Anxiety and Authenticity - Part III

In the word itself – the word of God that comes to me – is the strength I need. That word from God to me is my daily manna. I’ve tried to store it up. It doesn’t work. God’s word to me, God’s word through others, can fill a reservoir to draw on as needed, can inform the word God has for me at a specific moment. But God wants to meet with me daily. As He did with Adam and Eve in the garden.

This word is not the routine itself. It is not merely the discipline of meeting with God. That is the problem with stale habits and traditions. The form is not the word. We won’t hear from God just because we have a routine.

But the form gives place for the word to come. How can we hear from God without those forms? We are more likely to hear from Him if we set aside place in our lives to hear from Him. That is the strength of regular time with God, of regular time of coming together with His people. In relationship, quantity time and quality time are not the same, but it is hard to have quality without quantity. So setting aside time for hearing from God is one thing.

A second thing is also required. I am reminded as I write that expectation is a necessary ingredient. The old ketchup commercial so effectively expressed the feeling of “anticipation” – the expectation that through the long wait, the ketchup will come. The joy of dating when we are in a relationship that is moving toward commitment is that something special may come of that date. Dating, even the relationship itself, gets stale when we lose that sense of anticipation, of expectation.

The old tarrying custom of Believers in earlier decades was filled with expectation that in waiting on God something was going to happen. But eventually that activity of tarrying became an end in itself. When I was a teenager, a group of us started gathering for a prayer meeting because we were motivated to pray. The prayer meeting grew and with it a sense that God was at work in our midst. Then came the day that we were encouraged to come to the prayer meeting so that we could pick up that sense again. By then, the value of the meeting had been lost.

We don’t get back to the sense of expectation by reviving the habit of tarrying – or by adopting any other particular style of spirituality – any more than we can revive the sense of impending discovery in our married lives by dating as we did before we were committed. We can still date, but the secret is not the form. It is coming to the current forms of the relationship with a sense of anticipating that something fresh will happen.