Never Give Up

You know what I’ve noticed about God’s trials? He hardly ever tells you, “This is a trial, and if you hold out for six months, you’ll be through.” And some of us get to five months and 29 days, and we give up. We didn’t know we only had one more day.

Never give up. There’s no precedent in the Bible for giving up. God determines how long the test will last, not we.

You see, waiting is one of the tests to which God almost invariably subjects the servants He intends to use. I’ll give you just a little list. Abraham.

“You’re going to have a son who will be the head of a nation that will be unique in the earth.”

How long did he have to wait? 25 years.

Meanwhile, his dear wife Sarah tried to help him and complicated things. It’s interesting. She said, “Listen to me, do what I say.” First of all, “Have a child by Hagar.” And later she said, “Get rid of the child.” That’s the counsel of the flesh. It’s inconsistent. Tells you to do one thing and later cancels it.

But Abraham became the man he was by waiting. He had to watch his wife pass the age of childbearing and still wait.

It amazes me that Abraham is so highly rated in the Bible. But what did he do? Well, essentially, he was a prosperous cattle farmer. And he wandered around the area to the east end of the Mediterranean, looking after his flocks and his herds. He did nothing very dramatic until the time came that he offered up, or was willing to offer up, his son Isaac.

I’ve often asked myself, what was it in Abraham that caused God to esteem him so highly that he was called ‘a friend of God’? And I’m not sure that I really know the answer. But I think one way he earned God’s favor was by waiting.

Some of you are going to forfeit God’s favor if you don’t wait. And then there was Joseph. I love the passage in Psalm 105 that speaks about Joseph. I think I can identify with this to some extent from my own experience. Psalm 105, verse 17 and following.

“God sent a man before them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave. They hurt his feet with fetters. His soul came into irons.”

Somebody said the iron came into his soul, too.

“Until the time that his word came to pass, the word of the Lord tested him.”

See, that’s a test. The Lord gives you a glorious promise, tremendous. And after that, everything goes the opposite way. Instead of becoming the ruler over your brethren, you end up in a jail in Egypt. And I can’t think of a worse place to be in jail than Egypt. What was God doing? Testing him. What was the test? Waiting.

And then, if you want to look at another, Moses. It says in Numbers 12:3,

“Moses was the meekest man on earth.”

How did Moses learn meekness? By waiting, by waiting 40 years.

Somebody asked another preacher friend of mine, “Why did God keep Moses waiting 40 years?” And the answer was, “Because He couldn’t do it in 39.” God will not finish until the test is complete. When Moses first thought he could deliver Egypt, he was—Israel out of Egypt, he was a very arrogant young man. 40 years later, he was the meekest man on earth. And no one, except Jesus, has ever exercised such authority as Moses exercised.

So, if you want to have authority, you know what you need to cultivate? Meekness. God cannot trust His authority to the arrogant, the proud, the self-assertive. We had a prophetic word that said that in so many words.

You know the condition for promotion in the kingdom of God? It’s very easy. It’s abase yourself.

“Everyone who abases himself will be exalted.”

But on the other hand,

“Everyone who exalts himself will be”—abased.

That’s right. You have the choice. That’s an unalterable law that governs the universe.

People talk about breaking God’s laws. That’s not true. We don’t break God’s laws. God’s laws break us, if we break them. And then let’s think just about David for a moment. Another young man who was given tremendous promises of God. And he spent the next, I don’t know how many years, I think probably about 15 years, living, as he said himself,

“like a dead dog or a partridge on the mountains,”

running away from the man whom he was to succeed as king. Why does God permit that? In fact, why does God ordain that? What is He looking for? In one word—I didn’t hear you. Endurance. That’s right.

You cannot bypass endurance. You know whom I’m speaking to at the moment? Me. You cannot bypass endurance and enter into the promises of God. You can come so far, but the completeness is only through endurance. And just when it seems impossible to hold out, that’s the time to hold on. Don’t give in. I would like to say that to several of you individually. You’re in the test. You’re doing all right. Just hang in there. Don’t back out. Don’t give up. God is faithful.

I’ve been asked sometimes, “If I had a message to leave for posterity, what would it be?” I always say I can give it to you in three words: “God is faithful.” I’ll tell you another thing about waiting. It causes us to realize, more and more, our dependence on God. I can’t do anything. I can’t make it happen. I don’t know when He’s coming. I just depend on Him.

I don’t know whether you ladies ever have problems in your house, but we do in Israel. Sometimes our electricity fails, for reasons we can’t analyze. And we’re in the middle of cooking something, or somebody’s doing the ironing. And we phone, and we eventually catch up with our electrician. It’s midday. He says, “I’ll try to be there by 4:00 p.m.” So what do we do for 4 hours? We wait. And by the end of 4 hours, you know, we’ve learned one thing: We need the electrician. We’re dependent on him.

So, waiting causes us to realize, in an altogether new measure, our dependence on Jesus.