I hate waiting in lines.  When I go to the bank or the store, I hate waiting in line.  I hate hitting all the red lights.   I feel like my life is wasting away.  I want to go, to move, to drive, to do.

Recent trials of back pain make me wait.  I have to wait on God.  I have to endure.  I have to learn patience.  And patience is that quality phrased in some Bibles as “long-suffering.”  Able to suffer long.   A friend recently joked and called me Job.  I smiled.  I’m hardly in Job’s league of enduring suffering.  Yet his joke helped me realize that any trials we have are a form of testing much like Job’s.  I sure hope I never experience anything to the level of Job, yet whatever the Lord brings or allows in my life will have the same effect:  to learn to wait.

Psalm 40:1-3 says, “I waited patiently for the Lord;  He inclined to me and heard my cry.  He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.  He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.  Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord.”

While I despise the trial of pain itself, I long to have a walk with God like David.  And I long that others in this world would somehow see and fear God and put their trust in Him.

But I have to wait in Him.  One day at a time I have to wait.  Did I say I hated waiting? 

A dear woman in our church wrote a note to Annette and me Sunday that comforted my soul.  She and her husband have endured 1000 times the “waiting” that I have had to, so her words come from a sincere heart.  She quoted from a devotional by Charles Cowman called, “Streams in the Desert.”  An excerpt from it says this:

“Waiting is much more difficult than walking…

“Must life be a failure for one compelled to stand still in enforced inaction and see the great throbbing tides of life go by?  No; victory is then to be gotten by standing still, by quiet waiting. It is a thousand times harder to do this than it was in the active days to rush on in the columns of stirring life.  It requires a grander heroism to stand and wait and not lose heart and not lose hope, to submit to the will of God, to give up work and honors to others, to be quiet, confident and rejoicing, while the happy, busy multitude go on and away.  It is the grandest life “having done all, to stand.””

It requires a grander heroism to stand and wait and not lose heart.  Wow.

Lord, strengthen my soul to quietly wait for you.  Let me not lose heart.  Let me cling to you.  Let me keep my eyes on another world, a glorious world that is only a moment away.

We often live in defeat.  We live as if God didn’t love us.  We live with little power.  Honestly, we live just like everyone else does.

But this passage (Rom 8:28-39) is like smelling salts:  It wakes us from our slumber.  If we apply faith as this passage calls us to, we will live radically different lives.

Rom 8:37  “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”

The phrase, “more than conquerors“ means to gain a surpassing victory.  Not just plain victory, but literally we are hyper–conquerors.   We are like a “winner on steroids“.  And a winner through and in Christ.

We are winners with Almighty God on our side (vs. 31).  We are winners with a God who won’t hesitate to give us whatever we need (vs. 32).  We are hyper-winners who are justified, aquitted, not guilty in Christ (vs. 33).  We are conquerors at peace with God and with no condemnation ever hanging over our heads (vs. 34).  We are overcomers who can never be separated from the incredible, passionate love God has for us (vs. 35).  We are hyper-conquerors over our greatest enemy:  death (vs. 39).

How do we win?  Christ.  Only and always Christ. “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor 15:57)

Albert Barnes says, ““We gain the victory.  That is, they have not power to subdue us;  to alienate our love and confidence; to produce apostasy.  We are the victors, not they.  Our faith is not destroyed; our love is not diminished; our hope is not blasted. But it is not simple victory; it is not mere life, and continuance of what we had before;  it is more than simple triumph;  it augments our faith, increases our strength, expands our love to Christ.”

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