Psalm 27:14

14 Wait for the Lord; Be strong and let your heart take courage; Yes, wait for the Lord.

My friend sat across from me with the weight of leadership pressing down on his shoulders. He’d been praying. The church leadership had been praying. They’d sought God’s direction earnestly and honestly on several important decisions facing their congregation. But God hadn’t answered. Not clearly. Not in the way they expected. Some leaders felt God was calling them in one direction while others sensed a different leading. The discernment wasn’t unified and God’s clarity wasn’t coming. So they made a decision. Since God wasn’t giving them a clear answer, they would move forward anyway. The projects sounded good. Surely God would bless good intentions and good works, even without explicit direction. They moved forward in faith, they told themselves. But what followed wasn’t blessing. What followed was frustration, tension and division. The very things they’d hoped to avoid. This situation reminded me of a question that so many believers wrestle with: “How long do we wait? When do we stop waiting and start moving?” It’s a fair question. It’s a question that reveals something deep about how we understand faith, God’s timing, and how we understand the nature of waiting itself. There’s a common narrative in modern Christianity that goes like this: Faith is action. Faith is moving forward. Faith is trusting God even without clear direction. Faith is doing something rather than doing nothing. There’s some truth in this. Faith does sometimes require action. Faith does sometimes require stepping out when the path isn’t fully illuminated. But this narrative has become dangerous. It’s become an excuse for impatience. It’s become a justification for moving ahead without God’s clear direction. We tell ourselves: “This is a good project. This will help people. This is ministry. Surely God wants us to do it.” So even though we haven’t received clear direction, we move forward anyway. We call it faith. We call it trust. We call it obedience. But often it’s not. It’s impatience. It’s pride. It’s the belief that our wisdom, our timing, and our judgments are sufficient even without God’s explicit direction. And it always leads to the same place: frustration, division, and ruin.

Here’s what we need to understand: Sometimes God’s answer to our prayers is not yes. It’s not no. It’s wait. This is the answer that tests our faith the most. This is the answer that reveals what we truly believe about God. This is the answer that separates shallow faith from deep faith. When we pray for direction and God says “yes,” that’s easy. We move forward with confidence. When we pray for direction and God says “no,” it’s difficult but ultimately clarifying. At least we know what not to do. But when we pray for direction and God says “wait”—that’s where faith is truly tested. Because waiting requires something that action doesn’t: trust in God’s timing when we can’t see the endpoint. Trust in God’s wisdom when our own wisdom is compelling us to move. Trust in God’s goodness when His silence feels like abandonment. In truth, waiting is the answer that demands the most from us. It’s the answer that requires us to surrender our timeline to God’s timeline. It’s the answer that forces us to acknowledge that we don’t know what God knows, we can’t see what God sees, and we need to trust Him even when we don’t understand. Psalm 27:14 speaks directly to this: “Wait for the Lord; Be strong and let your heart take courage; Yes, wait for the Lord.” God tells us to wait…twice in a row.  When God has to tell us something multiple times within a few sentences He does so because He knows this will be a struggle for us.  God says “wait…yes wait”.  That is hard to do. But notice what also accompanies the command to wait: “Be strong and let your heart take courage.” Waiting is not passive resignation. Waiting is not giving up. Waiting is active trust. Waiting is courage. Waiting is faith expressed through the discipline of restraint. Restraint and caution are a lost art in this fast paced culture.  We want what we want and we want it now — that is is the attitude of this age. And the problem with this attitude is that it becomes easy to justify everything. We call it “faith”, but really it is is just impatience wrapped up in a Christian verbiage.  After all, who can argue with you if you are “trusting God through faith”. “This project is good. This will help someone. This is a good use of my time, money or resources”. However, just because something is good doesn’t mean it’s God’s timing. Just because something is ministry doesn’t mean God is calling you to do it right now. Just because something would help people doesn’t mean it’s what God wants your church to pursue in this season. God’s timing is not the same as good timing. Sometimes the answer is just “wait”. And here’s what happens when we wait. Here’s what we learn in the silence. If my friend’s church would have waited longer before moving forward, they would have learned something crucial. They would have discovered that their leadership wasn’t unified. They would have realized that not everyone was sensing the same direction from God. They would have recognized that forcing unity where unity didn’t exist would create exactly the problems they’re now facing. Waiting would have given them time to pray more deeply. To seek God more earnestly. To examine their own motives more carefully. To allow the Holy Spirit to work in their hearts and bring genuine unity instead of forced agreement. Waiting would have revealed what moving forward too quickly concealed: that perhaps God wasn’t ready to move forward yet. That His timing wasn’t aligned with their timeline.

Waiting teaches us humility. It teaches us that our wisdom is limited. Waiting teaches us faith. Not the kind of faith that acts without direction, but the kind that believes God is working even when we can’t see what He’s doing. Waiting teaches us discernment. It gives us time to distinguish between our desires and God’s direction. Between what sounds good and what God is actually calling us to do. Waiting teaches us obedience. Because waiting, when you don’t want to wait, is the deepest form of obedience. I know that waiting is hard and that waiting often feels like failure. Waiting feels like you’re not being faithful. Waiting feels like you’re letting opportunities pass by. But here’s the promise: When you wait on God, when you have the discipline to restrain yourself from moving forward without His clear direction, you will see His hand move in ways that moving ahead too quickly would have prevented. You will experience His blessing in ways that your own plans never could have produced. And in that waiting, in that discipline of restraint, God will do something far greater than any project could accomplish: He’ll build genuine unity. He’ll clarify His true direction. He’ll deepen the faith of His people.

Yours in Christ, 

Pastor John