The time you spend waiting on the Lord is never wasted. You may be frustrated by the stacks of work you have to do, but you will be blessed if you are dedicated to wait on the Lord first. If you have a sense of true values, you know that your time with the Lord is your most important time. Then the things that fall in place afterwards will seem to be by divine execution. You will not tremble or worry about deadlines, because they will all be met more efficiently. Everything will fall into place because the Lord is with you. Where should our emphasis be? What is the Lord’s emphasis? We are learning our priorities. Sometimes we do what seems to be less important by human judgment, and yet we are doing what is the most important as far as God is concerned.
God has a way of revealing—of sharing a little about His ways. When you have a decision to make, yet you feel in the Lord you are not to make it at that time, then proceed to walk on with the Lord. People may be waiting for your decision. Keep right on walking. In the process of going from glory to glory, from step to step, you learn what you need to know in order to make the decision that has been temporarily withheld from you until the Lord has met your heart. Then He gives you the answer. If you try to meet every need as it presents itself, you will see that the answer is ready, but you are not always ready to hear it. Therefore you must wait. Do not worry or be of an anxious heart, but commit your problems to the Lord. Pray, “Lord, lead me today. Show me what I am to do right now.”
A problem may be of supreme importance, but it is more important that it be met in God rather than by your best effort to do what you can. Your day may be like one of the days the Lord experienced. It was hard to determine what was most important when He was on His way to heal a little girl who was dying. She was the daughter of Jairus—a good man, a centurion, a man of faith who wanted the Lord to come and heal his daughter. Jesus was on His way to heal the little girl, ready to meet Jairus on his terms, the way Jairus thought it ought to be done and when he thought it ought to be done. It was an emergency to be met immediately.
In the midst of this, the Heavenly Father threw in something else that seemed to bungle this miracle. A woman touched the hem of Jesus’ garment and was healed, and so He stopped and said, “Who touched Me?” He could have hurried on because the girl was dying. But He stopped and talked to the woman and gave her release and blessing. Then someone came to tell Him He was too late. The girl was dead.
Does that seem like a masterpiece of bad planning? It would seem that if we have our priorities right, we should heal the dying first and then heal the sick. Though the woman had suffered twelve years of hemorrhaging, and had spent all she had on physicians, she could have endured a little bit longer. Shouldn’t the first problem have been taken care of first? No, do not reason it that way. Have you ever heard the story about the man who went out to hunt ducks? Though many ducks were flying that day, he returned without a duck and said, “Every time I aimed my shotgun at a duck, another one flew in the way and ruined my shot.” The Lord was in a similar situation. When He was ready to perform one mighty miracle, another came in the way and He had to perform it. But did He miss the first miracle? No, He did not miss it. He went on and raised the girl from the dead, all for the glory of God (Luke 8:41–56).
We must learn, as the Lord learned, to be sensitive to the Spirit and to be led by the Spirit. We ourselves cannot evaluate what things are most important, and what are not. It is the Holy Spirit who gives us the wisdom to evaluate what is set before us. Every day is like a day that Jesus faced. When we are set to do something important, something else comes in the way. Yet it is all right. When the day is done, everything will be taken care of.
Yearn to be so sensitive to the Lord that you say, “Lord, I feel You are there before me, leading me; and You are behind me, my rear guard. You are the shade upon my right hand; You are my defense. You are my protection; You are my mighty tower. I feel that I am invincible, and yet expendable. I am protected for one purpose, that I might completely do Your will with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my mind, and with all my strength. In order to help me, You are a fire in the midst of me and a wall of fire around me, too. You are protecting me, so that I can fulfill my glorious destiny of humbly doing Your will with all my heart.”