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Waiting is hard—praying for years with silence the only reply, watching others move while you stand still, wondering if God has forgotten or if you took a wrong turn. That was Isaac in Genesis 25: married at forty, still childless nearly twenty years later, the promise hanging unfinished. What do we do in the long stretch when nothing seems to move?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon describes Isaac as “the patriarch who waits”—married at 40, still childless nearly 20 years later, with little recorded action in between. How does a quiet life of faithful waiting challenge our culture’s emphasis on visible achievement, and where might God be calling you to embrace that kind of unnoticed obedience right now?
The speaker uses several modern examples—slow internet uploads, a mosquito at night, stranded fishermen spelling out HELP on a beach—to illustrate the difficulty of waiting. Which resonated most with you, and what “spinners” or distractions tempt you to cancel God’s process prematurely?
When Rebecca becomes pregnant with twins who fight in the womb, she asks God, “If it is thus, why is this happening to me?” How do you respond when circumstances seem to contradict what you thought was God’s answer to your prayers—when his smile seems to turn to a frown?
The sermon compares our confusion during waiting to a bald eagle that was grounded—not because its wings were broken, but for a reason the conservationists didn’t expect. Can you think of a time when what felt like a setback was actually a period of necessary preparation, and how did you eventually recognize it?
The sermon suggests that during times of waiting we should focus on living faithfully in daily actions—showing Christ’s love, pursuing God’s Word—rather than trying to force outcomes. What does “faithful waiting” look like practically in your own life right now?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
It’s—I can’t help but come back to the prayer walk. It’s kind of been the thing on my mind this past period of time. You know, there’s all kinds of bits and pieces that come together for that prayer walk. Of course, you saw all the different people who shared in some way, whether it was musically or sharing a devotional. Of course, everyone that was online praying with folks and praying together during that prayer walk. All these different pieces.
And one of the things that’s always interesting is trying to get the video together. Something different that happens each time. But if you’re in the Tuesday night Bible study, you know the last few weeks I’ve been dealing with Internet issues. And Greg took over the Bible study a couple weeks ago. He wasn’t scheduled. I wrote him. He was at work. And it was probably like 2:30, and I said, Greg, my Internet is absolutely horrible. Even my cellular Internet isn’t working right because I think everybody that can’t get on the land line for the Internet is going on cellular. And so it’s terrible. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to connect or not. Could you cover for me? And Greg did. He did a terrific job. I got to hear part of it while the Internet was sort of working. But that problem has continued.
And as I got closer to the prayer walk, I got more and more nervous because here we are doing an online prayer walk, and the Internet is on the fritz. And there are a lot of very large downloads and uploads that go into a prayer walk because we have that prayer walk was, I believe, an hour and 26 minutes in the full loop of it. And so we’re talking on gigabytes and gigabytes of video that’s being sent to me, then processed and being sent back out. And I send some of it up to the server and process it and all these sorts of things.
Well, I spent a lot of time waiting because when the Internet is really slow, maybe you’ve had this experience. You’re uploading a video onto Facebook. You’re going to share something or you want to send something to your family, some photos, and it’s slow and you’re waiting. We remember that more in the past. It’s gotten better. Our Internet has gotten a lot faster in general in the world. But then something doesn’t work, and you know you have that progress bar, the little spinner. It’s really bad when it’s the little spinner. It’s just spinning. And you think, I don’t know if it’s progressing or not. Yeah, maybe I should click again. I’ll click again.
And then it’s one of those places you go and it says, click once. And I look at it and I think, but I’m pretty certain it didn’t work the first time. Do I click or not? And you take the mouse and the touchpad and move the cursor over the button. I think I said not to press it again. Or I’ve been uploading this file for 10 minutes, and if I cancel and it actually was working, I lose it all. What did I do? Waiting is unsettling.
I was actually thinking further about waiting last night. I went to bed. I was really tired. I just barely crawled into bed. I said, oh, I’m tired. I’m laying there. I’m going to be out. I’m barely going to even realize I’m out before I’m out. Zzzzzz. I thought, don’t you hate when you hear a mosquito? I thought, I think I hear it. Uh, no. Wait, okay, maybe I got it. I fell asleep. Zzzzzzz. By the time I swatted it and I’m swatting my face, by that point it hit my head, you know, I was wide awake. And then it quit. I don’t know if I swatted the mosquito. I don’t know if the mosquito decided enough with him. I’m going to go see if I can go bite the cat instead because this doesn’t look like a seem promising. I don’t know exactly what happened. But I couldn’t get to sleep for the longest time because I was waiting. Waiting for that bite. I feel it. Oh, did it? No.
Waiting is hard, isn’t it? Sometimes you know what you’re waiting for. Sometimes you’re just waiting for something not to happen. But waiting is hard. And so much of what we see in scripture is a story of people waiting. Why is that? That’s because we spend an awful lot of time waiting ourselves. And we wonder when we’re waiting, am I going in the right direction? Just like when I’m waiting and wondering if I should hit that button again. I’m wondering if I should swat again. I don’t like waiting. I don’t think most of us like waiting.
But what do we do when we’re waiting? And that is what we see over and over in scripture, that we’re being taught, that we’re being walked through because, well, we need help with it. Because those times that we’re wide awake wondering, am I going to get that bite? And I don’t know. I can’t fall asleep. We have those times where we’re wondering if maybe we need to refresh the browser. We just don’t know what to do. And God is calling us to understand better what it is that he wants for us so that as we’re waiting, we don’t become distracted and go the wrong direction. Because it’s so easy to do.
The longer we wait, the longer that we pray about something and we’re not clear what the answer is, we’re not clear how it’s coming together, the harder it is and the easier the temptation becomes to go the wrong way. Whatever we’re waiting for right now, whatever it is that runs through our minds like a mosquito buzzing at night, let’s pray that God would help us to think about how we wait in him tonight. Will you join me in prayer?
Father, it’s so hard when we need to wait. It’s so, so hard. Lord, would you help us to wait faithfully in you? When we’re on the right direction, would you help us to keep waiting? Would you help us to be able to discern that time when the button didn’t get pressed versus the moment when you’re just saying, wait, I have it under control. Just wait. It’s so hard to do, but we pray that you would help us to do that, to be faithful in waiting. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
If I was trying to summarize why it’s hard to wait as a Christian, I think maybe the centerpiece of the problem for us is that God’s answers sometimes take time, right? We pray, we are waiting for God to work, and it takes time, and we don’t want to take time, and we start to wonder what to make of the fact that it seems like we were going in the direction God wanted us, but now we’re here, we’re waiting, and we don’t know what to do.
And if you look at the life of Isaac, Isaac spent more time, I’d say, waiting for things to happen than actually doing anything at least of significance enough to be recorded in Scripture. He is significant. He’s one of the three patriarchs. He’s the patriarch who waits. Take a look at chapter 25 of Genesis, starting with verse 19:
These are the generations of Isaac, Abraham’s son. Abraham fathered Isaac, and Isaac was 40 years old when he took Rebekah, the daughter of Bethuel, the Aramean, of Paddan Aram, the sister of Laban, the Aramean, to be his wife.
And Isaac prayed to the Lord for his wife because she was barren, and the Lord granted his prayer, and Rebekah, his wife, conceived.
Well, seems pretty straightforward, right? Isaac gets married. They have a child, or children. Easy peasy, right? It all goes exactly according to plan, except it doesn’t. And I think sometimes we miss that when we’re reading here because, well, notably first, we know the story up to that point. Isaac’s been the child that was anticipated for the longest time, but here we are now, we’re 40 years into his life, and we don’t yet see the next clear part of the path on how this gets passed on, this promise, right? And he marries Rebekah, and he prays, and then it says that Rebekah’s going to have a child, or children.
And it sounds good, except if we remember how the rest of it’s arranged. Note that he’s 40 in verse 20. Then take a look a little further along, verse 26: Afterward, his brother came out with his hand holding Esau’s heel, so his name was called Jacob. Now this is the part we really want to notice. Isaac was 60 years old when she bore them.
Well, I’m no mathematician, but I can pull this one off: 40, 60, 20 years. So after all that waiting, Abraham waits until he’s 100 to have Isaac. Then Isaac waits another 60 years to have the heir that’s going to carry the promise on beyond him. And he doesn’t necessarily wander into the other attempts to somehow strategize and make this work that Abraham does. But I have to think that Isaac may think back to everything that’s happened in his life, everything he heard about that came before him, and wonder, God, do you remember? God, am I going in the right direction? I’m 60. I’m 59 at that point, right? I’m 59, and there’s no heir to me, and I’m getting older.
I don’t have a sibling that’s supposed to inherit the promise. We’ve already made that clear. I do have a sibling, Ishmael, but he’s not supposed to be me. What happens after me? Because to the extent that Isaac was able to internalize the promise at this point, and we don’t hear a lot about his thought process, but to the extent that he understood that he was the son of promise, the one that was to carry on this mission to the world, it doesn’t take a genius to realize there’s a bit of a problem here. And the fact that Rebekah doesn’t have any children, but here he is. He marries at 40. He’s waiting, then, to see how this carries on beyond that. There’s nothing happening here. What’s God doing? Did he misunderstand? Did he not live faithfully enough, and God rescinded his promise? Should he have done something else?
Now, how much of the time that Isaac is living about his life is he choosing a life that he thinks is in accordance with God’s will? He thinks he’s doing the sorts of things you should do if you’re going to be the person carrying the torchbearer of this promise, and yet, when nothing’s happening, does he think, well, maybe I should have lived differently. Maybe I should have done something differently. I inherit an awful lot of property from my father. I’m an important man. Maybe I could have accomplished something. Maybe God really wanted me to be a spiritual father to people that I conquered. I could be like a father to them. Maybe I’ve just gotten it all wrong. Maybe God’s not listening at all.
We have Abraham and God talking back and forth regularly, but we jump very quickly through Isaac’s life, and for all we know, during most of that time, Isaac doesn’t hear from God at all. Had he ever heard from God at this point? He probably felt very much in the middle of everybody else’s story in this situation, just like we do when we’re waiting. You’re waiting someplace, you’re waiting for something, and you’re watching everybody else buzzing around, accomplishing things, and you think, where in the world do I fit in this? Does anyone care? Does God care?
Sometimes we’re waiting so long, we’re not even sure we care about what we’re waiting for anymore. Maybe Isaac went through that. He just thought, you know, this promise thing sounded good when I was younger. It sounded good when I was 20. It sounded good when I was 30. It even sounded good when I was 40, and I married Rebekah, and I saw how this was all going to work out. But now I’m 59 years old. It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and I kind of wonder if I’ve wasted my life. He’s Abraham’s son. But does that matter? Is there any point to this?
I was reading about recently some Micronesians, actually on Easter Sunday they went out fishing. And so they’re out, they leave their little island, which has a partnership with the United States. It’s no longer directly under our control, but it is considered a region protected by us. Our military protects them, our Coast Guard and so on. But it’s way far away, right? It’s not like it’s off the coast of California or Oregon. It’s way out in the Pacific. And these Micronesians went out, and they were fishing. They hit a coral reef, and the boat starts to take on water. So they find the nearest little island, and they beach the boat because they know they can’t get back home. They’re about 100 miles away from where they set out.
And I wonder in that moment what they were thinking, because if I were them, I’d be thinking, I’m from this little bitty place that the country has about the same population as O’Fallon, Missouri. And allegedly, the Americans, well, we use their money, and their military is supposed to protect us, but is anyone ever going to come looking for us? And for that matter, it seems as though they hadn’t established exactly when they were returning from their fishing trip, so a relative only reported them missing six days after they’d gone missing.
So if I were them sitting on that island, I’d be thinking, well, we don’t know when we’re even going to be reported, because we didn’t know that had happened. And when we are reported, is anyone actually going to think that we’re worth finding? And the question, when you have that sort of question running through your head, the next question is, are you going to act as if there’s something ahead?
Because they could have just said, well, okay, we’ll make the best of it, we’ll eat our rations, and then we’ll die on this island, and at least our last meals were pleasant enough. At least we got to go on a fishing trip one more time. Or were they going to actually live in expectation? Well, thankfully they chose the latter. They took palm fronds and they took them off the trees and they laid out on the beach a giant sign that spelled out, HELP.
And even though they probably felt like they were secondary, they’re just in a protectorate, they’re not actually American citizens of that much consequence, and they’re 100 miles away from their little bitty speck in the ocean.
When the relatives reported them, the Coast Guard did set out. It did exactly what it was supposed to do, and it started flying planes and sending out ships, and one of those ships buzzed over that island and could see below the word HELP spelled out, and they dropped rations and then came back the next day and rescued them on a boat. They were out there for nine days.
I thought about how easy it would have been to lose hope, to write their own story as insignificant, insignificant to maybe even their own people, but certainly to the only people that had any hope of rescuing them. And so often, that’s exactly where we land, because we think, well, okay, I know that God has said he’s adopted us into his family, but I’m a sinful human being. He’s not going to really want to send out the rescue ship for me.
And we talk ourselves into, well, but God did say that he’s going to rescue me, and I’m praying about these things. Isaac here is praying about Rebecca having a child, and he’s been praying for 19 years.
We’ve been praying about the things that are on our hearts for years and years oftentimes, and we start to think, well, I know the scripture said that God cares. I’ve laid out those palm branches, and I’ve spelled out the word HELP, and I don’t even hear an aircraft buzzing overhead, and if it ever sounds like there’s anything even near me, I’m pretty certain it’s looking for someone more important than me. It doesn’t seem like God really cares.
And when we pray, and we pray, and we pray, and we don’t hear an answer, it seems like the silence itself is God’s confirmation of that, because we say, if God cared, I’d hear something by now, right? I’d hear those engines roaring overhead. Maybe Isaac thought back to when he and his dad had gone up to that infamous mountaintop, and his dad had been told to sacrifice, and we looked at that a couple weeks ago, and you think about Isaac’s view of that. What had his dad said to him? The Lord will provide.
And Abraham didn’t know exactly how that was going to work out. I don’t know how much afterwards he and Isaac talked about, well, Dad, how much did you understand how God was working in this moment?
But in that moment, what’s Abraham doing? He’s waiting on God. He’s waiting because he’s just going and doing what God told him to do and knowing somehow the Lord’s going to provide. But what do you know he does? Abraham didn’t wait 20 years. He didn’t just hold the knife up in his hand and say, okay, I’m just going to wait here until God makes a good plan for me because I know it can’t be to kill my son, so I’m just going to just stand here. And Abraham, years later, had to have a chiropractor come and get his arm down because it was stuck up there. He didn’t do that. He goes ahead, and he’s just moving forward, and God provides a relatively fast response, because before Abraham can bring that knife down and kill his son and sacrifice him, God provides the ram that’s stuck in the thicket.
And imagine them talking afterwards, and Abraham and Isaac, they finally catch their breath. Their hearts start to slow down a little bit. They talk about how the Lord provided in that moment.
And we have those moments where we see God providing, and we say, okay, now I know that God provides because I’ve seen this, and yet, then when we wait and we wait and we wait, I wonder if Abraham and Isaac’s conversation replayed in Isaac’s mind, and as it did, Isaac thought, I wonder if Dad just got lucky with that ram. Maybe the Lord didn’t care about saving me at all. Doesn’t seem like the rest of the promise is coming through.
What if my whole life is built on the thought that God was providing in that moment, but God didn’t even care whether I lived or died? Because if He cared if I lived because He wants His promise to come through me, then there would be the next part coming into place, and yet the next part isn’t anywhere to be seen.
Maybe everything I’ve thought is wrong, meaningless. It doesn’t tell us that Isaac thinks this, but I tend to think he probably had those things go through his mind because Isaac was a human being like us. And after everything he’d been through, to just pause and see nothing towards the fulfillment of the promise for decades.
We get impatient when we’re waiting for a year. We get impatient when we’re waiting for a month. There are a lot of times I get impatient if I’m waiting for minutes, right? Uploading that video for the prayer walk. It used to be amazing if you could upload a video at all or download a video at all. It was amazing when you could download a photograph for the first time on a computer, and now it’s like I have this multi-hour video I’m trying to upload, and it’s not uploading in 15 seconds. What’s wrong here?
And we’re not entirely wrong sometimes to ask the question. Late on Wednesday night trying to get the prayer walk ready, I upload the wrong file. It was even bigger than the one I needed to upload, but it went up, and then the internet got worse. I’m thinking, okay, I guess I start over now. And so I try to upload the correct file, and it says it’s going to take two hours. It says it’s going to take five hours. So I connected and came up with a different way to reprocess what I already had put up there so it would work. I thought, this is never going to get done.
But I thought, well, just in case my other way doesn’t work, I’ll leave it uploading because maybe it’s still working. I remember, I think it was about 3 p.m. on the prayer walk day, so we’re now talking, what, 16, 18 hours later. I look and I realize it’s still uploading. That file was still uploading. It wasn’t ever going to get done. I don’t know, maybe by the next prayer walk that one will get done. It wasn’t going anywhere. And I rightly canceled that one. It wasn’t going to complete.
And we’re right sometimes to ask, well, it seems like I’ve hit a dead end here. It doesn’t seem like this is where God wants me to be. Maybe I need to reassess. It’s okay to ask the question. When we are constantly seeking to discern God’s will, sometimes we’re wrong. I don’t think that really surprises any of us, right? So it’s worth asking the question.
But sometimes we just need to wait a little longer. There are times I’ve almost hit the cancel button, and I’ve seen that spinner, and then just moments before, like my finger is trembling over the button to cancel it, and it goes, done! Oh, I’m so glad I didn’t hit the cancel button.
What God’s encouraging us to do is to constantly be in prayer, constantly be in His Word, so that when we’re trying to decide, do I cancel or don’t I? Do I keep waiting or don’t I? That we actually discern what He’s calling us to do.
I don’t know how many times Isaac considered canceling the process of following God’s plan. How many times he thought, eh, maybe how many times he just didn’t regard it for a period of time. He just started thinking about whatever else he could do in life, and maybe even did it.
We don’t really know what Isaac spent a lot of his time doing. Maybe it wasn’t so much that he was giving up on it, as he just let it sort of fade away. Where are the places where you’re struggling and waiting right now? Where are the places where you’re trying to figure out, is God leading me here or not? And the question is, well, what am I going to do in the wait? Does that mean that God doesn’t care, or does it mean that God’s saying, wait? Can’t always answer that right away, but the thing that we can do, the thing that we can know, is what it is that we should do to be faithful in the meantime.
And I believe that’s largely what we see in Isaac’s story, because we’re not told about his foibles and faults and trying to push it forward like Abraham did at this point. It just jumps. He prays, the prayer is answered. Oh, by the way, it’s 20 years.
The key thing is that we stay faithful in that process. We keep pursuing God in that process, because one thing that you might say is, well, Tim, I look in his word, and it doesn’t say whether I should take that job or not. Wouldn’t it be nice if it did? But what his word does say is what we should be doing with our daily activities right now, how we should be living right now, how we should treat others right now.
And that part doesn’t matter whether we’re waiting or not. We always should show Christ’s love to the people around us. We always should be seeking after him and his kingdom. We should be seeking to live in a way that’s glorifying to him, no matter what.
And I think maybe more than anything, in Isaac’s case, what we see is someone who just waits faithfully. How insignificant it might feel in that moment. Because think about it. If Isaac had had all kinds of faults and foibles in this adventure, and they were all written down, we’d spend a lot more time talking about Isaac. We’re just told that 20 years pass. But there’s a quiet beauty to a life lived in faithfulness that’s so quiet and faithful that there’s very little to report. But God continues to work.
And that’s the key thing, that we don’t lose sight that God continues to work. Sometimes, though, it’s not so much the waiting, it’s the result of the waiting. We wait and we wait and we wait and we say, God is going to work. I know he’s going to hear this prayer. I know he is. I believe he is. And then there seems to be a glimmer of an answer to that prayer and yet suddenly it seems completely contrary to everything we’ve been hoping for.
We see that in the next few verses. Starting at verse 22.
It says,
The children struggled together within her, within Rebecca, and she said, If it is thus, why is this happening to me? So she went to inquire of the Lord. The Lord said, Two nations are in your womb and two peoples from within you shall be divided. The one shall be stronger than the other. The older shall serve the younger. When her days to give birth were completed, behold, there were twins in her womb. The first came out red in all his body like a hairy cloak, so they called him Esau. Afterwards, his brother came out with his hand holding Esau’s heel, so that his name was called Jacob. Isaac was 60 years old when she bore them.
Rachel is sort of on the other end of this. She’s been waiting with Isaac. She knows that he’s been praying. I assume she’s been praying, too. They’ve been waiting. Excuse me, Rebecca. Rebecca’s been waiting. We haven’t quite gotten to Rachel yet, have we? Skipping ahead here. Rebecca has been waiting. And it seems like God’s answered. She’s expecting children now.
They don’t have modern technology, so she may not know she’s expecting children, but she’s expecting a child at least. This is exciting, right? God is finally answering the prayer. He’s finally coming into the situation. Maybe he hasn’t forgotten us at all. Maybe entrusting our entire life to this plan that God has said he’s going to do in our lives, maybe there’s something actually to that. Maybe it’s actually going somewhere.
And then she suddenly realizes that she’s expecting twins, but they’re fighting each other. I mean, they’re actually actively fighting each other before they’re even born. And she says, why is this happening to me?
This one commentator put it, she’s basically asking the Lord, I thought you were smiling. Why has your smile turned to a frown? Because if the child of promise is to come from Isaac and Rebecca, if the child of promise is going to carry on everything that they’ve been told is going to come, is within her, that he’s going to be born now, then why in the world is she expecting children that are already fighting before they’re even born?
Definitely she’s in distress. Perhaps even great physical pain over what’s going on here. It seems like, well, God sort of answered, but maybe we still were wrong. Maybe we thought this was God’s answer, but it was another misfiring, a misunderstanding, sort of like maybe Isaac wasn’t really meant to be saved at that old.
We start to look at those sorts of situations in our lives. I think all of us, we don’t need to do a show of hands, I think I can answer for all of us. We’ve all had times where we start to see, ah, God is putting the pieces into place finally. I see where I’m going, and then suddenly we do a hard left turn someplace, as I point to the right, hard left turn someplace, and we say, this doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t where God was supposed to be taking me. This wasn’t an answer to the prayer that I’d been praying like I thought it was.
Now what? Do I abandon ship? Do I go ahead and just pull the palm fronds back off the beach and just enjoy my last meal before I die? Because there is no hope, or do I keep going? Do I go ahead and refresh the palm fronds to make sure it still says help? I thought you were smiling at me, God. Why are you frowning?
I think that can almost be an even harder place to wait. When we feel like God has been smiling at us, he’s answering that prayer, and then we think, maybe he’s really angry at me instead. Maybe this is a horrible thing that’s come upon me, but it’s not actually the answer I thought I was getting.
The question is, what are we going to do in those times where, on the one hand, we have a pretty good sense of where God’s calling us, we have a pretty good sense of what we’re supposed to be doing in the process, but we have no idea how to make sense of the circumstances in the middle of that.
Are we going to give up? Are we going to start doing things that we know God didn’t want us to do, but it somehow feels like, well, it’s not going the way it was supposed to anyway, so I’ll just try something else?
And Rebecca does receive an answer. Even the answer is sort of cryptic. Why is God giving two nations? Why are we going to be the parents of two nations? They’re going to be fighting each other. Why is the younger going to dominate over the older, and what does that mean? Who is it that’s really supposed to be taking that promise and carrying it forward? How does this all make sense?
And we can be pretty certain that in their lifetimes, Isaac and Rebecca aren’t even sure of the answer entirely. They might have gotten a clue. We know that Rebecca later on favors Jacob, and maybe she’s thinking back to this. But I bet there was some confusion.
God just made it clear. It was clear with Isaac, right? The child of Sarah? He’s the one. He’s the one carrying on the promise. Good, easy, right? We’ve got it. No problem. Why this God?
And sometimes we find, well, it seems like God’s answering this over here, but there’s this new problem over there, and I’m not sure whether that’s something saying that this isn’t really an answer over here. And if it is an answer over here, I don’t know how to deal with what’s over here.
You get the job you’ve been praying for, but then you find out you have some kind of health condition that’s going to complicate taking it. Now what, God? We’re back to waiting again. What do we do?
Well, we pursue faithfulness to God in the wait, because here’s the thing that we can see time and again. Time and again, we’re not very good at discerning, based on the symptoms of the situation, what the actual thing going on is. Sometimes we are, but sometimes we’re not.
I read this week some people spotted a bald eagle that appeared to be injured in one of our Missouri State Parks down by Springfield, and they saw this eagle. It didn’t seem to be able to fly, and so they figured there must be something wrong with his wings, and so a team of conservationists came in and picked up the eagle and took him for treatment. They performed x-rays on him to figure out what’s wrong with this eagle. How did he get injured? Why can’t he fly, right? Eagles are a national bird, and they’re a protected bird, and so they’re trying to do everything they can to figure out how can we help this eagle that’s so badly injured that we can walk up to him, and he’s not going to fly away. He’s stuck. He’s grounded. There must be something wrong with his wings. He was somehow injured. He was somehow now incapable of flight.
Well, they were right, just like often we’re right when we’re looking at our lives, and we know everything isn’t quite going as smoothly as we hope. We can tell that part, right? We know when we’re hitting bumps in the road. That’s not hard, but what is the cause of it, and is it really what we think, right?
Sometimes we start to abandon the way that God’s called us to because we think, well, it’s clear my wings have been injured. I’m never going to fly again, so there’s no reason to even pursue it.
But you see, this eagle, there was nothing wrong with his wings. As the one conservationist working with him put it, he was simply too fat to fly because you see, right before they spotted him, he must have seen some really scrumptious roadkill, a raccoon on the road, and eaten the entire raccoon.
And the way they discovered this is when they did the x-ray trying to figure out what was wrong with his wings. They saw a paw of a raccoon inside his stomach. There was nothing wrong with this eagle as far as flight. This eagle just was too heavy at that point to get off the ground. It was going to take a little while before he could fly again.
And maybe even for the eagle it felt like a setback, but I think at the same time the eagle said, boy, that was a good meal.
And sometimes when it feels like, wait, I thought I was supposed to lift off and fly, or we’re helping someone else, and we thought, he was supposed to be able to fly, she was supposed to be able to fly, I can’t figure out the wings. God must have broken his wings. God must have broken her wings.
Sometimes God’s saying, well, no, you guys, you all just need to digest your meal a little bit. Then you’ll fly.
And sometimes there’s other preparation, and we see that in the lives of Jacob and Esau, and how that all fits into the broader biblical story. There was some digesting to do here, and it was kind of confusing. Sometimes we eat a really good meal, and we feel a little confused. I thought that was a good meal, but I’m not sure I…
But can we just say, OK, I can see the paw and the stomach. Yeah, I see it there.
And if we can keep going, right? They didn’t do something drastic like, well, let’s try to cut open the eagle’s wing and see if we can reset a bone or something. We’ll just start digging around and seeing what we can find.
The eagle maybe never would have flown again, but what were they able to do? The same week, this all happened this past week. Eagle was released back and able to go and fly.
And that’s true for us as well. God is working through you. God is working through me, and sometimes it feels like it’s not the case because we can’t fly. Sometimes we’re just in that state of being too fat in the moment to fly.
And no, we’re not launching the Little Hills Weight Loss Club. It’s not that kind of fat. It’s spiritual fat, right? It’s time for us to be nourished, and God’s nourishing us. It’s not time for us to lift off yet. Sometimes it’s a little bit of that flab of sin that needs to go first as well. Maybe we shouldn’t have eaten the whole raccoon.
But the fact that we can’t fly in the moment doesn’t mean that God has somehow turned his smile to a frown. As he looked at Isaac and Rebecca, he hadn’t turned his smile to a frown and said, I don’t care about you guys anymore. Or even, I reconsider my plan. I don’t really want you to be the parents of the next generation bearing the promise of my people.
He wasn’t saying any of those. He was saying, you’re going to digest your meal for a little bit, and then you’re going to fly. And then the promise is going to take off, and it’s going to fly majestically throughout all time.
As we look back, we do see very little, as you can tell as we’re going through a series on Isaac, we do see very little about Isaac and all the things he did, and all the time he spent essentially digesting. But what we do see is that Isaac, as he pursued faithfulness, God used him.
Are we really paying attention as we start to worry and wonder about the waits that we encounter and when we’re waiting because things just don’t make sense? Are we analyzing it correctly? Are we just looking at the appearance? I’m missing the reality of what God’s doing.
When we’re waiting and we say God has forgotten, are we understanding that sometimes God’s just saying, not yet. As we’re confused in the midst of that wait because things are going, and it seems like it’s contrary to exactly where we were supposed to be, we’re sure that God is leading us. Are we jumping to the conclusion that God is angry and what God’s saying is, no, I’m just telling you it’s not quite time. That meal still needs to digest a little longer. Are we looking at the appearance or are we looking at the reality, which is this, that God works through his people and God sees through his promises.
And so, we’re called to trust in him. We’re called to follow his word. We’re called to recognize that he has a plan. Even when it doesn’t seem like it’s working in the moment, even when it doesn’t seem quite the way that we thought, even when we feel grounded and we can’t take flight, he’s working as we wait. He always has been. He always will be.
Can you praise him, please?
Father, it’s hard to wait. It’s so hard when we’re waiting and it just seems like things aren’t as they should be. Sometimes it’s just silence and nothing else. Sometimes it’s just silence and that’s so hard and so frustrating. We’re waiting and we’re wondering.
Sometimes it feels like we started to get an answer and then it was interrupted and it goes a different direction and now we’re not sure if we’re back to waiting. We’re not sure if it was a confirmation that we were just dead wrong and we don’t know what to do.
Lord, in all those times, would you guide us back to your word? Because you don’t always tell us exactly in the moment how everything’s coming together, how it’s all working, but you do tell us that we can faithfully trust in you. That you are faithful to us and that in the wait we can know that your love is sure. Would you reassure our hearts tonight, we pray, oh Lord. In the name of our Savior, Jesus, that we ask this. Amen.
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