Our God Is a Time God

God’s Healing for Life’s Losses:
How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Post 27: Our God Is a Time God

When we cry out to God; He promises His comfort. However, He does not promise “quick answers.” He is a “time God.” He does not come before time. He does not come after time. He comes just on time. And . . . He comes in His way for His glory and our good.

Stage Six: Wailing

So, when His time and our timing are light years apart; we wait. We resist the temptation to regroup and to fix things on our own.

But let’s be honest, that brings more pain. So we are tempted to deaden the pain of waiting for healing, for hope, for cure.

In “stage” six of the grieving process, we move from deadening our pain to wailing: longing for heaven and living passionately for God and others while still on earth.

Deadening Described

The barren Shunammite woman of 2 Kings 4 helps us to picture deadening. After years of barrenness, she bears a son who fulfills a lifetime of hopes and dreams. Tragically, he dies. Life sent her two caskets, the first her inability to conceive, the second the death of the child she finally bore.

Rather than face her groaning, she repeats five times, “It’s all right.” Her heart is sick, her soul vexed, yet she keeps insisting, “It’s all right. I’m all right.”

She eventually screams at Elisha, “Did I not say to you, ‘Don’t deceive me! Don’t get my hopes up.’” Deadening refuses to ever hope again, to ever dream again.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick. Hope hoped for, received, then lost again, makes the heart deathly ill. Fragile. Needy. We hate being there, so we block it out. We deaden ourselves by refusing to hope, long, wail, or groan because groaning exposes us for the needy people that we are.

The problem is, God made us longing, thirsting, hungering, desiring beings. So we follow a trillion different strategies for deadening our desires and shutting out the wail of our soul. We live as if this world is all there is. We refuse to hope for something more. We make it our goal to satisfy the flesh in order to quench the ache in our soul.

Staying Alive to Life When It Crushes Us to Death

How do we stay alive to life when it crushes us to death? That’s the question we probe tomorrow.

Resting in God

God’s Healing for Life’s Losses:
How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Post 25: Resting in God

How do you help others to wait on God? How do you help your hurting, grieving spiritual friends to find delay gratification and remember their future hope?

There are many effective ways to journey with people toward trusting God’s future provision without working to provide for themselves. We’ll focus again on trialogues: three-way conversations between us, our friend, and the Ultimate Spiritual Friend: Christ.

Sample Waiting/Hope Trialogues

Waiting may be the most difficult stage to trialogue about because it is the most difficult stage to apply. It takes supernatural intervention. Consider some sample biblical trialogues to assist people to refuse to take over while refusing to give up.

“God’s timing and ours are often light years apart. What are you experiencing as you wait on God?”

“When God wanted Esau to wait, Esau took matters into his own hands and messed everything up. Are you facing any similar temptations to handle your hurt on your own? To fix things in your own strength?”

“Abraham is a classic example of refusing to wait on God. He decided to help God out by having Hagar bare him a son. What were the horrible results of this in his life? What might the negative results be in your life if you take matters into your own hands?”

“What would it look like for you to rest in God right now? For you to surrender to God? To trust instead of work, to wait instead of demand?”

“Someone once defined Biblical perseverance as ‘remaining under without giving in.’ How are you remaining under your suffering without giving in to self-rescue? Where are you finding the strength to do this?”

“Could we explore some passages like Romans 5; James 1; 1 Peter 1, and Hebrews 11 that teach us how to wait on God in the midst of suffering?”

“How could you apply Moses’ delayed gratification, waiting, faith, and trust (Hebrews 11:24-26) to your situation?”

“What would it look like not to quit while this lingers?”

“What would quitting mean? What would it look like? What would result?”

“What will it look like to trust God while you wait on Him?”

“Let’s look at Revelation 7. How do these wonderful pictures of heaven give you hope today?”

And What About You?

How is your hope meter? In our next post we’ll explore ways we can find the endurance to wait on God.

Clinging to God's Rope of Hope

God’s Healing for Life’s Losses:
How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Post 24: Clinging to God’s Rope of Hope

Waiting is rooted in the Old Testament. The Prophets promised Israel that a better day was coming, later.

The New Testament writers develop the waiting motif when they urge us toward patience, perseverance, longsuffering, and remaining under. That’s the message of Romans 5; James 1; 1 Peter 1-2; and Hebrews 11.

In waiting, we cling to God’s rope of hope, even when we can’t see it. In biblical waiting, we neither numb our longings nor illegitimately fulfill our longings.

Waiting’s Evil Twin

The opposite of waiting is meeting my “needs” now, taking matters into my own hands now, and acting as if I’m my only hope. Esau embodies regrouping through immediate gratification (Hebrews 11:16). For a single meal, a bowl of soup, he sold his birthright. He refused to look ahead, to wait, to delay gratification.

Moses exemplifies delayed gratification and waiting.

"By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as greater value than the treasures of Egypt because he was looking ahead to his reward" (Hebrews 11:24-26).

No quick fix for Moses. No “Turkish Delight” from the White Witch of Narnia. No pleasures of sin for a season.

Remembering the Future

Why? How could he? He chose eternal pleasure over temporal happiness. He remembered the future.

Faith looks back to the past recalling God’s mighty works saying, “He did it that time, he can do it now.”

Hope looks ahead remembering God’s coming reward saying, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (Romans 8:18-19). Hopeful waiting gives love time to take root.

Clinging to God’s Rope of Hope

And how do we help others to cling to God’s rope of hope? How do we wait on God while waiting on hope? Those are topics for our next two day trips.

Hope Waits

God’s Healing for Life’s Losses:
How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Post 23: Hope Waits

Yesterday’s journey ended with the Woman at the Well in a dilemma. God told her to wait.

So what would “hope” look like in her immediate context? Hoping in God, she would choose delayed gratification over immediate gratification. She would accept her singleness, clinging to God and trusting His timing.

Hope waits. Hope is the refusal to demand heaven now.

Waiting Defined

If hope leads to waiting, what then is waiting? Waiting is trusting God’s future provision without working to provide for myself. Waiting is refusing to take over while refusing to give up.

Waiting refuses self-rescue.

You’ll never see waiting as one of the stages of grieving in any research study because it is not natural in a fallen world. It is supernatural.

I do a lot of ministry to ministers. A couple of years ago I was working with a pastor and his wife (we’ll call them Tim and Terri) in a situation where the pastor was fired, frankly, without cause. No moral failure. No doctrinal error. This pastor had been at the church for over 20 years. It was the only home his three teenage daughters knew.

We worked through the candor, complaint, cry, and comfort process. When it came time for waiting, he battled. Everything in him wanted, almost desperately needed, to regroup. He was ready to take a church, any church, on the rebound. He was ready to take a job, any job, on the rebound.

However, I counseled him to wait before making any long-term commitments to a new ministry position because I sensed that he was motivated by a desire for self-rescue, for regrouping, not by a desire to wait on God.

Waiting Biblically Supported

Was my counsel godly or ungodly? Wise or foolish? Too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly good? Can we find biblical support for the principle of waiting rather than regrouping?

We’ll be back tomorrow for answers to these important questions.