Waiting on the Lord

John B. Willis

Human life is full of what Phillips Brooks named "withheld completions." Men have to learn to wait for the appearing of many very worthy and greatly longed for things, and having reached the conviction that their purposes respecting these things are unselfish and good, they are and ever have been wont to attribute the explanation of delays to the ways of a higher wisdom! To wait on the Lord has thus come to mean with the many that they should be patient with His seemingly slow performance rather than that they should be impatient with their own unresponsiveness to the call of Truth and Love.

From the beginning, mankind have thus woefully erred in their thought of God as having their point of view and being actuated by their relative, imperfect sense of things, instead of remembering ever the declaration of Scripture which reads: "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." The reactionary and penal effects of this anthropomorphism obtain very largely today throughout the Christian world, and they practically cancel all hope of progress for the man who is possessed of the idea that Christianity's meager achievements of good are due to the fact that the plans of Providence are being worked out at an adagio pace which it is not ours to hasten. Such a man is impelled to be content with unideal, not to say unchristian, conditions, and to wait upon God, when in fact what he needs is not to wait, but to wake up—to escape from the mesmerism of an utterly false sense of the divine nature and will.

Christian Science preeminently conduces to spiritual progress by making it logically clear that Truth is forever instant in its operations; that it is the Father's will and therefore possible that we be saved at once and unto the uttermost. It teaches that in the very nature of things we truly wait on God when we honor and seek to be conformed to divine law, when we make patient, intelligent, and determined effort to "put off the old man,"—that dominating deadness of mortal mentality referred to by Mrs. Eddy when she says, "The illusion of material sense, not divine law, has bound you, entangled your free limbs, crippled your capacities, enfeebled your body, and defaced the tablet of your being" (Science and Health, p. 227).

That the prevailing thought of God as being actuated by considerations which sufficiently earnest, beseeching prayer will induce Him to give up, has immediately to do with prevailing spiritual apathy and ineffectiveness, is logically clear and lamentably true. The divine manifestation is conceived of as being not a continuous unfoldment which is always and instantly responsive to human receptivity, but a variable order which is advanced or retarded according to impulses that are not unlike those of a human personality.

The uncertainty respecting the divine attitude and action which necessarily attends this sense of things can but beget a spirit of irresponsibility and reserve upon the part of all who entertain it. No man can have confidence in himself if he is wavering in his confidence toward God. Who would think of having to wait for the pull of gravitation or for light to bring illumination? The chemist does not expect to be delayed by any dallying of what he calls molecular affinity, and all this hints at the eternal fact that the activities of Mind, of Truth and Love, wait ever to serve and save, and we truly wait on God when we adjust our thought to the unvarying order of His appearing.

Divine Truth neither knows nor brooks delays. "He that keepeth Israel" neither slumbers nor sleeps, and the only thing ever waited for is the sluggish withdrawal of that mortal sense which in human experience has delayed Truth's illumination of every innermost court of consciousness.

John B. Willis.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit