Watch and Wait

“I wait for the LORD, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope. I wait for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.” — Psalm 130:5–6 (NIV)

We, as a whole, are not particularly gifted at waiting.

We all would generally prefer an answer. Yes, no, go, stay, now, later—honestly, we can work with almost anything as long as we could please reach a conclusion. There is a special kind of agony in not knowing, because at least a bad answer gives you something to do.

Waiting gives you nothing to do but wait.

Which may explain why Psalm 130 repeats the word so many times.

“I wait for the LORD, my whole being waits… I wait for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning” (Psalm 130:5–6, NIV).

The repetition almost sounds restless. I wait. My whole being waits. I wait more than watchmen wait for morning. More than watchmen wait for morning.

We get it, David, seriously.

Except this psalm isn’t attributed to David, so apparently impatience with waiting is widespread enough that we can’t even blame this one on him! Rude...

Psalm 130 is one of the Songs of Ascents, a collection of psalms sung by God’s people as they traveled toward Jerusalem. And it begins nowhere near a mountaintop:

“Out of the depths I cry to you, LORD” (Psalm 130:1, NIV).

The psalmist is in the depths. He is crying out for mercy. He is painfully aware of his sin and his need for forgiveness. His circumstances have not been neatly resolved by verse five. There is no sudden announcement that everything worked out exactly as he hoped.

He is still waiting.

But pay attention to what he says he is waiting for.

“I wait for the LORD.”

That is different from the way many of us wait. We wait for the Lord to give us the job. We wait for the Lord to heal the relationship. We wait for the Lord to provide the spouse, open the door, give the direction, change the circumstances, answer the prayer, or finally explain what in the world He is doing.

We say we’re waiting on God, but sometimes what we really mean is that we’re waiting on God to give us the thing we’ve decided will make the waiting “worth it.”

Psalm 130 says something better. The psalmist waits for God Himself.

And he waits “more than watchmen wait for the morning.”

A watchman in the ancient world was responsible for staying awake through the darkness, watching for danger while everyone else slept. I imagine the final hours of that shift felt extra long. There was no scrolling social media to pass the time (shocking!). No coffee shop conveniently open at 4:37 a.m. No phoning a friend to help keep you awake. Just darkness and watching and waiting for the first hint of light.

But there was something the watchman knew.

Morning was coming.

He didn’t know exactly when the first streak of light would break over the horizon. He didn’t have the Weather App to tell him the exact second of the sunrise. He couldn’t make it arrive faster. Pacing wouldn’t help. Worrying certainly wouldn’t help. Checking the eastern sky every thirty seconds would not move sunrise up on the schedule.

His job was simply to watch.

And his confidence wasn’t in his ability to produce the morning. His confidence was in the certainty that morning would come.

That is the picture Scripture gives us for waiting on God.

Not because every situation will eventually turn out exactly as we want it to. Scripture never makes that promise. Some prayers receive answers we celebrate. Some doors open. Some relationships are restored. Some long seasons finally end. Others don’t.

If our hope rests in a particular outcome, then our hope is only as secure as that outcome.

But the psalmist says, “in his word I put my hope” (Psalm 130:5, NIV).

His confidence is rooted not in what he can see happening, but in what God has already said.

That is one reason waiting can be such a revealing part of our faith. When there is nothing left for us to fix, manipulate, hurry along, research for the forty-seventh time, or construct an extremely detailed hypothetical timeline around, we eventually have to confront the question underneath all the others:

Do I trust God when I don’t know what He is doing?

Psalm 37:7 says, “Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him” (NIV). Psalm 62:5 says, “Yes, my soul, find rest in God; my hope comes from him” (NIV). Psalm 40:1 says, “I waited patiently for the LORD; he turned to me and heard my cry” (NIV).

Again and again, the Psalms teach us that waiting is not empty space between what God did before and what we hope He will do next.

God is present in it.

We tend to treat waiting like the airport terminal of the Christian life. This isn’t the destination; we’re just stuck here until our actual life boards. So we distract ourselves. We keep busy. We search for signs that something is changing. We try to get ahead of God because surely He would appreciate our assistance! (I hate to burst your bubble, but He generally does not require it).

Waiting exposes just how badly we want control, but it can also teach us how deeply we can trust.

Because patience, biblically, isn’t pretending we don’t want something. The psalmist clearly wants something. “Out of the depths I cry to you” is not exactly the language of a man who has achieved complete emotional detachment.

He brings the ache directly to God.

Christian waiting is not passive resignation. It is not shrugging our shoulders and convincing ourselves we never cared about the thing anyway. We can ask. We can plead. We can grieve. We can tell God exactly what we hope He will do.

And then we can entrust the answer to Him.

That is where waiting becomes an act of faith. We discover that God can be working even when our circumstances look remarkably unchanged. James tells us that the testing of our faith produces perseverance, and that perseverance matures us (James 1:2–4, NIV). What looks like inactivity from our perspective may actually be a place of profound formation.

Roots grow in places nobody can see. So does trust, endurance, dependence, patience, humility, and hope.

Sometimes we don’t recognize what God has done in a season of waiting until much later. Sometimes we never get to see the realization. We were watching the circumstances for evidence of movement while God was doing something quieter in us.

But Psalm 130 eventually moves beyond the psalmist himself. After “I wait” and “my whole being waits,” he turns toward Israel and says,

“Israel, put your hope in the LORD, for with the LORD is unfailing love and with him is full redemption” (Psalm 130:7, NIV).

There is the foundation underneath his waiting. God’s unfailing love. God’s redemption. God’s character.

The psalmist can wait because he knows the One for whom he is waiting.

And that may be the invitation for us too. Maybe we are waiting for clarity, healing, provision, direction, restoration, opportunity, or an answer we have asked God for so many times that the prayer barely changes anymore.

We can keep asking.

But somewhere in the asking, Psalm 130 invites us into a deeper hope. Not merely, God, I am waiting for You to do this.

God, I am waiting for You.

There is freedom in realizing we don’t have to know how the story ends in order to trust the Author of it. We don’t have to manufacture an outcome or interpret every tiny development as a secret message from God. We can be still before Him. We can hope in His Word. We can trust His character when we cannot trace His hand.

And we can watch for Him like watchmen watch for morning.

The watchman does not know what the next day will hold. He just knows the darkness will not last forever.

Our confidence is even greater. We know the God who meets us in the darkness, hears us from the depths, forgives completely, loves unfailingly, and promises full redemption.

So we wait. Not because we are certain what God will do. Because we are certain who God is.

bytaylormcgee