Enthusiastic waiting — Judy Moore (12 July 2026)

Paul Duncan, I bumped into Paul and Henry on the high street yesterday, and we were talking a bit about waiting.

And we were talking about, in our childhood, and for the younger ones amongst you, you might find this hard to believe, we used to have to wait for strawberries in summer.

They were not an all-round produce.

They were a treat that you waited for until summer came.

You waited for satsumas in your stocking at Christmas.

Fruit was kind of in a cycle.

And it's interesting to me that as we've moved away from creation and the paradise that God made in Genesis, we have got further and further and quicker and quicker into wanting things now.

And even nature has been sort of compressed and influenced by our need for the immediate, whether it's fruit or whatever it is in our lives.

And that's the air that we breathe, as we heard last week.

We have that instant world now.

that is very hard spiritually for us not to ingest and take in.

We like quick, we like our prayers to be answered right now, and our theology and sometimes even our hope and entitlement can be wrapped up in that instant world that we live in.

But the Bible is a story of waiting throughout scripture.

You don't have to go far in the Old Testament or in the New Testament to see people who are waiting.

And the Psalms, as we've had brilliantly read for us, are an amazing resource if you are waiting.

You just have to go to one like the one we've just had.

I mean, I love the fact that this guy says, I think of God and I groan.

Does that help us? Yes.

He's finding it so hard.

This is a worship leader guy who's finding it so hard that even when he thinks of God at the beginning of this psalm, he groans.

He physically feels bereft by his circumstances.

Waiting is painful.

It's challenging.

And the Psalms can strengthen us.

The guy writing this, Asaf, is having a crisis of faith in the beginning.