The Other Six Podcast Episode 170: The Art of Biblical Waiting

``Knowing God doesn't mean that things are gonna be good. Knowing God means that things will turn out good. Mhmm. Knowing God doesn't mean that things are gonna be easy, but knowing God does mean that that you will never be alone in it. That's that's the deal. And if and if what your relationship with God entails is circumstances must change or it's not acceptable to you, then you're not walking with God, you're walking with yourself. The God who knows all and sees all and loves you more than anyone loves you, his ways are better, his plan is better, his grace is greater than anything and the reality is it is the voice of faith, yet though he slay me, I will trust in him because if he slays you, you will rise again. [00:51:53] (42 seconds)  #TrustThroughTrials

When you're in baseball and you're taught to play defense, the first thing you're taught is the ready position. You don't just stand there with your hands just hanging at your side. You get in the ready position. Prep. Meaning, when the ball is pitched, you're ready, it could come your way. Right. You're waiting, how are you waiting? You're waiting ready. So it's an active waiting, you're not just standing there looking around, if you hear the crack of the ball, look and see and make sure. You don't do that, you posture yourself. [00:19:42] (27 seconds)  #ActiveWaitingReady

The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him and he makes known to them his covenant. It's this idea of close friendship with God, bound together by commitment, covenant loyalty, and it flows from God to us and we return it, albeit imperfectly, but yet we benefit from the God who never lets us go. That's what we've been saying is this covenant love is referred to as Chesed in the Hebrew or loving kindness or steadfast love. So what does God bind to us? He binds his love to us. [00:13:58] (33 seconds)  #ChesedCovenantLove

Jesus brings to us the new covenant, the ultimate covenant, the final covenant whereby he does all the work and heavy lifting and we are attached to him so we benefit from his righteous standing before the father. We become adopted children into the family of God by way of covenant. So we don't talk about covenant, but yet the Psalms drive the old covenant language so strongly that if you don't catch it, you just kinda read over names like Lord. You wouldn't see that that is Yahweh, it's the covenant keeping name of God. [00:12:00] (31 seconds)  #AdoptedInChrist

You don't get out of verse one without getting most of what you need from the Psalm. Mhmm. To you, oh Lord, I lift up my soul. You go, okay, that's cool. And you read on and go, wow, that's a lot of crap. Yeah. In the middle of all that crap, lift up your soul to God. You're gonna lift up your soul to something. Often, we'll lift up our soul to whatever makes the problem go away or we lift up our soul to whatever makes the pain go away or we lift up our soul to pretty much anything that solves it. And Dave is like, no, I'm gonna wait on God. No, I'm gonna trust in God. He's committed himself to his covenant. I'm gonna sit right here in the posture of a of a person trusting God. I mean, friendship with God means that you're never alone in a broken world and that's what David learned. [00:42:11] (38 seconds)  #WaitOnGodTrust

The fear of the Lord so I think it's the proper posture of the creature before the creator. Mhmm. When you recognize I'm not God, I didn't make all this, this is what Job encountered at the end of Job. God's like, where are you? When I made all that was the fear of the Lord. You were a creature before the Creator going, wow, yes, you made it all, I'm not God, you're God and I recognize, I love what Job says, he's like, I heard of you before, now I see you with my eyes, I cover my mouth and I'm in dust. Right. [00:34:08] (28 seconds)  #ReverentFearOfGod

in the midst of a lot of what David mentioned. You know, you've got loneliness or maybe maybe even guilt. Maybe you've got sins of your youth and you feel like they're too big. You can't undo them, you can't fix it. What was done is done. Or maybe just a lot of uncertainty, you're tired of uncertainty, wish you had more certainty. Right. Or maybe you have literal enemies, you know, people who are just trolling you or against you or throwing bombs at you or whatever's going on. All of that is the fodder. All of that is the context for friendship with God. Mhmm. And that's the beauty part is God wants you know, I I said it earlier, friendship with God means you're never alone in this broken world. Mhmm. [00:51:15] (38 seconds)  #NeverAloneInBrokenness

Everybody wants a resurrection life but nobody wants death. Mhmm. And you gotta go through death to get the resurrection. Mhmm. And so our God is the God who walks us through a broken world and we would rather not have the valley of the shadow of death but this is the world in which we live. Right. And God is faithful to his covenant and we can hang on it. We can hang on to the God who's always hanging on to us. That's what Dave is doing. Mhmm. Love it. So good. And you we talk about covenants and, you know, one of the [00:52:54] (28 seconds)  #ThroughDeathToResurrection

isn't like the sense of shame. Mhmm. It's the shame of being defeated. Right. Of ultimately losing. And it's like, none who wait will lose. You don't lose by waiting. Right. There is no defeat in waiting. Right. But there is defeat in taking matters into your own hands and trying to manipulate and cause things to happen. So so here's David, he's going he's got enemies abounding, he's got internal and external strife all about and he's gonna wait. He's gonna wait. That's what faith looks like. Faith waits, faith waits. So we talked about what does trusting God look like? It looks like trusting God's timing. And if you can't trust God's timing, [00:25:09] (35 seconds)  #NoDefeatInWaiting

that we might be made righteous with his righteousness. I mean, you gotta let that sink in and if you do, then you start doing what David does, you start realizing, wow, I don't have to obsess over the sins of my youth. Right. They're there in my head but not in God's. So I can shift over and just really honestly, just fall scandalously in love with Jesus. Just fall scandalously in love with the God who is a God of mercy, his kindness is meant to lead us to repentance. Mhmm. The turning away is not because he's smacking our hand, it's because he's inviting us to something greater and deeper with him. Yeah. You know, so so often that's that's beautiful what you said. But so often, think I our society [00:30:46] (43 seconds)  #FallInLoveWithJesus

The thing is we don't realize that those are mutually exclusive. Right. The fear of the Lord is an exclusive reality and the fear of man is an exclusive reality. It's choose one lose the other. Right. And if you're gonna say, I want the fear of the Lord, that has to apply in those scenarios where you are tempted to be swayed by fear of disappointing other people or fear of not being approved by other people or fear of not fitting in or I mean, you name it. And I don't know if it could seem more practical than that. It's choosing to fear the Lord in a reverent submissive way in the midst of situations where the sway to appease others or be approved by others is strong. Mhmm. Yeah. Mhmm. And I think probably too leading to our next question, David's circumstances [00:39:10] (50 seconds)  #FearGodNotMan

God is God and I'm not. That's what fear of the Lord sounds like and it should reorganize your life. Fear of God should reorder the way you love things. It should reorder the way you do your loyalties in this world because you will give an account. Right. Because you're not God. So telling God what to do gets that kind of backwards, right? Yeah. So every time you see like I always love, we talk about this all the time. When you read through the bible, I like to draw symbols for things. This year, one of the things I'm tracing is every time a person falls down before God or an angel or in reverend, you know, respect in any way. Every time there's someone bowing down, I'll draw two like a opposite chevron, two arrows pointing down like just down. It's all over the place. Mhmm. And by the way, every time an angel shows up, it's in spades. Mhmm. Because there's this sense of the presence of the holy and you just go right to the ground. Mhmm. That's not necessarily like, you know, I'm a mouse and God's a cat and he's gonna destroy But [00:35:52] (61 seconds)  #BowBeforeGod

we're like Americans go, I should have a right to have a relationship with God. God's like, no, I set the terms. I tell you what it means to be my children, you say yes and then we bind ourselves in a covenant, right? So covenant relationship, that's what God offers to us. And we don't think that way very often and so we kinda get lost in the mix on the idea of walking with God is not based on our commitment to God, it's based on God's commitment to us. Right. He's a covenant making God. I will be your God, you will be my people. And so [00:11:29] (31 seconds)  #GodSetsTheTerms

God doesn't just relate generally with people, to relate with God is to say yes to his his construct of how to relate with him. God relates with us by way of covenant. Mhmm. So a covenant is the idea of binding yourself to another person. It's kind of the root ideas to bind together. Right. So we are alienated from God. God wants to relate with us, so he does it via covenant. So he offers to be our God and we can be his people, but we have to say yes to the terms of the covenant. So basically, [00:10:59] (30 seconds)  #SayYesToCovenant

performance doesn't keep him before God, he is kept by a God who so God's ability to keep his promises is greater than our ability to keep our own. Yeah. So so David hangs on that and he clings to that and he uses the covenant language all throughout to just constantly be the reminder, I'm hanging on to you hanging on to me. I'm not hanging on to you, you're hanging on to me. Right. I'm just hanging on to the Lord who's hanging on to me. That's what David's doing and so we see it all throughout the Psalm, particularly Psalm 25 [00:13:30] (27 seconds)  #HangOnToGod

That's right. And that's what biblical waiting is, a posturing of the self for what what God's gonna do. And there's a whole bunch of things. The Psalm lists, I mean, my goodness, so many different things. What is active waiting? It's praying, that's what David's doing. Mhmm. He's seeking God, he's asking, he's making requests. I mean, that's one of them. He's looking to God, he lifts up his soul to God. In fact, he's trusting, he's not panicking. Right. He's getting strength from God, he says it right in the Psalm himself. And then he he in verse 10, he's like, I will obey what you've told me until you do something. So there's so much activity that happens in waiting that we don't typically imagine. We don't just stand there [00:20:08] (40 seconds)  #PrayWhileYouWait

people who grow up in church world are taught to be more aware of their sin than God's goodness. Mhmm. That's a problem. Mhmm. Mhmm. That's a problem because this Psalm is is outweighing human sin by God's goodness. It's the mercy and the goodness of God that weighs more than our sin. But for some reason, I think it's a desire to to make much of the cross that we make much of our sin inadvertently, and we make our sin weigh so much more that the goodness of God is just outweighed by our sins, and that's problematic. That's highly problematic. I also wonder if that's a little bit of a artifact of like the medieval church and so so much of the culture from back in the day that that's where the focus was. Mhmm. You know, just [00:26:33] (46 seconds)  #FocusOnGodsGoodness

because he mentions the sins of his youth, so he's not a youth. Right. Most scholars would agree David is running on the run from Absalom. It's during Absalom's rebellion when he wrote this psalm. So he's away from everything, he's away from his palace, he's away from his throne, he's away from all these things but he still has his authority and so instead of David has the ability to command armies and instead of commanding armies to fix his problem, he decides a different route, he decides to wait on God. So basically what's happening is David as the king realizes that he has to submit to God as king. He [00:16:56] (37 seconds)  #SubmitToGodsKingship

He wrote a great book, a bunch of them, but one of them is called seven things I wish Christians knew about the bible. Yeah. Great book. And in the book, he summarizes he he he defines faith in covenantal terms. He says faith means entrusting ourselves to the faithfulness of God in Jesus Christ. That's covenant language. I love that. Faith isn't believing things about God, it's entrusting your own self to God to be faithful to what he claimed he was gonna do in Jesus. That's that's faith. So that is so much bigger than believing right information Right. About God. It's just way bigger than that. So the covenant language in all the Psalms is really rich but Psalm 25 is really Mhmm. Woven all [00:15:31] (74 seconds)  #FaithIsEntrustment

He binds his loyalty to us, not because of us, but because of him. So in his steadfast love, he binds a commitment to us that he will always perform his end of the covenant. And David's like, I can count on that. So in his uncertainty and all the issues and emotions he's going through in Psalm 25, he's counting on God to be God when he knows that on his end of it, he's not not doing great. So Yeah. It it reminds me a little bit of what we talked about in week one. You know, mercy and goodness will follow me all the days of my life. Yeah. I was actually at a funeral one time where [00:14:31] (30 seconds)  #BoundBySteadfastLove