After telling the parable of the Ten Virgins, Yeshua (Jesus) said, “Be on the alert then, for you do not know the day nor the hour that I will come” (see Matthew 25:13). We also read that Yeshua told His followers, “Be dressed in readiness, and keep your lamps lit. Be like men who are waiting for their master when he returns from the wedding feast” (Luke 12:35–36).[1] So Yeshua gives us two commands: be on the alert and be waiting in readiness. This Scripture is where we receive the initial explanation from the Lord Himself about this idea that we wait upon the Lord. Christ is talking about His coming back and telling us to wait expectantly. Thus the blessed hope of all Christian belief is that Yeshua will descend out of heaven and return to establish His physical Kingdom here on this earth. We know that we are waiting primarily for His return, and we must have this anticipation in us.

There is something in this process of waiting wherein we are literally prepared for the presence and appearing of Christ. We are prepared to receive the fulfillment of the Scriptures and the prophecies God has given us as we wait on Him. Peter talks about “looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God” (2 Peter 3:12). There will be this hastening of the coming of the Lord that transpires. In Romans 8, Paul talks about how we have this earnest expectation, “waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23). This is the redemption that we wait for in Christ. In Philippians 1:20, Paul adds, “According to my earnest expectation and hope, that I will not be put to shame in anything.” By Paul’s waiting with earnest expectation, circumstances were driven to take place according to his faith.

First and foremost, we exercise our waiting on the Lord toward God. Our waiting is for Him; our waiting is upon Him. But in each case of our waiting, if we connect it to a Scripture, we find that something happens of a change in us. We are transformed into His image from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18). As we wait, a metamorphosis takes place in our lives because of the Word spoken by God. It connects the invisible realm of the Word that has been spoken to the natural level that we live in—including the literal change of our bodies into His glorious form that Paul talks about in Romans 8. That is what I want to emphasize. Why do we wait? We are waiting for things to transpire. Of course, we are waiting for His return, but there are other things that happen within that. Isaiah says,

Though youths grow weary and tired,
And vigorous young men stumble badly,
Yet those who wait for the LORD
Will gain new strength;
They will mount up with wings like eagles,
They will run and not get tired,
They will walk and not become weary. (Isaiah 40:30–31)

Do you need to be refreshed and invigorated in your life? It will come to us as we wait upon the Lord. His faithfulness, His compassions, and His lovingkindnesses are new every morning, for “the LORD is good to those who wait for Him” (Lamentations 3:25). We are to wait for our God continually (Hosea 12:6). And in our waiting upon Him, we will understand what God is doing in this generation.

[1] All Scripture references are from the New American Standard Bible 1995 (NASB1995).