David was 16 when Samuel anointed him as King over Israel. He was thirty when he saw partial fulfillment to that promise.
That is a fourteen year wait.
He started off strong in the wait – slaying a giant, defeating armies, living in the palace, marrying the king’s daughter. The wait was easy…until it wasn’t.
Then there were years of living in caves surrounded by scoundrels, being pursued and threaten by an angry king, seeing a household of priest slain because they showed you kindness, seeing your wife given to another, having your camp plundered and burned, seeing those scoundrels you have been surrounded by turn on you.
The wait was not easy.
The wait. No one likes the wait. We want quick fixes, instant growth, and immediate answers. We want to pray a prayer , click our heels three times and find ourselves standing in the middle of our promise. But God is in the wait. He is in the process.
If you are in the wait today, be encouraged by David. Character is built in the wait. Great Kings are formed in the wait. And though the wait maybe difficult, it is only temporary. The wait is momentary compared to the vastness of the promise.
Embrace the wait, remembering three important truths:
1. God is not the author of your pain. He is good.
2. There will be difficult times in the wait but that doesn’t mean God is angry with you or that He has forsaken you. You are conjoined with Christ regardless if you are in the wait or the fulfillment of the promise.
3. All things will work together for your good. ALL things – the difficult, the pleasant, the tragedies, the comedies, the deaths, the life’s, the hard, the easy, the incomprehensible, the understandable, the failures, the wins, the disappointments, the joys. ALL. God in His infinite restorative power takes all the ingredients of our lives and prepares a feast not just for us to enjoy but our enemies as well.
The wait is necessary.
“David was thirty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned forty years in all. He had reigned over Judah from Hebron for seven years and six months, and from Jerusalem he reigned over all Israel and Judah for thirty-three years.”
2 Samuel 5:4-5 NLT