Let me begin with a confession: I’m an impatient person. When I have an idea for a new project, I want to get started right away, and when I buy a gift for someone I love, I can barely wait to give it to them. But the time that I’m most impatient is when I’m waiting in my car for my kids to leave for church. I do fine at first, but after a few short minutes of staring out the car window, my tiny fuse is spent, and I get frustrated. In my mind, I expect obedience like the scene in Sound of Music where the father blows his whistle and the kids obediently line up in a row. But sadly, this doesn’t seem to work in my home.

I don’t think I’m alone with my impatience because often leaders struggle with waiting. Leaders want to take action. They want to solve problems, remove obstacles, and move the organization forward, but waiting is the opposite of that.

From my perspective, making others wait often feels disrespectful and irresponsible. It means that we aren’t prepared or we haven’t taken other people’s time into consideration.

But despite my strong feeling about waiting, Scripture is clear that waiting on God is part of the life of the believer. Here are a few examples:

“Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!”
Psalm 27:14 (ESV)

“But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”
Isaiah 40:31 (ESV)

“The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.”
Lamentations 3:25 (ESV)

It turns out there are many situations in life and ministry that require us to wait. A few examples include:

  • Trusting God to work out financial challenges instead of taking short cuts.
  • Being patient with coworkers and staffing issues, knowing that some things take time.
  • Continuing faithfully in ministry even when things don’t go according to our plans.

As followers of Jesus, you and I have been called to “walk by faith and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). We’ve been told to wait on God instead of pushing ahead with our plans and agendas.

Fortunately, we have an example from Scripture of what it’s like to rush ahead without being mindful of God. In 1 Samuel 13, we read that Saul, the first king of Israel, grew impatient waiting for the prophet Samuel to arrive and offer a sacrifice to the Lord on behalf of the army of Israel. After waiting seven days and seeing his army begin to scatter in fear, Saul offered up the burnt offering himself.

Instead of waiting on Samuel and following God’s ways, Saul decided to impatiently follow his own plan. And when Samuel arrived to see the situation, the results were disastrous:

“You have done a foolish thing,” Samuel said. “You have not kept the command the Lord your God gave you; if you had, he would have established your kingdom over Israel for all time” (1 Samuel 13:13).

Because Saul decided to follow his own plan instead of patiently waiting on God and obeying His ways, Saul was eventually removed from the kingship of the people of God.

Through Saul’s negative example, we see that from God’s perspective, patience and obedience go hand in hand. When we wait on God, we submit our agenda to His own. We set aside our timetables and our strategies, and we admit that we really can’t do anything without His direction and leadership.

So maybe it’s time for me to rethink my approach to waiting and remember that action isn’t always the answer.

You and I have an opportunity to learn from Saul and walk with patient trust in God—choosing to humble ourselves and trust Him and His good plans.

God’s best,