Reflection - Waiting in Hope

28 January 2025

A view across the Glass House Mountains National Park from One Tree Hill Lookout on Mountain View Rd on a clear sunny day near Maleny, Queensland, Australia
A view across the Glass House Mountains National Park from One Tree Hill Lookout on Mountain View Rd on a clear sunny day near Maleny, Queensland, Australia

By Rev Clive W Ayre

"Wait a minute!" How often have you said, or heard, words like that? And isn't it one of the hardest things in the world to do? Wait! Yet it is one of the most important approaches in the Christian life. Psalm 130 is not a complex passage of Scripture; it is a beautiful expression of devotion to God, but it contains some elements of truth that we need today. Verse 5 tells us what we need to hear: "I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope." Waiting; Waiting in hope!

But the Psalmist begins at a point of quite profound need; perhaps out of our own experience we might be able to identify with him. "Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice!". If sometimes we associate our worship and our closeness to God with the happier times of our life, I'm sure it is more often true that our deeper experiences emerge when we are pushed to an extremity. Out of the depths of our trauma, our anxiety or illness, our cry goes out to God, and God hears our cry.

I'm sure you have heard the story of John Newton, the writer of a well-known hymn, "Amazing Grace"; and I am not going to repeat it here. In brief, he moved about as far from God as it was possible to go; including piracy and participation in the slave trade.  Then one day, without forewarning, he realised what had happened. Literally, "out of the depths" he cried to God; and God heard his voice. He returned to England, and his mother's prayers were finally answered as his life was turned around. It was as he reflected on the harsh realities of his own story that he penned those deeply felt words of “Amazing grace”.

Some of us probably want to cry out with the Psalmist: "Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord, Lord, hear my voice!" Some may even feel guilty about it, thinking that Christians aren't supposed to feel that way. To those who know what that feels like, there is a word of hope. Out of the depths we call to God; and God hears our cry! We live in a world of pressure and of rush; we all know that; and in many ways it is the inability to deal adequately with that pressure that leads to so many of the problems we face.

To wait for the Lord is to wait in hope. Think of some of the "waiting" texts in Scripture. Psalm 27: "Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!" Isaiah 40: "... but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles." In Romans 8, Paul puts that in a wider context: "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God".

Waiting for the Lord is intentional. It is a way of giving God access to us, giving God the space to do something in us, or speak a word to us. It is then that something significant is likely to happen.

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