September 1, 2024
Beloved,
The seasons change, from Summer to Fall, on the 22nd of this month.
The world around is day by day changing radically and rapidly.
The church needs to change to bring the changeless good news of Jesus to as many as possible in
this new, unprecedented cultural context.
We, however, are not yet clear on how we should change or how we can change.
What then are we to do?
What comes to us is we are both to work faithfully in the Lord and to wait faithfully for the Lord.
That is to say that we are, first of all, to carry on in doing what He has already made clear is ours to
do, changing only in the sense of doing those things still better as His grace enables.
It is also to say that we are, as well, to keep listening carefully for His guidance and to keep hoping
that He will lead us, at the exact right moment, in every next, new step we are to take.
Most of us probably understand better what it means to work for the Lord than what it means to
wait for the Lord.
Waiting for the Lord does not mean becoming passive and inactive. In fact, it means diligently
persevering in what God has already directed us to do, even while we hold on to His promises of directing
us further and hold out for His revelation of what is our best next step (which requires us to refrain from
jumping to what just occurs to us as a good next step).
To wait for the Lord is to let go of our illusions about our ability to figure things out on our own, to
depend on God to show us the way forward, and to believe that He will do that at the perfect moment
according to the perfect timing of His perfect schedule (which is often quite different from our schedule).
To wait for the Lord is to turn to Him first and foremost for the wisdom we need. It is with focused
and sustained attention to listen vigilantly and expectantly for His voice as it might come to us through the Bible, through the Spirit in prayer, through conversations with other brothers and sisters in the faith, and through our meditation together on the circumstances of our present context.
It is a process that takes longer than we might like; and, in the midst of it, we might feel like the
children of Israel on their forty-year journey to the Promised Land.
But let us persist in this drawn-out process of working and waiting, even as we obey the call of
Psalm 31:24 to “be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord”!
In the grip of God’s grace,
Pastor Adele and Pastor Rob
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