the abundance of many wicked” (Psalm 37:16). Even in adversity, like Elijah with the ravens, God’s people can expect provision as they exercise intentional faith. At all times, we place our hope in the One who is coming to make all things new.

Would I prefer to prosper while I wait? Of course – who wouldn’t? But there are seasons of plenty and seasons of adversity, and in both, God is faithful. I believe that God will bring to fruition the word I was given about being a storehouse. I want that with all my heart, because I believe it’s part of God’s destiny and purpose for me. But I also realize that the waiting is part of God’s preparation. He wants my hope, my security and my desires to be fixed on Him, not on specific outcomes that I (fool that I am) imagine I can control.

Why do we wait? Because we serve a God of hope – a God of resurrection – a God who is bigger than we are, and who will fulfil His promises in His way and in His time. We serve a God who is faithful when we have plenty, who is faithful when we suffer loss, who is faithful even when His people are being murdered for their faith. At all times He is good.

I’m glad I’m not in control.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

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