By Michael Kelley

Nobody likes to wait.

Not for food, not for service, not at the DMV, not for a lull in the video streaming – not for anything. One of the reasons we hate to wait comes from our culture. We live in a culture in which everything is measured against time. Everything must be better – faster – at virtually any cost. We want what we want, and we want it now. And if we can’t have it now, we demand to know exactly how long it will take in order for us to get it. Hence the rise of the “time guarantee” – whether it’s the delivery of pizza, shipping on a product, or a repair on a kitchen appliance, if we have to wait we want to at least wait with a timetable. It is, after all, our sovereign right as a consumer.

This is problematic for the Christian, though, because we worship a God that doesn’t give timetables.

God is perfectly content to operate in His way, and in His time, and is not obligated to tell us what – much less when – He is going to act. There are, then, many times when we find ourselves believing God will make good on His word, and yet we do not know when.

This is not a new phenomenon, though – because God is the Rock who does not change, He has always operated in this way with His people.

Think of the children of Israel, enslaved for 400 years, trying to hold onto the promise given to their father Abraham that they would have a land of their own, and yet having no timetable on when God would make good on that promise. Or consider Abraham himself who was promised a son that would be the beginning of an entire nation, and yet the decades came and went without God scheduling a baby on Abraham’s calendar. And then there are the promises of the Messiah who would come and deliver the people of God, and yet these promises did not contain a specific date or time in which God must perform this service or the service would be free.

Or what about Noah? His story is recorded for us in Genesis 5-9. In those chapters, we are introduced to this man, who “found favor in the sight of the Lord” (Gen. 6:8). These were desperate times, days in which “the Lord saw that man’s wickedness was widespread on the earth and that every scheme his mind thought of was nothing but evil all the time.” In fact, so evil were these days that “the Lord regretted that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart” (Gen. 6:5-6). And so this God, who only a few chapters earlier in the Book of Genesis gazed on His perfect creation and declared over and over again, “It is good,” chose to wipe the earth clean of everything that walked, crawled, or flew around it.

God shared His intentions with Noah, but He also gave instruction. We find the detailed commands of building the ark, a vessel that would save a remnant of humanity and the rest of God’s creation to repopulate the earth. In those instructions, we find what kind of wood to use, how to cover it, how long and wide and high it must be, how many decks it would have, and even how close to the sides of the craft should be to the roof.

But despite all of these details, we never once see God giving Noah a timetable.

There is no deadline for how long the construction would take. There is no date mentioned about when the rain would start. Only the promise that it would come, and instruction for what Noah must do in the meantime.

The only description of how Noah responded is recorded in a few words as Genesis 6 closes: “Noah did this. He did everything that God had commanded him.”

As Genesis 7 opens, we find God speaking again, this time telling Noah to get on board the ark he had made. What we don’t know is how long it took him. Furthermore, we don’t know how long Noah had to wait after the construction was finished. For all we know, Noah put the last nail in the ark and God spoke, or perhaps it was that Noah finished the ark and there it sat for a decade. No timetable – only the promise.

Which makes Noah’s reaction all the more remarkable: “Noah did this. He did everything that God had commanded him.”

And here we find the answer for us. For us, who are so frustrated without a timetable. For us, who demand to know when and how long. For us, who see it as our right to have answers. For us, who follow a God who does give timetables. How do we respond to a God like that? We do everything God has commanded us.

This, I believe, is the greatest principle of Christian waiting – that while we wait on the promise of God, we act on the commands of God. We continue on in what God has already told us to do, obediently living by faith. We continue and do what we know while we wait for what we don’t.

This is what takes our posture from passive waiting into active waiting – it’s that we are not paralyzed by the seeming inactivity of God; rather, we come again and again to His revealed Word and we act by faith on what He has already told us to do.

Michael Kelley is a husband, father of three, author, and speaker from Nashville, TN. His latest book is a year-long family devotional guide called The Whole Story for the Whole Family. Find his personal blog at michaelkelley.co.