God's Waiting Room or Faith Gym?

What do you do after consulting God on an issue, 

and a big part of His answer is or seems to be, "Wait"?

I recently heard (live) a powerful and quite moving speech by Dr. Ronn Elmore (drronn.com) entitled, "Have a Seat in God's Waiting Room". This speech painted a vivid and very entertaining analogy between the experience of waiting in a dentist's office with an awful toothache, and waiting for God to answer urgent prayer. This speech prompted me to ponder the following questions, which may be on your mind, too, if you’ve ever “Had a Seat in God’s Waiting Room” for a protracted period of time:

1. When do I end up in God's waiting room -- before consulting Him on my petition, as with the dentist experience, or afterward? 
2. From God’s perspective, what really constitutes patient waiting? 
3. What to do while in God's so-called waiting room? 

Re. the first point, I readily recognized my waiting room experiences with God are the flip side/opposite of those in typical professional settings. I typically am required to wait AFTER praying. What about you?

Before addressing the remaining points, ponder with me a couple of questions:

• Honestly, when is your faith developed to receive from God, the answer to your typical prayer -- before you ask (pray) or afterward? 
• When is your faith to receive the answer most likely to wane??
• And WHAT is the typical evidence of …waning faith? 

The biggest problem we may encounter in God's waiting room may well be the tendency of devils to manipulate our thinking to focus on ANYTHING BUT the glorious climax -- the manifestation of answered prayer! One of their biggest deceptions may well be prompting us to apply to God's waiting room experiences, the 'patient mentality' of our human experiences, e.g., with the medical industry, or other similar professional waiting rooms. I, too, have been duped into believing waiting on manifestation of answered prayers means hunkering down, getting quiet and trying to prove to God and myself "just how patient I can be." After a long while with this approach, the vision and desire would slowly dry up and fade away, to the point that it didn't matter anymore! I gave up; caved in. My vision was D.O.A. (Dead On Application) of the "patient principle", or at least what I thought was patience. It was merely me slowly giving up ‘the fight of faith’! 

I now understand more clearly God's ways are so much higher than our ways. It boggles my mind to try to flip my image about being patient. The concept of patience really speaks to what we "do" while in God's waiting room. This is the place and time our faith may be on trial, and devils know it! This may be when God, in His loving but tough 'faith development' mindset’, offers us the opportunity to grow-up our faith to receive, materially, that which He has given to us, spiritually. If so, this is the time to come out fighting, swinging and jabbing with the "S-Word" (The Sword of the Spirit, which is the Spirit's Word!). We do this by increasingly confessing and professing God's promises, listening to them, feeding on them, praying them and meditating on them. We do this until God's promises become our 'new inner reality' over and above the 'temporal actuality' of our current circumstances. As noted in the blog post, Earth Still Producing After Its Kind, our mind is the biggest planting field of Earth’s system. Our mind and spirit, working together, simply reproduce, in actuality, the reality we mentally ‘see’ within, spiritually believe, and hold as Truth. Thoughts of our mind and heart, when fed, nourished and spoken, become seeds that have germinated and taken root. Their resulting fruits, are assured! 

Once their fruits are produced in our spirit, no devil can dislodge our 'faith vise' on God's promise. By this, God is incredibly PLEASED! Rather than our vision shriveling up and dying (the devil's wish!), it now has been magnified, and has developed exceptionally deep roots that won't easily be dislodged with the slightest pull or push from untoward forces, seen and unseen. This, I have come to understand, is "patience" to God -- quite the contrary to what I originally understood.

I tend to pray in response to needs others or I have, rather than when my faith to receive is strongest. Do you, too? As a result, I spend an inordinate amount of time in God's so-called "waiting room". Looking at this situation from the flip side, I now see this waiting room is not always where I am assigned to go and wait for God to get everything aligned, and carefully worked out before His answer is manifested. Often, it may be more of an assignment for me to go to the faith gym to develop and strengthen my faith to be able to receive my needed answer.

This tendency to do need-based praying rather than faith-based praying is both inefficient and unproductive. Knowing others and I will have needs that will move me to pray should, in itself, be sufficient wisdom for me to develop, en avance!, faith to receive well before any need materializes. Thus, I need to get ahead of the need-based praying “8 ball”, so to speak.  Do you, too?

In light of the above, God's waiting room may well be more like a "Faith GYM!". In this case, to help minimize time in His waiting room, before praying…

"Go to the gym, FIRST, you sluggard!" 

(Takeoff from Proverbs 6:6)

May this concept and the above picture help you, during your waiting experiences, to achieve a sustainable, laser-like focus on your end result, musing what God is shaping for your life. As you do, allow the vivid pictures of what you 'see' (the results of your prayers) to ignite within you, the fiery desire to fight and overcome any and all obstacles, seen and unseen, to the realization of your vision.

To help anchor this concept in your mind, please accept my challenge to share it with someone. Whatever we share, we retain; and what we teach, we (re)learn.

wOw!! This concept and picture really excite me as I, too, am definitely in God's Waiting Room ... oops, I mean Faith Gym. In fact, that is where I intend to LivE -- deliberately... always in expectancy!

How about you? 

NB: Thanks to BJT for the picture suggestions.