Are you waiting on direction from God?

A lot of times in life it really does come down to: Is it this way or that way? Is it this relationship or that relationship? Is it this school or that school? Is it this job or that job? And we really need direction.

Direction is something the human race is desperately hungry for. People have tremendous anxieties about the future.  

So this Sunday look at what to do while we wait on direction from God. We walk through practical steps that will help those of us who legitimately want direction from God.

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Good morning!

This is week three of our Wait For It series. If you weren’t here last week, Justin taught on, “How we wait.” It was a great message if you want to go back and listen to the podcast.

What I want to focus on today is: waiting on direction from God.

How is it possible for fallen, sinful human beings to wait patiently when we need direction from God?

How many of you would say you need direction?

We all have times in life when we’re waiting on direction from God.

Direction is something the human race is desperately hungry for. People have tremendous anxieties about the future.

Just think about it for a moment.

Wouldn’t you like to know the future?

Wouldn’t you like to be able to see just a few miles down the road into your future?

Sometimes people play little games about the future:

You’re approaching a stoplight at an intersection, and you’re concerned about something in the future. Say, you just took a test or interviewed for a job. So you say to yourself, “all right, if the light turns green by the time I get there…”

Or, you’re wondering, “Does she love me or not?” And so you say, “If the light turns green by the time I get there she loves me,” or “If this particular song comes on the radio she loves me.”

Or I pick pedals from a flower to find out if she loves me.

We do that sort of thing don’t we? Because we’re curious about the future.

And the reality is, our concerns about the future can lead us toward God or they can lead us away from God.

There’s a story in the bible in the book of Acts about a young slave girl who had a spirit in her so she could predict the future. And she made a great deal of money for her owners by fortune telling.

In other words, people in that day wanted so desperately to find direction — to know about the future — that they would pay money to get some poor, spiritually misguided soul to predict their future.

Now, it’s only 2,000 years ago that people would do something that naive and superstitious, right?

It’s an amazing thing — there are thousands of psychics in San Francisco who want to be your psychic friend, who will give you direction for your future.

They’ll read your palm

They’ll read your Tarot card

They’ll read your wallet

They’ll look deeply into your eyes or into their crystal ball or whatever else they look at, and they’ll say they can give you counsel on your career, on your relationships, or they can help you find the purpose of life. And people flock to them for direction.

Listen, if they were really psychic, they would have called you.

Now, the truth about all of this is — people who look to psychics and horoscopes and do these sorts of things — they don’t particularly want direction.

What they really want is inside information for the future to accomplish their own ends.

They want to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, and they want a road map for how to do that.

And they want it disconnected from moral direction. They want it disconnected from the need to have a submitted character or a surrendered heart.

Direction from God is a whole different matter.

And it’s so important that we get this one as right as we can.

So we’re going to look at what we should be doing while we wait on God for direction. And I want to make this as concrete and practical as it can be.

I’ve discovered there are a number of things we can do while we wait on God for direction.

A lot of times in life it really does come down to:

Is it this way or tha