Advent is a season of waiting. It’s about waiting for God’s redemption, for his promised deliverance from the power of sin and death. It’s about learning to wait faithfully and patiently, trusting God to keep his promise; it’s about preparing ourselves to celebrate Christmas by using the time leading up to that celebration to examine our hearts and discipline our impatience. Especially in our broadband microwave instant-oatmeal society, it’s about stepping back from our culture’s emphasis on fasterfasterfaster and learning to slow down, to understand that just because God doesn’t give us what we want rightnow doesn’t mean he isn’t at work; it’s about learning to understand the work he does in our lives while we wait.And it’s about learning to understand the importance of trusting God in the waiting, and for the waiting. The Exodus gives us a great example of that. You may remember the story of how Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt, and eventually rose to power as the right-hand man of the Pharaoh, the king of that nation; and how in a time of famine, Joseph’s father and brothers and their whole household came down from Israel to live in Egypt. For a long time, this worked out well, and Joseph’s family grew into a large and flourishing tribe, known as the Hebrews; but then a Pharaoh came to power who hated and feared them, and made them slaves as the first step in destroying them. They cried out to him to deliver them, and did he swoop down right away and set them free? No. People were born in slavery and died in slavery. The Pharaoh who first enslaved them died, and his heir took the throne, and their slavery continued. But in the proper time, when everything was right, God acted, and they were set free.And notice who he used: Moses. Though a Hebrew, Moses grew up in the palace as Pharaoh’s grandson; he was a golden boy. On the one hand, he could have settled in to his position as royalty, turned his back on the people from whom he came, and joined the oppressors; certainly many, many people in his position would have done so, given the chance, and many throughout history have. He didn’t do that. On the other hand, if he was going to be the one to free his people from slavery, you might have expected that he’d do that from his position of influence, as one of the heirs of the man who held the reins of power. That didn’t happen either. Instead, Moses’ life went all wrong: he let his anger get the best of him and killed an Egyptian who was beating one of his fellow Hebrews, and ended up having to flee to the desert to avoid being put to death. He had it all, he had the perfect opportunity to do whatever he wanted to do, and instead he ruined the whole thing—or so it must have seemed at the time—and left himself no choice but to run for his life. Sure, his early life had seemed promising, but he’d squandered that promise, and now he’d spent forty years out in the wilderness tending sheep. He was a nobody, a has-been, a footnote to history. He was a sermon illustration in the temples of Egypt on what happens when you lose your temper. That’s all.Except, he still had one thing: he still had faith in God, for whom he had chosen the side of his enslaved people over the side of luxury and privilege to begin with. He spent those forty years in the desert waiting, and maybe he still had ambitions or maybe he figured that he’d be a shepherd in the wilderness for the rest of his life, but he never stopped believing that God would be faithful to set his people free from their slavery in Egypt; and so when the time was right, God came to him and said, “Moses, I’ve chosen you to go tell Pharaoh to let my people go.” To be sure, Moses argued with him, but in the end, he went and told Pharaoh to let his people go; and in the end, Pharaoh didn’t really, but God delivered them anyhow, with Moses leading the way.There’s an important lesson in this, I think: when we’re waiting for God’s deliverance—from whatever we might need him to deliver us from—our waiting isn’t wasted time, and it isn’t unnecessary. It’s God preparing the ground, and preparing us—not only for our own deliverance, but to be his agent of deliverance for others as well. This is how he works, in this time between the times, when Jesus has come to begin the reign of God on earth but not returned to complete that work; he has left us in place here as his body, the body of Christ, his hands and feet through whom he works to carry on his ministry. What God is doing in us and for us isn’t just about us; as we wait for the answers to our prayers, he’s lining things up to answer them in the proper time, but he’s also preparing us to be the answer to other people’s prayers. We wait, not only for God to deliver us, but for him to work through us to deliver others; and even the waiting is part of his work.(Excerpted, edited, from “Deliverance”)
