If there’s one thing that can drive us nuts, it’s waiting. Waiting for news about a job, a promotion, a report card, the medical test, or for your loved one to be healed or come home? How about your kids to figure out life? Ever feel like you’re waiting on God?

In a society where we want everything right now, waiting can be one of the most difficult things we do. In this message we’ll learn why waiting matters, and what God is up to in the waiting.

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I can hardly wait for the bumper to be done so I can teach us all why waiting is so important.

It can drive me crazy when I have to wait for something… especially when I feel like, “I don’t know how long this is going to go on.”

We long for, “Now,” but we live in a world of, “Not yet.”

You get stuck in a traffic jam. You feel like it’s never going to untangle.

Or you call a company about a bill.

Or you want to order food to go.

Have you ever had this happen? Someone answers the phone, and they say, “Do you mind if I put you on hold?” It’s rhetorical. You can’t say, “No.”

Then they put you on hold, and you may be on hold for 10 minutes. It drives me crazy when that happens.

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Did you ever listen to a sermon that just goes on and on and on? You start to think, “This is never going to end.”

If you haven’t, just wait.

One of the reasons we don’t like waiting is waiting reminds me, “I’m not in control.

When I’m waiting, I can’t do any of the important things that make me feel like I’m accomplishing something because I’m just sitting around.” No one likes to do that.

Go to a doctor’s office. They have a whole room devoted to waiting. It’s called the waiting room.

No one volunteers to go to the waiting room.

The one person you never see in the doctor’s waiting room is the doctor.

You never have a receptionist say, “You go to his office. You get work done. You accomplish whatever you want to. When you’re ready, we’ll send the doctor in. He’ll be waiting in the waiting room for you.”

One of the rules of waiting is the less important person always has to wait on the more important person.

Waiting makes us feel less important… and we don’t like that.

I was at Disneyland recently with my family.

You have to wait so long in lines at Disneyland that they actually put signs up in the line that say, “From this point on, it will be another three days before you go on Guardians of the Galaxy.”

Wouldn’t it be great if they had signs like that in real life?

“From this point — six months till you find a spouse.”

Or, “From this point — four years till your kids grow up.”

Or, “From this point — 10 years till your spouse grows up.”

The problem with waiting is it’s not just that we don’t know when “now” is going to come; the problem is “now” may never come.

We may live in “not yet” for the rest of our lives… and it drives us crazy.

You may have seen this — there’s a video on Youtube(well over a million views now) of a guy who is at a fine-dining restaurant, and it takes so long for his order to get there, he actually calls a pizza place and has pizza delivered to the restaurant.

Everyone in the restaurant starts applauding this guy who refuses to wait so long for his food to come.

But then there are more serious and difficult kinds of waiting.

There’s the waiting of a single person to see if God might have marriage in store for him or her.

They’re living in “Not yet.”

There’s the waiting of a childless couple.

I was talking to a couple about how painful it can be, waiting. “God, will you let us start a family? It would be such a good thing. We want it so badly.”

They’re living in “Not yet.”

There’s the waiting of someone who just longs to have work to do that can help pay the bills and is meaningful and a contribution.

“Not yet.”

Theres’ the waiting of a deeply depressed person for one morning to come when, “I actually feel like I want to live another day.”

The waiting of a spouse who is just trapped in such a painful marriage; they feel like it’s never going to change.

The waiting of an elderly