The Test of Waiting | Derek Prince

0:05 You know what I’ve noticed about God’s trials? He  hardly ever tells you, “This is a trial and if you hold out for six months you’ll be through.” And  some of us get to five months and twenty-nine days and we give up. We didn’t  know we only had one more day. Never give up! There’s no precedent  in the Bible for giving up.

0:36 God determines how long  the test will last, not we. Waiting is one of the tests to which God almost  invariably subjects the servants he intends to use. I’ll give you just a little list. Abraham.  “You’re going to have a son who will be the head of a nation that will be unique in the earth.”  How long did he have to wait? Twenty-five years.

1:12 Meanwhile his dear wife Sarah tried to help  him and complicated things. It’s interesting, she said, “Listen to me, do what I say.”  First of all, have a child by Hagar and later she said get rid of the  child. That’s the counsel of the flesh, it’s inconsistent. It tells you to  do one thing and later cancels it.

1:45 But Abraham became the man he was by waiting. He had to watch his wife pass the  age of childbearing and still wait. It amazes me that Abraham is so highly rated in  the Bible, but what did he do? Well, essentially, he was a prosperous cattle farmer and he  wandered around the area to the east end of the Mediterranean looking after his flocks  and his herds. He did nothing very dramatic.

2:26 Until the time came he was  willing to offer up his son Isaac. I’ve often asked myself what was it in Abraham  that caused God to esteem him so highly that he was called the friend of God. I’m  not sure that I really know the answer but one way he earned God’s favor was by waiting. Some of you are going to forfeit  God’s favor if you don’t wait. And then there was Joseph. I love the passage  in Psalm 105 that speaks about Joseph.

3:09 I think I can identify with this to some  extent from my own experience. Psalm 105:17 God sent a man before them, Joseph who was sold  as a slave. They hurt his feet with fetters, his soul came into irons. Somebody  said the iron came into his soul, too. Until the time that his word came to pass, the word of the Lord tested him. That’s a test. The Lord gives you a glorious promise, tremendous. And after  that everything goes the opposite way.

3:58 Instead of becoming the ruler of your brethren you  end up in jail in Egypt. And, I can’t think of a worse place to be in jail than Egypt. What was God  doing? Testing him. What was the test? Waiting. And then if you want to look at others, Moses. It says in Numbers 12:3, Moses was the meekest  man on earth. How did Moses learn meekness?

4:33 By waiting forty years. Somebody asked another preacher friend of mine,  “Why did God keep Moses waiting forty years?” The answer was, “Because He  couldn’t do it in thirty-nine.” God will not finish until the test is complete. When Moses first thought he could deliver Israel  out of Egypt he was a very arrogant young man.

5:05 Forty years later,he was the meekest  man on earth. And, no one except Jesus has ever exercised such authority as Moses  exercised. So, if you want to have authority, you know what you need to cultivate? Meekness. God cannot trust His authority to the arrogant,  the proud, the self assertive. We had a prophetic word that said that in so many ways. You know the  condition for promotion in the kingdom of God?

5:43 It’s very easy. It’s abase yourself. Every  one who abases himself will be exalted. But on the other hand, everyone who exalts himself  will be abased, that’s right. You have the choice. That’s an unalterable law  that governs the universe. People talk about breaking God’s laws,  that’s not true. We don’t break God’s laws, God’s laws break us if we break them.

6:17 And then let’s think about David for a moment, another young man who was given  tremendous promises of God. And he spent the next I don’t know how many  years, I think probably about fifteen years, living as he said himself, like a dead  dog or a partridge on the mountains, running away from the man  he was to succeed as king. Why does God permit that? In fact, why does God  ordain that, what is He looking for? In one word, endurance, that’s right. You cannot bypass  endurance. You know whom I’m speaking to at the moment? Me. You cannot bypass endurance and enter  into the promises of God. You can come so far but the completeness is only  through endurance. And just when it seems impossible to hold  on, that’s the time to hold out.

7:29 Don’t give in. I would like to say that to  several of you individually. You’re in the test, you’re doing all right, just hang in there.  Don’t back out, don’t give up. God is faithful. I’ve been asked sometimes if  I had a message to leave for posterity, what would it be? I always say I can give it  to you in three words, “God is faithful.

8:02 ”I’ll tell you another thing about waiting.   It causes us to realize more and more our dependence on God. I can’t do anything. I can’t  make it happen, I don’t know when it’s coming, I just depend on him. I don’t know whether you  ladies ever have problems in your house but we do in Israel. Sometimes our electricity  fails for reasons we can’t analyze.

8:36 And we’re in the middle of cooking  something or somebody is doing the ironing, we phone and we eventually  catch up with our electrician. It’s midday, he says, “I’ll try to be there  by 4:00 p.m.” So what do we do for four hours? We wait. And by the end of four hours we  know one thing, we need the electrician. We’re dependent on him. So, waiting causes us to realize in an altogether  new measure our dependence on Jesus.