HH, Sir Godfrey Gregg DDiv

“Let integrity and uprightness preserve me; for I wait on thee.” Psalm 25:21

In the great biblical thought of waiting upon God, there are several interwoven strands of meaning, and it is well to try to distinguish some of these that we may better grasp the importance of the term.

The Love

Another of the interwoven strands is love: in true waiting that is invariably present. As love is the source of all the highest work, so is it the spring of all the finest waiting. Jacob waited for Rachel seven years, and the years were as a day or two to Jacob because of the great love he had for her. What makes the mother wait upon her child and rise from her pillow when she hears it cry? What makes her wait on it with tireless patience when it frets or tosses with fever? She may be only a frail and sickly woman, but she never wearies of waiting on her child, and the secret of it is a mother’s love. Love beareth all things and endureth all things. Love can wait with patience all her own. Love can achieve miracles of waiting, as many a young engaged couple knows. And that is why, if we are ever to wait nobly, in the teeth of all our natural impatience, we must be taught to love the Lord our God. It must have been very hard in the times of the older covenant for the common man to wait on God, for God seemed very far away then, and clouds and darkness were about His throne. But now, under the new covenant and by the revealing grace of the Redeemer, it is within the reach and compass of us all. If we hold to it that “God so loved the world,” if we say believingly “Our Father,” love to God, once so supremely difficult, is in the range of the ordinary heart. And, lovingly, we can wait as Jacob waited, and as the mother waits upon her child, with a service that knows no weariness at all.

TO BE CONTINUED …….