Procrastination calling itself patience

The hardest step of faith is always the one just before the other side opens up.

EPISODE SUMMARY

The spiritual vocabulary is all there: “I’m just waiting on the Lord,” “I want to make sure this is His timing.” But there is a question underneath the question: is the person waiting because God has not spoken, or because they already know what He has said and are not yet willing to do it? This episode draws a precise line between genuine, Spirit-formed waiting and the avoidance that borrows its wardrobe, and spends careful time in 1 Samuel 15 with the tragedy of King Saul’s almost-obedience.

KEY SCRIPTURES

• 1 Samuel 13:8–14 — Saul’s pragmatic exception

• 1 Samuel 15:22 — “To obey is better than sacrifice.”

• James 4:17 — “Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”

• Isaiah 40:31 — True waiting on the Lord renews strength

• Hebrews 11:8 — Abraham obeyed, “not knowing where he was going”

• John 14:15 — “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

NOTABLE QUOTES

“The heart is so expert a deceiver that it will use the very words of holiness to justify the very acts of disobedience. A man may say ‘I am waiting on God’ when he is waiting on himself — waiting for the obstacles to clear, the cost to diminish, the courage to arrive.”

— Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity

“I have seen more souls damaged by the long neglect of a known duty than by any dramatic fall into sin. The man who has been ‘waiting on God’ for three years over a matter God settled in the first three weeks has been moving away from God quietly while convincing himself he has been standing still.”

— Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

• 1. Is the thing you’re waiting for more clarity or more comfort? (Will the peace you’re waiting for ever actually arrive for this kind of step?)

• 2. Has the waiting produced interior growth or a dull numbness and a gradual distancing from the thing God has asked?

• 3. Does anyone in your life know both the clarity you have received and the fact that you have not yet moved?

THIS WEEK

One honest question for this week: Is there something you have been calling ‘waiting on the Lord’ for longer than a few weeks and that you already know, if you’re honest, is not about clarity? You don’t need to feel ready. The One who called you to it will meet you in it, not before and not from a distance.