A few years back, I completed a graduate program in church planting and revitalization. All of my classes looked at discernment practices for the church, but my final class centered its instruction in the book of Acts. I bring this up because I don’t usually rely heavily on one particular book (other than the Bible) for my sermons, but this one takes a lot of ideas from a book that my instructor wrote. The stories I tell are still my own, as is my way of using some of his ideas to interpret scripture. If you’re interested in fact checking me later, you’ll need the book of Acts and the second chapter of It Seemed Good to the Holy Spirit and to Us: Acts, Discernment, and the Mission of God by Mark Love.
All of us spend a significant part of our lives waiting. Whether it’s in our beds at night waiting for morning or at a traffic light or even for the school bell to finally ring or the end of the workday to arrive. And that’s just everyday stuff. We wait for graduation, for a job promotion, or a raise. We wait to be able to buy a house, to get married, to start a family. We wait for healing. For the fulfillment of a dream. For God’s promises to be fulfilled. We all have something we’re waiting for.
Despite all the action and excitement in the book of Acts, it actually begins with Jesus telling his disciples to wait.
“Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about” (Acts 1:4 NIV).
Wait. You don’t know what you’re waiting for but wait. Waiting, as Mark Love wrote, allows attentiveness. Waiting doesn’t simply require attentiveness, it actually allows us to suspend our understanding or expectation of the world and be open to something new, something that we don’t know yet. We get glimpses of that something new and unexpected all over the book of Acts.
In Acts 6, the apostles are torn between preaching and helping to distribute food and end up appointing additional leaders rather that choosing between the two.
In Acts 8, Philip was told to go south to the desert road and ended up sharing the good news of Jesus with the most unexpected person. A foreigner. A high ranking official. A eunuch. One who wanted to understand. And as a result, the man believed.
And nearly twenty years ago, a teenager at my church became a Christian and I was tasked with mentoring her. The church had certain ideas of things I needed to ask her to change, things that God would of course transform in her life first. But as we met and studied scripture and prayed together, God began restoring family relationships seemed irredeemable, impossible to repair, something only God could do. And I had to wrestle with God not doing what we believed he would but doing so much more instead.
Being attentive to what God is doing in the world compels us to slow down. Waiting requires patience. This is particularly challenging because we’re busy. We have things to get done. Our jobs and families and lives require us to make plans and stick to them. The problem is that we are so focused on getting things done, we risk using things and even people as a means to an end or a problem to be solved rather than seeing them as a gift.
In Acts 3, Peter and John were on their way to the temple to pray when they were interrupted by someone sitting near the temple gate asking for money. It doesn’t much stretch of the imagination to picture this encounter. But while it would have been easy to walk on by, Peter and John stopped and engaged with the man.
Two years ago, several individuals from my church met together for four weeks leading up to Easter, praying and attempting to discern what God might want to do through the music for the Easter service. Even when I put together the meeting agenda, I didn’t know what God might bring out of it. It was also difficult to explain what we were attempting, because these weren’t planning meetings as much as listening meetings. At our second meeting, someone expressed that he sensed God leading us to write a choral response to the scripture being used for the Easter homily. The group was receptive to that suggestion, so as we prayed over the scripture for the remaining weeks, we each offered lines that stood out to us, and my friend combined them into a song that the choir sung on Easter. I don’t think any of us had anticipated that God might want us to sing a new song through us in this way.
While Peter and John weren’t expecting to stop on the way to the temple, pausing their movement resulted in God healing a man who had been lame for his entire life. They got to witness something that only God could do. They even got to participate in it.
In addition to attentiveness and patience, waiting also anticipates power. Waiting points to God’s action.
Let’s look back at Acts 1:4, only I’m going to read a little farther this time.
“Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:4-8 NIV).
Clear as mud, right? When details are withheld from us, we tend to fill in what we think is meant, and the disciples did exactly that. To be fair, their assumptions were not illogical. God had promised to restore the kingdom, and when the Holy Spirit came upon people in the Old Testament, they performed great wonders. Think of the judges or the kings. With the power of the Holy Spirit, they restored the kingdom of Israel. But they were not thinking big enough. In John 14, Jesus promised his disciples that along with the coming of the Holy Spirit, they would do even greater things than the work Jesus had been doing.
Who would have expected a reversal of Babel, a regathering of scattered people? Who would have expected that by waiting, God would do the work of preaching the gospel to all people in every language that needed to be heard? Only God. But by waiting, the apostles got to participate in God’s powerful work of proclaiming his message to the world. This is Acts 2.
There have been a few times in my life when I had no idea what was going on or what God was doing, but I had a strong sense that I needed to wait. Shortly after I moved to Southern California, I was shunned by my church. This was after being diagnosed with MS and my boyfriend breaking up with me, so it was kind of piling on by that point. I joined a small church plant that one of my friends was leading. I remember showing up and just crying through the entire service for weeks on end. It became a place for healing. But it was never my church. I don’t even know how to explain this because I don’t think I realized it until I was no longer there. I served. I got involved in whatever ways I could. I showed up. People were kind, inclusive, supportive. But the purpose of that church for me was never to stay, only to be a place where I waited.
I bring this up because I don’t think waiting means doing nothing. At the same time, I think it does mean holding on loosely and being willing to let go when God shows you what’s next. My what’s next came in the form of an email from a Korean pastor, inviting me to serve at the English ministry of a Korean church. I responded saying, but I’m not Korean. He responded saying, that’s the point. So I went, more from curiosity than certainty. Had dinner with the pastor and his wife. Visited the church. And heard God speak to me. It is one of the moments that I can still hear with the most clarity. God said, I can bring you back to life here. What can you even do when God speaks but follow. I gave my notice to my waiting church that day, telling them that I wasn’t looking for something else, but God was so clear, I had to follow.
That step was the beginning of a completely new trajectory for me. Ten years after graduating from Bible college—another type of waiting—I was finally called pastor, something beyond my imagination. This is the power of God. To do things that are so much more, so much greater than anything we can hope or dream of. In his time. For his glory. And that is always worth waiting for.
Finally, “prayer marks the space of waiting even as waiting creates the opportunity for prayer.” I lifted that directly from Mark’s book because I love the way he phrased it. In every story in Acts, prayer is key. It’s central to everything we’ve looked at and every story I’ve told. Acts 1:14, which takes place in between Jesus’ instruction to wait and the Holy Spirit being poured out on all people at Pentecost, reminds us that “they all joined together constantly in prayer.” These prayers are what lead into Pentecost and tongues of fire and Holy Spirit empowered languages. In Acts 3, Peter and John were on their way to the temple to pray. In Acts 6, the men chosen to serve the widows food were prayed over. In Acts 8, the Holy Spirit spoke directly to Philip. And in Acts 10, which I would claim marks the turning point in the book of Acts, Peter is praying.
Prayer is the first and best thing we can do while waiting. And sometimes it’s the only thing we can do. It is often said that hard times drive us to prayer. Waiting demands that we trust God.
I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of things that I’m waiting on God for right now. Some things I’ve been waiting a very long time for. But those things have changed the way I pray. They’ve changed the way I’m trusting God. Prayer is the opposite of giving up. It’s a declaration that only God can do this. But the longer I’ve known God, the more confident I’ve become that he can be trusted even when things seem out of control and the time of waiting feels uncertain. And I have no doubt that whatever God has promised he will make happen. Because in all the earth and beyond, there is no one more faithful.
So let’s be attentive. Let’s be patient. Let’s anticipate God doing something here, in us, in this place that only God can do. And let’s pray.
Watch the sermon video on YouTube.
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