Sermon quotes on waiting
Neta Alexander
Is buffering a punishment? And if it is, what sin have we committed?
Rage Against the Machine: Buffering, Noise, and Perpetual Anxiety in the Age of Connected Viewing,” Cinema Journal 56, no. 2 (2017): 1.
Steve Arterburn
A lot of times, we’re waiting for God to do what God is waiting for us to do.
Augustine of Hippo (Attributed)
Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
Dave Barry
It is inhumane, in my opinion, to force people who have a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently view it as some kind of recreational activity.
Michelle Blake
One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along, that while we need to be reassured of God’s arrival, or the arrival of our homecoming, we are already at home. While we wait, we have to trust, to have faith, but it is God’s grace that gives us that faith. As with all spiritual knowledge, two things are true, and equally true, at once. The mind can’t grasp paradox; it is the knowledge of the soul.
E.M. Bounds
The goal of prayer is the ear of God, a goal that can only be reached by patient and continued and continuous waiting upon Him, pouring out our heart to Him and permitting Him to speak to us. Only by so doing can we expect to know Him, and as we come to know Him better we shall spend more time in His presence and find that presence a constant and ever-increasing delight.
The Complete Works of E.M. Bounds on Prayer, Baker.
Michael Calore
Without the internet, we wouldn’t expect instant gratification as often as we do. Not just the ability to get online answers immediately, or same day delivery. Because of the internet, the anticipation of waiting for things is largely gone.
Taken from Blake Snow, “What Would a World Without Internet Look Like?” Atlantic, April 5, 2016,
Francis Chan
Most of us use ‘I’m waiting for God to reveal His calling on my life’ as a means of avoiding action. Did you hear God calling you to sit in front of the television yesterday? Or to go on your last vacation? Or exercise this morning? Probably not, but you still did it. The point isn’t that vacations or exercise are wrong, but that we are quick to rationalize our entertainment and priorities yet are slow to commit to serving God.
Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God, David C Cook 2013, p.169.
Kevin DeYoung
Perhaps out inactivity is not so much waiting on God as it is an expression of the fear of man, the love of the praise of man, and disbelief in God’s providence.
Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God’s Will, Moody Publishers, 2014.
Elisabeth Elliot
Waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts.
Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ’s Control, Revell.
Jason Farman
Our time is calibrated to a notion of efficiency that, in a single gesture, both demonizes waiting and preys on it as the opportune moment to occupy our attention.
Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World . Yale University Press.
Jason Farman
The mythologies of the digital age center around the idea that waiting is keeping you from obtaining what you want and holding you back from living a more fulfilling and productive life.
Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World . Yale University Press.
Woodrow Kroll
Quite honestly, most people are quick to “write someone off.” But our God is a God of the second chance. Learn from One who is patient with you, and you’ll learn to be patient with others.
Fran Lebowitz
The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
C.S. Lewis
I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure that God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do enter your room, you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling.
Abraham Lincoln
Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.
George Macdonald
He may delay because it would not be safe to give us at once what we ask: we are not ready for it. To give ere we could truly receive, would be to destroy the very heart and hope of prayer, to cease to be our Father. The delay itself may work to bring us nearer to our help, to increase the desire, perfect the prayer, and ripen the receptive condition.
Jeff Manion
Desperate prayers may be an indication of spiritual health rather than a sign of spiritual deficiency.
The Land Between: Finding God in Difficult Transitions, Zondervan Publishing.
Paul Manwaring
In the gaps, waits, and journeys of life, especially the traumatic and tragic ones, there will likely be many things, which we do not understand. We have been given permission to live with mystery, and to know that faithfulness is always rewarded, even if we do not reach what we believed was our destination. After all, the father of our faith, Abraham, appears to be given that title more as a result of the journey than an arrival at a destination.
Kisses From a Good God: A Journey Through Cancer, Destiny Image
Sally McClung
I hope someday that God can explain some of the delays to us……but I’m convinced that one of the things He is teaching me, and all of us, is perseverance. In this day and age of everything being “instant” – we can forget what it means to persevere. Perseverance is one of the ways of God that are found all through the Word. It’s an important character trait for us to have in our walk with the Lord. Being willing to persevere in prayer, and in other ways, is often a test for us.
Mignon McLaughlin
When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.
Joyce Meyer
Patience is not simply the ability to wait – it’s how we behave while we’re waiting.
G. Campbell Morgan
Those who wait for God are pilgrim souls that have no tie that will hold them when the definite command is issued; no prejudices that will paralyze their effort when in some strange coming of the light they are commanded to take a pathway entirely different to that which was theirs before; having no interests either temporal or eternal, either material or mental or spiritual, that will conflict with the will of God when that will is made known.
G. Campbell Morgan
Waiting for God is not laziness. Waiting for God is not going to sleep. Waiting for God is not the abandonment of effort. Waiting for God means, first, activity under command; second, readiness for any new command that may come; third, the ability to do nothing until the command is given.
J.I. Packer
“Wait on the Lord” is a constant refrain in the Psalms, and it is a necessary word, for God often keeps us waiting. He is not in such a hurry as we are, and it is not his way to give more light on the future than we need for action in the present, or to guide us more than one step at a time. When in doubt, do nothing, but continue to wait on God. When action is needed, light will come.
J.I. Packer
“Wait on the Lord” is a constant refrain in the Psalms, and it is a necessary word, for God often keeps us waiting. He is not in such a hurry as we are, and it is not his way to give more light on the future than we need for action in the present, or to guide us more than one step at a time. When in doubt, do nothing, but continue to wait on God. When action is needed, light will come.
John Piper
To wait on God means to pause and soberly consider our own inadequacy and the Lord’s all-sufficiency, and to seek counsel and help from the Lord, and to hope in Him (Ps. 33:20-22; Isa. 8:17)… The folly of not waiting for God is that we forfeit the blessing of having God work for us. The evil of not waiting on God is that we oppose God’s will to exalt Himself in mercy.-
Marilynne Robinson
“I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.”
Jan L. Richardson
The season of Advent means there is something on the horizon the likes of which we have never seen before… .What is possible is to not see it, to miss it, to turn just as it brushes past you. And you begin to grasp what it was you missed, like Moses in the cleft of the rock, watching God’s [back] fade in the distance. So stay. Sit. Linger. Tarry. Ponder. Wait. Behold. Wonder. There will be time enough for running. For rushing. For worrying. For pushing. For now, stay. Wait. Something is on the horizon.
Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas
Lewis B. Smedes
Waiting is the hardest work of hope.
Charles Spurgeon
Those who do not hope cannot wait; but if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.
Charles Spurgeon
If the Lord Jehovah makes us wait, let us do so with our whole hearts; for blessed are all they that wait for Him. He is worth waiting for. The waiting itself is beneficial to us: it tries faith, exercises patience, trains submission, and endears the blessing when it comes. The Lord’s people have always been a waiting people.
A.W. Tozer
What then are we to do about our problems? We must learn to live with them until such time as God delivers us from them…we must pray for grace to endure them without murmuring. Problems patiently endured will work for our spiritual perfecting. They harm us only when we resist them or endure them unwillingly.
A.W. Tozer
[God] waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.
The Pursuit of God, Wingspread.
Philip Yancey
The people of God are not merely to mark time, waiting for God to step in and set right all that is wrong. Rather, they are to model the new heaven and new earth, and by so doing awaken longings for what God will someday bring to pass.
Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud”, Harper Collins, 2009, p.237.
Ace Ventura (Jim Carrey)
“If I’m not back in five minutes, just wait longer.”
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
Wayne Stiles
God works through our waiting to strengthen our character through weakness, to develop our peace of mind by trusting him in chaos, and to teach us that we can glorify him just as much by waiting on him as we can by serving him.
Richard Hendrix
Second only to suffering, waiting may be the greatest teacher and trainer in godliness, maturity, and genuine spirituality most of us ever encounter.
Charles Spurgeon
If the Lord makes us wait, let us do so with our whole hearts; for blessed are all they that wait for Him. He is worth waiting for. The waiting itself is beneficial to us: it tries faith, exercises patience, trains submission, and endears the blessing when it comes. The Lord’s people have always been a waiting people.
Frederick Buechner
Faith is a way of waiting—never quite knowing, never quite hearing or seeing, because in the darkness we are all but a little lost. There is doubt hard on the heels of every belief, fear hard on the heels of every hope.
Ben Patterson
Waiting is not just the thing we have to do until we get what we hope for. Waiting is part of the process of becoming what we hope for.
Taken from Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent by Ben Patterson Copyright (c) 1989 by Ben Patterson. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Ben Patterson
Waiting is difficult. It requires an attitude of humility and hope that few of us come by naturally. And so we must cultivate that perspective. If we are going to learn to wait, then we must … wait.
Taken from Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent by Ben Patterson Copyright (c) 1989 by Ben Patterson. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Ben Patterson
God always comes alongside us in our waiting and suffering. But it is rarely to explain what is happening to us. Rather, he comes to speak of his love for us, to assure us that he is near and to tell us what he requires of us as we wait and as we hurt.
Taken from Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent by Ben Patterson Copyright (c) 1989 by Ben Patterson. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Ben Patterson
What we become as we wait is at least as important as the thing we wait for. To wait in hope is not just to pass the time until the wait is over. It is to see the time passing as part of the process God is using to make us into the people he created us to be.
Taken from Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent by Ben Patterson Copyright (c) 1989 by Ben Patterson. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Mark Batterson
God doesn’t call the qualified; He qualifies the called. If you wait until you’re ready, you’ll be waiting for the rest of your life.
Shirley Carter Hughson
In trying to dedicate every moment to God, just remember that the time of waiting, doing nothing as the world would say, is just as much an offering to God as hours of prayer or work. Even puritanic Milton realized that ‘they also serve who only stand and wait.’ Do not let Satan tempt you to be in a hurry about anything.
The Spiritual Letters of Shirley Carter Hughson (West Park, NY: Holy Cross Press, 1953), p. 34.
Nicholas Wolterstorff
I prayed to God,] “But why don’t you raise [my son] now? Why did you ever let him die? If creation took just six days, why does re-creation take so agonizingly long? If your conquest of primeval chaos went so quickly, why must your conquest of sin and death and suffering be so achingly slow?’
Rainer Maria Rilke
It is life in slow motion, it’s heart in reverse, it’s hope-and-a-half: too much and too little at once. It’s a train that suddenly stops with no station around, and we can hear the cricket, and, leaning out the carriage door, we vainly contemplate a wind we feel that stirs the blooming meadows, the meadows made imaginary by this stop (p. 100)
Taken from “The Wait” in Rilke: Poems (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series) by Rainer Maria Rilke, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Mark Batterson
God doesn’t call the qualified; He qualifies the called. If you wait until you’re ready, you’ll be waiting for the rest of your life.
Joyce Meyer
Patience is not simply the ability to wait, it’s how we behave while we are waiting.
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