I'm curious as to how one would define the "waiting" aspect we often hear being put as the answer to quite a few things. For a popular example, lets say waiting on marriage for sex with the right person. Is waiting defined by constant longing and suffering(Almost a grieving process if you will)? Or is waiting being confident in God, resting secure in faith? Does it still count if say during the waiting process, you indulge in things which may be a stumbling block(entertainment, friendships, etc) or would it all fall under grace?
I guess the question is, how do you wait on God? Is there even a way to wait? Is it still waiting if you forget that you were waiting? Is there different ways to wait? What does the scripture say? Remember marriage is just a prime example, not necessarily the subject at hand.
To understand
how to wait it helps to see what
NOT waiting on the Lord looks like. From "Knowing God" by J. I. Packer;
"God wants us to feel that our way through life is rough and perplexing, so that we may learn thankfully to lean on Him. Therefore, He takes steps to drive us out of self-confidence to trust in Himself and the classical scriptural phrase for the secret of the godly man's life, 'to wait on the Lord'.
This truth has many applications. One of the most startling is that God actually uses our sins and mistakes to this end. He employs the educative discipline of failures and mistakes very frequently. It is striking to see how much of the Bible deals with men of God making mistakes, and God chastening them for it.
Abraham, promised a son, but made to wait for him, loses patience, makes the mistake of acting the amateur Providence, and begets Ismael and is made to wait for 13 more years before God speaks to him again (Genesis 16:16 17:1).
Moses makes the mistake of trying to save his people by acts of self-assertion, throwing his weight about, killing an Egyptian, insisting on sorting out the Israelites private problems for them and finds himself banished for many decades to the backside of the desert, to bring him to a less vainglorious mind.
David makes a run of mistakes seducing Bathsheba and getting Uriah killed, neglecting his family, numbering the people for prestige and in each case is chastened bitterly.
Jonah makes the mistake of running away from God's call and finds himself inside a great fish.
So we might go on. But the point to stress is that the human mistake, and the immediate divine displeasure, were in no case the end of the story. Abraham learned to wait for God's time. Moses was cured of his self-confidence (indeed his subsequent diffidence was itself almost sinful! See Exodus 4:14). David found repentance after each of his lapses, and was closer to God at the end then at the beginning. Jonah prayed from the fishes belly, and lived to fulfill his mission to Nineveh.
God can bring good out of the extremes of our own folly; God can restore the years that the locust has eaten. They say that those who never make mistakes never make anything; certainly, these men made mistakes, but through their mistakes God taught them to know His grace, and to cling to Him in a way that would never have happened otherwise. Is your trouble a sense of failure? The knowledge of having made some ghastly mistake? Go back to God; His restoring Grace waits for you."
