“It will be said on that day,
‘Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us.
This is the Lord; we have waited for him;
let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.’”
– Isaiah 25:9

We live in a culture that fools us into thinking we shouldn’t ever have to wait. Indeed, we’ve come to believe that something is wrong if we’re ever made to wait! Items large and small get delivered to our homes day and night. Meals get delivered within minutes of ordering. Groceries likewise show up without delay. Countless other things can be pre-ordered so they’ll be ready for pickup when we arrive, without waiting. In all this, we’ve lost our ability to wait patiently for anything.

Nonetheless, God tells us we must wait for the most important things. God moves on His time table and His transcendent understanding of time is dramatically different from our own. So we wait for the glorious day of salvation and restoration described in Isaiah 25: the Messianic banquet we’ll enjoy in God’s presence. Our hearts yearn for the restoration of creation as we survey the darkness and evil of this fallen world. We must wait patiently!

God will fulfill all His promises. When that day comes, it will be glorious, but we must wait for it, however long it takes. In the meantime, there is much that is good and wonderful for followers of Christ: we enjoy fellowship with God through faith in Christ, we enjoy forgiveness and eternal life in Christ, we have purpose and significance in our lives as we do the work prepared for us in Christ. Nonetheless, there are things we must still wait patiently for, including the glorious day when the Kingdom is consummated. Be patient!!!

“But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.” – 2 Corinthians 11:3

Paul is right to be concerned! Satan is deceptive and determined. He’ll often look pleasant enough and sound both reasonable and fairly similar to the truth. Satan usually works from a position of near-truth. Nonetheless, he is the Father of Lies! The devil loves to draw Christians off course into following not-Jesus while they remain firmly convinced they love and follow Jesus!

As followers of Jesus, we must be constantly on guard against deceptions that divert us from true devotion to our Living Savior. For centuries, we’ve seen people attempt to redefine Jesus to suit their preexisting philosophies, politics, preferences, proclivities, or patriotism. Don’t let that to happen to you!

Jesus must never be redefined to fit human categories and labels. We must redefine every category of our mind to fit Jesus! Our devotion to Him must be total and it must be true. To stay true to Jesus in a world full of lies, we must each know Him and His Word as well as we possibly can. Every Christian should be a student of the Bible. Every Christian should know what the Bible says so they can wisely discern true teachers and preachers from false. The devil is cunning – you must be wise and knowledgeable to resist him!

“For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh.” – 2 Corinthians 10:3

As Christians, we are constantly engaged in a battle, but it’s a spiritual battle and must be fought spiritually. Many Christians get excited at the language of spiritual warfare, then try to conduct it with the tools and techniques of the world. That’s a trick of the devil! Our battle isn’t one that can be fought with harshness, anger, or violence. It isn’t a battle won by “shock and awe” or overwhelming force. It isn’t won by bending someone else’s will to our own.

We must wage this battle with prayer, meditation, and praise. We must wage this battle inside the church and out with profound Spirit-given self-control of body, mind, and spirit. We must wage this battle with love, truth, and compassion. We battle against the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil that would pull us away from our mission to make disciples of all nations. We battle against the yielding of the church to the ways of the world in a hopeless quest for greater approval and acceptance. We battle against the myriad false teachings flooding our social media, email, and TV channels that distort and undermine the unchanging truth of Scripture.

If you’re a follower of Jesus, then you’re in a battle, make no mistake about that! Are you fighting it? Did you know there was a battle going on? Are you fighting it like Jesus, the Lamb of God, fought with sacrificial love? Or are you fighting in the way of the world, the flesh, and the devil?

“Then they believed his words;
they sang his praise.
But they soon forgot his works;
they did not wait for his counsel.”
– Psalm 106:12-13

What the Psalmist writes about Israel could easily be said about us today. We humans can swiftly move from mountaintop experiences of faith, praise, and worship to the valley of practical atheism as quickly as Sunday turns into Monday!

Hard as it can be to believe, we can be full of zeal for the Lord one day and quickly be acting as if God weren’t present, relevant, or interested in our everyday lives. Hopefully we aren’t blatantly asking, “What has God done for me lately?” Nonetheless, we too easily live our lives at work, school, home, in community, or on travel with God as a mere afterthought. We decide and act without prayer. We make decisions, then perhaps ask God to bless them as if He were wielding a divine rubber stamp.

That isn’t how we should relate to God! God is Lord of the universe! He’s intimately familiar with and concerned about all the details of our daily lives. He calls us to lives of seamless faith from Sunday through Saturday. He invites us to pray without ceasing. How we live each moment of each day should reflect the wondrous words, works, and realities of our life in Christ. Learn from the Israelites and always remember the works of God. Invite Him to guide you and be glorified in every moment of every day – you won’t be disappointed!

“In that day the remnant of Israel and the survivors of the house of Jacob will no more lean on him who struck them, but will lean on the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, in truth.” – Isaiah 10:20

Throughout biblical history and down to the present day, God has proven faithful over and over again to “the remnant” who loves and follows Him. Not all who have claimed or thought they were “God’s People” were actually faithful to Him. Therefore, times of testing, times of suffering, and times of judgment have come to reveal those who are faithful to God and those who are not.

God always restores the faithful remnant! He’s always there for those who turn back to Him and seek Him with determination. In our own age, we’ve seen a rapid diminishing and fracturing of Christ’s church, particularly in the Western world. While there is much to lament about this, we should also recognize that it’s the continuation of an age-old pattern. We are in a time of winnowing when casual Christians, nominal Christians, ethnic Christians, and worldly Christians likely find no social or economic advantage in calling themselves Christians (indeed, quite the opposite!). What will remain is the faithful remnant who leans on Christ rather than man.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing and may well be the necessary step prior to another Great Awakening, a glorious movement of the Holy Spirit that bring many more to genuine faith and enlarges “the remnant”. Let us pray diligently that it would be so and that a spirit of awakening would soon sweep across all the nations of the world!