Beth says, “God can deliver the most hardened criminal or the most hopeless addict in one second flat.”
Have you seen it or has it happened like that for you? One moment in the throes of habitual sin and the next moment you were free as birds?
Would you be skeptical? Or eagerly watching to see a divine spectacle?
Beth asks us to remember in Acts when Paul and Silas were in prison, severely beaten and bound. “Around Midnight the two men started praying and singing hymns. Suddenly an earthquake. Prison doors flew open and anyone’s chains came loose.” Acts 16:26
“Sometimes God can put you or I in a prison of sorts just to set us free.”
I’m not the one to be chosen to be instantaneously set free. Like Beth, God and I have to get some hard work done. Beth says she is high maintenance. I think I am too. My life is like a golf course where the gofers have taken over. Pits all over the place.
Beth says her tombstone will probably read “God got tired”. I feel that way too. Always work to be done, keeping me out of a pit. We are opposites, God and me. I am more prone to do bad than good.
God summons the most faithless of all to faith. He is a magnet to weakness, perhaps the ultimate proof that opposites really do attract.
History is told through the encounter and experiences of men and women God would call to know Him. To trust Him, often under nearly impossible circumstances. People prone to wander, prone to bruising, prone to doubting, prone to losing.
“So when it is not instantaneous, God can take His own sweet time because sweet time is God’s to take.”
Time, time was created for man. Relationship. God wants relationship with man. Us!
One of the things to come out of a crisis often is relationship. While waiting you build a relationship with God, with others, deeper, longer more meaningful talks with God. Usually crying out to God. Waiting on God is good for us.
“It takes two to tango, even out of a pit. His part is to lift you out. Your part is to hold on for dear life. That’s the Liberty tango!”
God does what ever works, whether instantaneous or a long process. Obviously, a process works best for me. I am a slow learner.
What do we do while waiting for God to work? Well the Psalms are full of examples, and commands even, of what God expects of us while working things out.
On page 148 read again, Psalm 40:1-2 it tells all we need to know. We may have to wait for deliverance while the vehicle of time jolts and lurches.
But we never have to wait on God Himself. Never have to wait to enjoy His presence or be reassured of His love.
The wait is on seeing His work manifest in the physical realm, seeing our petitions come to fruition.
Beth assures us, “that huge things happen as you wait upon the Lord to deliver you from that Pit.”
You can see them start to work as a process is well underway.
The moment you begin reversing the three characteristics of a Pit:
- When you are stuck
- You can’t stand up
- You lost your vision
- When you are convinced that you are no longer hopelessly stuck (you proved that when you cried out.)
- When you resume a standing position against the enemy (you did that when you began confessing truth and consenting to God.)
- When your are regaining glimpses of vision (you realize God doesn’t hate you nor is He, worse, oblivious to you.)
- You are no longer in the dark of the deep until you are all the way out, so you wait…
Never fear that God is not at work while you wait. He’s doing what no one else can. Get a load of Psalm 64:4 “…..who acts for the One who waits for Him”
Psalm 130 where eager expectation is beautifully clear from the context(be sure to look this one up).
According to the Complete Word Study Old Testament, the Hebrew word for wait: qwh means “to live in wait for someone…to expect , await, look for patiently, hope; to be confident, trust; to be enduring.
In God-terms that means to take a watchman’s posture. He is focused, centered, goal orientated. Watching and waiting. Expectantly.
After we cry out to the one true deliverer, scripture exhorts us to exercise unwavering, and have daily confidence that God is coming to our rescue. Wait. qwh!
That means stop being comfortable in that pit.
Stand up and watch! Anticipate your absolute, inevitable deliverance!
There you have it. Cry out, wait for God to work to manifest your sure deliverance by wrapping Him around you as tightly as possible.
Ask Him to make you more God-aware than you have ever been in your life.
Bind yourself to Him and His Word.
Be willing to go where ever He goes.
Let His Words live in you and you in Him.
God doesn’t make His home in a pit bound to his Holy robe and neither will you.
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