Greetings in the Name of Christ Jesus our LORD!
This past weekend’s Introit again pulled from Psalm 27, and today let us consider verse 14, which reads: “Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!”
Twice we are told here to wait for the LORD. Things are full of trouble and hardship, and the call is not a call to action on our part, but rather a call to… wait. It is literally “be stretched out” in patience, to endure instead of reacting. Now, this is becoming more and more a strange and foreign concept in modern American life. We don’t wait well, we don’t let things get stretched well. We want fast food and next day shipping on Amazon Prime. We don’t stretch our dollar – we go for the cheap credit. We want our solutions, and we want to be proactive with them, and we want them now.
But David has a very good reason for calling for us to wait, to let things stretch out. We miss it because we think like Americans instead of Israelites. We hear “be strong” and think that this is an injunction for us to just buck up – pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We hear, “let your heart take courage” and we want to start giving ourselves a pep talk or go find a motivational speaker to get us riled up. But that misses the point.
If you want to understand this verse, remember that you are waiting for the LORD. What happens when the LORD says, “be strong”? Think about in the New Testament when the fellow says to Jesus, “If You will, You can heal me.” How does Jesus respond? “I will. Be healed.” And he is. Or think about Genesis – Jesus goes forth saying, “Let there be light” and light is.
Wait on the LORD. Why? Because the LORD will say, “Be strong” and you will be. Wait on the LORD because He says, “Let your heart take courage” and it does – but not by your own strength, but in His Word.
This is the thing. When we are in trouble, so often we want to run around and panic. When we get nervous, we so often want to get busy doing something. In those times we forget that it is the LORD who is our light and our salvation – and our being stretched doesn’t stop Him from being the LORD and God who loves us and does good for us and to us. In fact, it is precisely in those moments of stretchedness where He does the best for you.
Of course, nothing that He does for you surpasses the day when Jesus Himself was stretched out upon the Cross to win you salvation, a salvation that He continues to bring to you in His Word and in His Supper.
Even if you find yourself having to wait, being stretched – fear not – for you will have a good week in Him.
Pastor Brown
