Formation to Transformation | A Worship Devotional

Not everything that wears you out is heavy. Some of it is light and just coming at you faster than you can process it.

Look at how God describes the thing he is raising up. Swifter than leopards. More fierce than the evening wolves. They fly as an eagle that hurries to devour. He never once says they are strong. That was available and he did not take it. He picks fast three times in a row, and then he says they face forward, which means nobody in that formation is looking around or thinking it over.

The threat in this verse is not weight. It is pace with no hesitation in it. And the last line is not a number: they gather prisoners like sand.

Anchored in Habakkuk 1:8-9. Part of The Waiting Season, a walk through the three chapters of Habakkuk.

Habakkuk complained that his own country was violent and lawless. God's answer is that he is raising up a nation that is worse at both. Their judgment and their dignity proceed from themselves, which means they answer to nobody. No appeal, no committee, no higher office to write to.

One distinction the whole book turns on: God using a thing is not God endorsing a thing. Habakkuk spends the rest of chapter one arguing that exact point back at him, so you are in good company if it lands badly.

Habakkuk asked God to do something. God said yes. It was just a yes shaped like the last thing on earth he would have asked for. Some of us have been calling that silence when the honest word is grief.

Anchored in Habakkuk 1:6-7. Part of The Waiting Season, a walk through the three chapters of Habakkuk.

God finally answers, and the first word out of him is not an explanation. It is look. Watch. Wonder marvelously, which in Hebrew is tamah doubled, the same root twice in a row, the way Hebrew leans on something.

Then the line that should stop you. A work in your days which you will not believe though it is told you. Not that you would fail to understand it. That somebody could explain the whole thing and you would not accept it.

We put this verse on graduation cards. Read the next verse and it is an invasion. If you came for the God who quietly arranges good outcomes behind your back, this book gets hard for a few days.

Anchored in Habakkuk 1:5. Part of The Waiting Season, a walk through the three chapters of Habakkuk.

Nobody denied it. That is the part that gets you. Nobody argued. It just sat there, everyone agreed it was a problem, and then the week started over.

Habakkuk does not complain that there are no rules. He says the law is paralyzed. Not repealed, not deleted, nobody voted it down. It is still on the books and everybody can quote it. It just stopped moving. And then the clause that is worse than no justice at all: justice comes out perverted. It comes out. A decision gets made. It just comes out bent.

Notice what he does with that. He does not take it to a committee. He asks God why God is making him look at it.

Anchored in Habakkuk 1:3-4. Part of The Waiting Season, a walk through the three chapters of Habakkuk.

You know the thing at your church that is wrong and is not yours to fix. Not a scandal. Just a thing everybody learned to work around, and you have run out of people to mention it to.

Habakkuk 1:1 is eight words, and two of them carry the book. The Hebrew massa is the ordinary word for a load you pick up and carry, and it is also the technical term for a prophetic oracle. Translations split on which one to hand you: the King James says burden, the WEB says revelation. The scholars have not settled it. And the second word is saw. He did not hear this first. He had been looking at something for a long time before he said one word to God.

Anchored in Habakkuk 1:1-2. Part of The Waiting Season, a walk through the three chapters of Habakkuk.

You drove here in the dark. Maybe not full dark, that gray that is not quite anything yet. The parking lot lights were still on, and there were two other cars in it, and you knew whose they were without looking. "I wait for Yahweh, my soul waits. My soul longs for the Lord more than watchmen long for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning."

Here is what I want you to see about a watchman. He is not doing nothing. He is also not doing much. He is standing in one place in the dark, facing the direction light comes from, staying awake. Morning is coming. He does not wonder whether. He just does not know how much longer.

Anchored in Psalm 130:5-6. Before the Doors Open is a short Sunday morning sending for the worship team.

You know the chair. The one in your house where you used to pray about one specific thing. You still sit in it. You just do not bring that up anymore. Habakkuk did not quit saying his. "Yahweh, how long will I cry, and you will not hear?" That is verse two, not verse forty. He does not warm up.

God answers him. He does not go quiet. And the reply is worse than the silence was: God says he is raising up the Chaldeans, so the fix for the injustice is a bigger injustice, arriving on horses. Then Habakkuk argues back, climbs up on a wall, and waits.

Anchored in Habakkuk 1:2. Part of The Waiting Season, a walk through the three chapters of Habakkuk.

You have probably heard the popular version of the Hebrew word for wait, qavah. It means to twist, like strands twisted into a rope, so waiting is really you being braided together with God. That is a good sermon. It may not be a good lexicon. Here is what does hold: count the King James renderings of the waiting root and you get wait twenty-nine times and look thirteen times. Look for. As in expect.

Now look at the order of what Isaiah promises: mount up, run, walk. That list goes down, not up. It ends on walking, the least impressive thing on the list, and the only one you are going to need on a Tuesday.

Anchored in Isaiah 40:31. Season opener for The Waiting Season, a walk through Habakkuk.

At a church I served there was a man who could not stand our sound. He stayed out of the service until the music was over. He was not fighting me about it. I did not win him over on that topic. I won him over as a person. None of it is on Paul's list.

A couple of episodes ago Paul made a list of what could reach you. This is the other list, and he closes it with a catch-all: nor any other created thing. Your name belongs right there. You are a created thing. You have spent a long time wondering whether you are the exception, whether the thing that finally separates you from God turns out to be you.

Anchored in Romans 8:38-39. This closes a verse-by-verse season through the interior-life chapter of the New Testament.

We built a burnout self-check. About ninety percent of the people who take it come back fully burned out, according to the test. By the time you are checking whether you are burnt out, you are probably burnt out.

Paul quotes Psalm 44 in the middle of his own argument: for your sake we are killed all day long. Not once. All day, the kind of exhaustion that accumulates with no single Sunday to point to. Then he does what he has done twice already in this chapter. He takes a word and screws hyper onto the front of it. Not conquerors. Hyper-conquerors. And notice he does not say we are more than conquerors over these things. He says in them. You do not have to get out of it first.

Anchored in Romans 8:36-37. Part of a verse-by-verse season through the interior-life chapter of the New Testament.