Come Down Lord: We Wait for You!

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3. GOD'S PEOPLE MUST WAIT ON GOD WITH PATIENCE

The prophet goes further and says that if you are willing to wait for God, well, if you are going to wait for God indeed, and you look forward to seeing him, you must not only wait confidently and eagerly, you must wait patiently.

Again, one of the things that you see about today's church, is the idea of impatience. Today's church wants revival, and they want it now. Now. Now! They have set their own calendar, and according to them, when they hold their annual conference, that is when God must come down. What does that mean? That until the dates of the conference, God cannot come, right. So everybody is preparing for that one week during the day, when God will come down. And it makes you wonder, where is he for the rest of the year, if he only comes when you are holding your annual revival conference? Is that still the God of the Bible who is omnipresent? The God who only comes during one week of the year that you hold revival crusades. You plan for him, you organize him in a certain way, that he must bring revival on your terms, at your own timing for your own desired end. Really? Is that what biblical revival is about? 

The prophet Isaiah not only prays, but you see, he is praying many, many years before even the problems for which he prays have happened. He clearly recognizes that he is going to have to wait a long time before he can see God's hand in action. But that does not deter him from waiting.

When we come before God, not only do we recognize that He is a God of power, but we also recognize that he uses his power in his timing whenever and however he chooses. Our job is not to dictate how he will serve us and work in and through us; our job is to surrender and wait and believe that he is faithful to bring his promises to come. Now many times when we talk about waiting, again, the church begins to think about this kind of life where you are in the church morning and evening crying and praying and fasting and getting ulcers, and climbing the highest mountains to pray, and that's when you hear people saying, "Haah, Hallelujah," and they hiss and say " I am waiting on God. You people, I don't know what you are doing? Every time you are there, you are at work, you are going to the beaches to enjoy life; when do you actually wait on God?"

And they think waiting on God is basically cutting yourself off from the rest of life, and beginning to live in a convent or monastery somewhere. That's not what the prophet is talking about. And in the history of the church, we have seen people who have misunderstood the message of waiting and have come to disastrous consequences!

Do you know today is what 19th of January. In the next two months, we will be remembering 20 years ever since the Kanungu tragedy happened. Some of you who are young probably who were born in the early 2000s may not know what happened. But it was on the 17th of March in the year 2000 when the country woke up to the most horrible news ever, I believe that put us on world map for the rest of the history of this country. 

Over 500 people had been burnt in a fire, in a church in Kanungu in southwestern Uganda. Days later investigations would reveal that another 500 plus people had already been killed and buried in mass grave in different places across the country. And guess who killed them, a church, the church! The church that called itself the Movement for the Restoration of the 10 Commandments of God, led by an ex-Catholic priest with another popular prostitute who was living in Kanungu at that time and some young theologian who joined the team. What was their theology? "The world is coming to an end, the Virgin Mary is coming to pick. God's people. We must separate ourselves from the rest of the world and wait for the end of the world and for the Virgin Mary to come and pick us." 

People sold their property. From Western Uganda, from Congo from Rwanda, people sold their property and moved to the commune in Kanungu. Those who had academic papers, they burnt them. Why do you need academic papers when the world is coming to an end? Those who have children in school, they withdrew them from there and brought to them to the community in Kanungu. For some years, they would be putting on uniform, moving around the village. Sometimes they were not allowed to talk or greet anybody because if you greet anybody, you will break the cycle over communing with God. They have to be holy, above every holiness standard that you can ever imagine.

The end of the year came in the beginning of 2000, and the Virgin Mary did not come. People started asking questions about why the virgin had delayed to come and take them to heaven. And the leaders started getting concerned. Not knowing who to do or how to take down the tempers of the people who were beginning to question the theology, they closed them in a church on March 17th. They tell them that in a few minutes, the virgin was going to come down in the fire to receive them. The fire came down, but the virgin was not there. The end of the world indeed came, only for them! What happened? They were waiting for God!

Now many of us could confidently say we've been waiting for God. But have we been waiting for God the right way? What does it mean when you say you are waiting upon God? Does it mean you are in church 24/7 singing and praying and crying and complaining why God is not coming faster? What does it mean really to wait for God? What does the Bible say about waiting? And the Bible has a lot to say. But one of those ways in which we wait is in communion with the God and with one another as a church. Church is a community of God's people in waiting. And while we wait for the promised, glorious return of our Savior, Jesus Christ: we live for him, we serve one another, we sacrifice for one another. We go to the scriptures and recount his promises and his faithfulness and affirm ourselves in what he has said, as we long for his appearance. We live for Him, we represent him in the world in which he has called us. We take advantage of every opportunity to proclaim Christ where he is not known. We continue in fellowship with Him and with one another.

When we talk about waiting, we are not talking about overzealousness. We are not talking about withdrawal from the world. But we actually talking about living in the promises, living in the fellowship, living in relationship with him as we wait for him to manifest himself.

Paul writing to Titus in Titus 2:11, he talks bout the grace of God and he says that "For the grace of God which brings salvation to all mankind has been revealed, teaching us to say no to every unrighteousness, to every ungodliness, and teaching us to say yes to righteousness and to soberness as we wait for the glorious appearance of our Savior and Lord." That while we wait for his glorious appearance, we walk in the manifested grace of God as we say no to everything that is unlike God; and as we seek to live right, as we seek to live holy, and as we seek live as examples of what it means to be a life changed by the gospel.  That God's people, living out the benefits of the gospel before the watch world, in a manner that brings non-believers to question their position before God, is what it means to really wait upon God.

We demonstrate our trust, our eagerness and our patience in God's promises by how we live and love and serve one another as a community of God's people. And that's what a church is supposed to do. To wait on God, in service, in fellowship, in purity, in communion, all the more getting hungry, all the more watching and waiting, all the more saying, "Come Lord Jesus, for we miss you; for we need you; for we wait for you. And we know, that those who wait for you, you act on their behalf. Praise the Lord!

How I pray that ours will be that church that hungrily longs for the power of God. But not so that we can prove that the power of God is among us, rather so that that power can work in and through us to challenge the world around us and to bring it on its need in submission to Jesus Christ, and to promote a desire in everybody who claims to be a Christian to live for God without compromise and hypocrisy. That's the call of the church. That's the call of our church in this year. That we will long for God. That we will yearn for God. That we will wait for God, and we will do so with confidence because he has come down before not only on Mt. Sinai, but in the person of Jesus, and we have every reason to believe he will come down again. We wait eagerly. We wait patiently. we went longingly. And we wait while we serve. praise the name of the Lord.

Let us pray.

Father, we thank you for the beauty of the gospel. We thank you for Your Word which is living and powerful. Your word which has power and ability not only to save us but to keep us in your promises. How we pray that we would not just repeat for reading's sake, but in it we will encounter the God of all faithfulness, the one who keeps his promises, the one who continues to preserve and to protect and to provide for his people as they wait for his glorious appearance. Would do you, dear  Lord, as a church visit us in your power, that we may experience the power of Jesus, even as it is revealed in calvary and the resurrection, but even more so, we may live in God's power, as we wait for his glorious return. Make us that Church Lord, that longs is for you. That leaves in repentance and confession, that desires and hungers for righteousness, that walks in purity and holiness; and in the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ, communicates Jesus to the watching world. We pray these things through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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