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EXCURSION DEVOTIONAL FOR TODAY: Working on UASV today, much closer to the hardcover being done.

WAITING ON GOD: The God of our Salvation

Psalm 62:1 Updated American Standard Version (UASV)

62 My soul waits in silence for God only;
from him comes my salvation.

IF salvation indeed comes from God, and is entirely His work, just as our creation was, it follows, as a matter of course, that our first and highest duty is to wait on Him to do that work as pleases Him. Waiting becomes then the only way to the experience of a full salvation, the only way, truly, to know God as the God of our salvation. All the difficulties that are brought forward as keeping us back from full salvation, have their cause in this one thing: the defective knowledge and practice of waiting upon God. All that the Church and its members need for the manifestation of the mighty power of God in the world, is the return to our true place, the place that belongs to us, both in creation and redemption, the place of absolute and unceasing dependence upon God. Let us strive to see what the elements are that make up this most blessed and needful waiting upon God: it may help us to discover the reasons why this grace is so little cultivated, and to feel how infinitely desirable it is that the Church, that we ourselves, should at any price learn its blessed secret.

The deep need for this waiting on God lies equally in the nature of man and the nature of God. God, as Creator, formed man, to be a vessel in which He could show forth His power and goodness. Man was not to have in himself a fountain of life, or strength, or happiness: the ever-living and only living One was each moment to be the Communicator to him of all that he needed. Man’s glory and blessedness was not to be independent, or dependent upon himself, but dependent on a God of such infinite riches and love. Man was to have the joy of receiving every moment out of the fullness of God. This was his blessedness as an unfallen creature.

When he fell from God, he was still more absolutely dependent on Him. There was not the slightest hope of his recovery out of his state of death, but in God, His power and mercy. It is God alone who began the work of redemption; it is God alone who continues and carries it on each moment in each individual believer. Even in the regenerate man there is no power of goodness in himself: he has and can have nothing that he does not each moment receive; and waiting on God is just as indispensable, and must be just as continuous and unbroken, as the breathing that maintains his natural life.

It is, then, because Christians do not know their relation to God of absolute poverty and helplessness, that they have no sense of the need of absolute and unceasing dependence, or the unspeakable blessedness of continual waiting on God. But when once a believer begins to see it, and consent to it, that he by the Holy Spirit must each moment receive what God each moment works, waiting on God becomes his brightest hope and joy. As he apprehends how God, as God, as Infinite Love, delights to impart His own nature to His child as fully as He can, how God is not weary of each moment keeping charge of his life and strength, he wonders that he ever thought otherwise of God than as a God to be waited on all the day. God unceasingly giving and working; His child unceasingly waiting and receiving this is the blessed life.

PSALM CHAPTER 62 (UASV)

Salvation Comes from God Alone

For the choir director; according to Jeduthun. A Psalm of David.

62 My soul waits in silence for God only;
from him comes my salvation.
²He alone is my rock and my salvation,
my stronghold; I shall not be greatly shaken.

³How long will all of you attack a man
    to murder him,
    like a leaning wall, a stone wall?
⁴They only plan to topple him from his high position.
    They take delight in falsehood.
They bless with their mouths,
    but inwardly they curse. Selah

⁵For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence,
    for my hope is from him.
⁶He only is my rock and my salvation,
    my stronghold; I shall not be shaken.
⁷On God rests my salvation and my glory;
    the rock of my strength, my refuge is God.

⁸Trust in him at all times, O people;
pour out your heart before him;
God is a refuge for us. Selah

⁹The sons of men are a mere breath;
    the sons of mankind are a delusion;
in the balances they go up;
    they are together lighter than a breath.
¹⁰Do not trust in oppression;
    set no vain hopes on robbery;
    if riches increase, set not your heart on them.

¹¹Once God has spoken;
twice have I heard this:
that strength belongs to God,
¹²and that to you, O Jehovah, belongs loyal love.
For you will render to a man
according to his work.

Andrew Murray, Waiting on God! Daily Messages for a Month (New York; Chicago; Toronto: Fleming H. Revell, 1896), 17–20.