Faithfulness - Day 4

I will stand my watch and set myself on the rampart.

How steadily all through the Old and New Testament God calls us to stand on the watch and wait for His indications, and how often God’s answers to our prayers have been squandered because we do not watch and wait.  Are you throughly perplexed over God’s way?  Are you unable to reconcile God’s clear way as revealed in His book with the way He is leading you?  Take the line of this prophet during his perplexity.  Stand and watch to see what God will say –watch in the right place.

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The first thing to remember is to watch at the right place, the place where God has put us.  Watch, that is, for God’s answer to our prayers, and not only watch, but wait...The meaning of waiting in both the Old and New Testament is “standing under,” actively enduring.  It is not standing with folded arms doing nothing.  It is not saying, “In God’s good time it will come to pass.”  By that we often mean, “In my abominably lazy time I let God work.”  Waiting means standing under, an active strength, enduring till the answer comes.

We must never make the blunder of trying to forecast the way God is going to answer our prayer.  When God made a tremendous promise to Abraham, Abraham thought of the best way to help God ... But God refused to speak to him for thirteen years, until every possibility of his relying on his own intelligent understanding was at an end.  Then Go came to him and said, “I am Almighty God” ... 

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I do not think we have enough of the wondering spirit that the Holy Spirit gives.  It is the child-spirit...When through Jesus Christ we are rightly related to God, we learn to watch and wait, and wait wonderingly.  “I wonder how God will answer this prayer.”  “I wonder how God will answer the prayer the Holy Spirit is praying in me.”  “I wonder what glory God will bring to Himself out of the strange perplexities I am in.”  “I wonder what new turn His providence will take in manifesting Himself in my ways.” ... I wonder how many of us have been getting our ideas and convictions and notions twisted.  Thank God for the confusion if it is going to drive us straight to the watchtower with God.  There our doctrines and creeds are going to be God’s, not doctrines and creeds out of God’s Book twisted to suit our preconceived ideas, but the doctrines of God woven into the flesh and blood tissues of our lives by the indwelling Holy Spirit–watching, waiting, wondering and witnessing.

(Oswald Chambers, If You Will Ask, Reflections on the Power of Prayer)