September 13, 2026 • Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder • Kingdom Church Troy
[Drafted with AI assistance from the week’s sermon and reviewed before publishing]
A Culture Allergic to Waiting
Let’s be clear: nobody enjoys waiting. The proof is in the economy we’ve built around avoiding it — two-day has become same-day has become 30-minute shipping, food delivered to our door saves us from waiting for “fast” food, an endless array of apps offer instant access to everything, all the time, anywhere. Waiting has become something like a modern inefficiency, a problem our technology promises to engineer away. So when Scripture keeps circling back to waiting — not as a problem to solve but as a place to actually live — it’s worth stopping to ask why.
We’ve come to treat waiting as wasted time, evidence that something in our life is broken and needs fixing. Faster always equals better, right? But the desire to remove any gap between wanting and having comes at a cost, teaching that success depends on how quickly we can make things happen. And when we can’t make them happen quickly, we don’t just get impatient. We get anxious.
We all know the feeling. We know what we want and we know who we hope to become, yet the space between here and there stretches out endlessly in front of us. We watch people around us achieving their dreams, seemingly without effort, while we sit in a waiting room with our uncertainty and doubt.
The alternative? We opt not to wait, choosing instead to force the future we want now, thank you very much. Not waiting, we fill every hour with our own effort, our own solutions, our own frenzied productivity — often unaware that an anxious worry underlies and powers it all. If I don’t solve it, do it, build it, fix it… who will? Can you feel that one? Can you feel the weight… of not waiting?
Like a choose your own adventure book (do you remember those?), there’s a fork in the road leading to your future, and neither path seems particularly appealing: to wait or to worry. Which do you choose?
The Lord Is My Stronghold
Psalm 27 doesn’t answer this by promising David an easy exit from his waiting nor the power to go on his own. David names real enemies, real armies, real reasons to be afraid — and yet he writes:
“The Lord is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life — of whom shall I be afraid?”
Psalm 27:1
Notice the verse doesn’t say the danger disappears, or that the waiting evaporates. It says the Lord is the place David lives. Not a flashlight he switches on and then goes about his own business — a light he stays near, a stronghold he dwells inside. That’s the whole shift: the waiting room doesn’t go away. God fills it. He moves in.
A Heart That Seeks
This kind of waiting is not passive. David doesn’t sit back and coast; he seeks. His heart says of God, “seek his face” — and he answers, “your face, Lord, will I seek” (Psalm 27:8). Waiting on God is a moving toward, not a standing still, because the alternative isn’t neutral. If we’re not moving toward him, we’re drifting somewhere else; our culture makes sure of that.
It’s true, we seek, but — and this is so amazing — it’s only because we are sought. Before we ever turn to seek God’s face, he has already chosen in complete freedom to be our God, our light, our stronghold. The seeking after God David describes isn’t the price of admission. It’s the natural response of someone who has already been found.
Wait for the Lord
Cue the Hollywood ending? Sorry to disappoint. David is still surrounded — by false witnesses, oppressors, voices that want to pull him off the path (Psalm 27:12). What changes isn’t his circumstances; it’s where his confidence is anchored: “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (Psalm 27:13). And then the psalm closes with an instruction repeated twice for emphasis, because we need to hear it more than once — wait for the Lord, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord! (Psalm 27:14).
That’s not a consolation prize. It’s the whole of it. The waiting we’re in — the gap between the life we have and the life we’re hoping for, the diagnosis we’re bracing for, the relationship we’re longing for, the answer that hasn’t come — isn’t a flaw in the plan. It’s where God is doing the slow work of shaping us into sons and daughters who trust him rather than our own hustle. We don’t have to solve it. We don’t have to outrun it. We get to dwell, and wait, and seek his face, and let him be the stronghold he already is.
Wait for the Lord. Be strong and take heart.