Jim Van Gelderen: Welcome to the Thee Generation Podcast. This is Jim Van Gelderen and I am podcasting from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This morning I got up in Pleasantville and drove a few hours over here to Cedar Rapids, where my wife and I will begin a revival meeting tomorrow.
Every even spring, my wife and I conduct revival meetings every fall and every spring on the odd year, we conduct War of Special Forces, which I know some of you listening have attended. It is our ministry program in churches that have Christian schools, and we certainly enjoyed a wonderful fall, and now we’re having some time in revival meetings.
And our hearts have certainly been encouraged with different testimonies folks have given us of the Lord using the preaching of the Word of God in their hearts. And that’s what it’s all about. Well, I’d just like to share something with you today that I hope will be a help.
And I want you to remember one word from the podcast. Expectation. Expectation.
There are a lot of key words and concepts in the Christian life, no doubt about it. And from time to time, God teaches us or illumines our heart to something perhaps we haven’t seen, or perhaps emphasizes it in a way we haven’t really emphasized. Maybe this word expectation will be one of those truths the Bible tells us in Psalm sixty two and verse number five, my soul, wait thou only upon God.
Here it is, for my expectation is from him. Now the first idea there of God, the idea of waiting. The best idea I could think of when I was thinking of.
How could I describe the word waiting in an Old Testament definition sense and best I can describe it. It’d be like a little bird. I don’t know if you’ve ever come across a nest where the little birds are in there.
They can’t feed themselves. And the mom shows up with a big juicy worm in her beak to feed her youngins. And you know what they do, man?
They open their mouth wide and you know why they do that? Expectation. Expectation.
They are expecting their mother to feed them. It’s a great picture. Front of what waiting is.
Waiting is opening our mouth wide. Why? Because we’re expecting God to meet our needs, whatever it might be.
Now, in some cases, it might be feeding us. I remember years ago when I was at a War of Special Forces in South Carolina, a young lady got up to give a testimony on Friday and the testimony service, and she said, you know, my devotions have been going nowhere. Now I have them every day, but I don’t get anything from them.
I came into this week and I said, Lord, would you show me why? She said, yesterday, God showed me why. I’ve been trying to get something out of my devotions.
She said that yesterday she read a chapter, didn’t get anything from it, but that morning she got up and she said, God, I read the same chapter yesterday. But would you? I’m going to read it again.
Would you teach me? Would you show me? Uh, truth out of this chapter?
She began to cry and she said yesterday, I didn’t get anything from it. But she said, oh, today God showed me so many things. I’m going to tell you, friends, you know what the what the difference was.
It was not only dependence. That was certainly a part of it, depending on God to teach her. But a part of dependence is expectation.
Expecting God to do what he said he’d do. Now the psalmist makes it clear. I’m waiting on God.
Like that little bird with a mouth open. Uh. My expectation is from God.
I’m expecting him to do what he said he would do. See, this is the key in prayer. It’s not just to pray and ask things, but it’s to expect them.
And the reason we can expect them is because of the Word of God. There’s promises we can claim. There’s the character of God we can stand on.
And yes, sometimes even the leadership of the Holy Spirit, like Romans eight twenty six says, we know not what to pray for as we ought, but the spirit. And he helps our infirmities when we don’t know what to pray for.
