"Therefore the LORD longs to be gracious to you, And therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you. For the LORD is a God of justice; How blessed are all those who long for Him." Isaiah 30:18 NAS

What a sweet verse this is. It is a perfect picture of God's patient mercy. The LORD most certainly longs to be gracious to you. The key word in this verse is 'longs'. Imagine for a minute the times in your life when you longed for something. Imagine when you longed for that something for a while. Was it something that you waited for with an anxious excitement? Was it something that brought you delight? That is the desire the LORD has with us and toward us. He delights in and waits to be gracious to us and show us His compassion.

It says in Psalm 37:23, "The steps of a man are established by the LORD; And He delights in his way." He waits for us to come to Him. The actual word 'longs' in Hebrew is chakah (khaw-kaw') and means to adhere to; hence, to await. The KJV uses it as long, tarry, wait (1). We get the same picture in the New Testament from 2 Peter 3:9-10 where it says, "The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance."

He awaits for us to come to Him so He can pour out His never-ending gracious compassion over us. When we long for Him in the same way, His delight is to pour Himself over us. He proved that to us by His love for us on the cross. So much so that the price of taking our sins is immeasurable. He longs for our all and we add nothing to God what so ever. We do however bring Him glory when we give Him everything we have so that He can be our all in all.

Remember the question I asked about that something you deeply longed for? I can remember as a kid having a paper route. I longed to have this 13" black and white TV for my bedroom. I really longed and waited for it. So much so that I took my little paper route money and put that TV on layaway at Kmart. It took me a little bit to get that TV, but I was so happy to finally get what I had longed for as a 13 year old boy can be. What an awesome God we love and serve.

The same goes for us when we long for the Lord and wait on Him. He fills us with great delight and meets all our desires. Proverbs 13:19 says, "Desire realized is sweet to the soul..." Some times this can mean waiting on Him. This can be a problem for some and especially in this microwave oven world today. It has a great deal to do with how we view God. So the question is how do we view God? What kind of picture does the world get when they think about God? I think this can be a major perception problem. How we have been taught to perceive God through life and experience reflects how we understand His love.

The attitude and thought of a lot of people today is that God is a God of judgment, always looking down with an angry pointing finger. Many in the world today think that God is just waiting for them to mess up so He can look down and point the finger of failure at them. Where you think we learn this concept or have this perception? I suppose that in a way some of these concepts of God are due to people having a bad experience in a church.

Churches can be known for being very judgmental and in the days of old they were in some ways. Funny enough I heard it said once that it is amazing how we preach and sing, "Come just as you are..." when it comes to evangelizing and getting them to accept Christ. Then once someone has said the prayer we lay a bunch of do's and don'ts on them immediately afterwards. Then may come condemnation or legalism.

Thankfully I attend a fellowship where grace is taught with the right amount of scripture direction and love to give you the heart that wants to surrender and become like Jesus. I pray you are blessed in that way also. Well this devotional was very long so I decided to break it up into two devotionals. In the next devotional we will talk more about concepts and perceptions we may have of God and how He truly longs for us.