Confession Remains The Same
The Anatomy of the Wait - Part V
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In every single season, my confession stays the same. I was made to glorify your name.
There is a strange grace in the way God will sometimes align His instruction and His testing so that they arrive in the same season on the same subject. That is what has happened in this series. While we have been walking together through the anatomy of waiting on God, my own wait has been actively tested, and the report card has returned with an overwhelming failure in the course that is faithfulness. “If we are faithless, He remains faithful; he cannot disown himself.” I have read that verse from 2 Timothy for years without needing it the way I need it now.
I have been in a season of waiting myself, waiting in so many areas of my life that the world as I know it has become a pressure cooker of sorts. The vision and the promises that God has given have become a tool of torture in the arsenal of the enemy. My heart leaps with joy every time a door opens, the very door I am convinced God showed me, only for it to shut abruptly and spectacularly in my face. In the build-up to what I have believed would be the deliverance and manifestation of God’s promises to me, I have sung with so much joy and energy because I felt as though I was standing at the walls of Jericho, and I had also seen the walls come down. But when the walls do not come down for reasons known only to God, a bitterness takes over me. I ask Him why he has brought me this far to bring me this far. I open my mouth to pray but I cannot find the words to say. And I sit in anger with God, the author and finisher of my faith, because the ideas I had for my life have not materialized in the ways I thought they should, and I have ended one waiting season not with resolution but with extension.
As I conclude this series on waiting on God, I write from a place of pain turned to instruction. The recent months have delivered what almost seem like knockout punches of disappointment arriving one after another. And in the middle of the breaking, God has taught me a song, quietly and without ceremony, and I will be singing it under my breath in seasons when I do not know what else to say. It goes like this: In every season my confession remains the same. I was made to glorify your name.
The song came to me at the pit of my despair and disappointment, and I have been working backward from the song ever since, trying to find the ground in scripture on which a confession like that could stand without collapsing under the weight of the disappointment it has to survive. The ground I keep returning to is Psalm 16.
David wrote it, and he wrote it not from a comfortable palace but from a life that had known betrayal and cave and delay and false accusations and running from the man who sat on the throne God had promised him. The psalm opens with a plea for protection and then turns to a declaration that reorganizes every approach to whole waiting.
“Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup; you make my lot secure. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.”
The Lord alone is my portion. Not the Lord and the promise. Not the Lord and the answered prayer. Not the Lord and the door that opened. The Lord alone. The portion is not the deliverance or the manifestation. The portion is the God who is with me while I am waiting for both, and if I have not learned to say that the Lord alone is my portion I have not yet learned to sing the song the God is teaching me. Because when the door closes and the walls do not fall and the season ends not with resolution but with extension, if my portion was the answer I was waiting for I am left with nothing. But if my portion is the Lord, then the extension of the season is the extension of the portion, and there is more of God to be received in the waiting than there was in the deliverance I thought I needed.
David goes further. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, and the pleasant places are not the outward circumstances. The pleasant places are the places where the Lord Himself is the inheritance, and when the boundary lines of your visible life have not fallen where you hoped they would fall. David is telling us that the boundary lines have still fallen in pleasant places because the pleasantness is not in the geography but in the God who occupies it with you.
Then he moves to the turn that carries the whole psalm, and this is the theological ground on which the song can be sung honestly. “Because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead, nor will you let your faithful one see decay. You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.”
The visible chapter is not the ending, and the disappointment is not the verdict. Whatever door has closed spectacularly, whatever wall has failed to fall, whatever season has ended with extension rather than resolution, the ending is not written by the closed door or the standing wall or the extended season. The ending is written by the God who will not abandon His faithful one to the realm of the dead, and who is making known to us a path of life whose destination is joy in His presence and eternal pleasures at His right hand.
This is why the confession remains the same. Because the confession does not rest on the answer to the prayer. It rests on the character of the God who receives the prayer, and the character of that God does not change when the door closes and does not change when the walls do not fall and does not change when the season is extended rather than resolved. He remains my portion when the answer does not arrive, because He was always the portion and the answer was only ever the sign of the portion.
David needed the cave before the crown. He needed the years of hiding and the years of watching Saul occupy the throne and the years of psalm-writing from inside caves that were not pleasant, so that when he finally came into the kingship he could sincerely sing Psalm 16 as a man whose portion had been tested and had held. Joseph needed the pit before the palace. He needed the slavery and the false accusation and the forgotten promise, so that when he stood before his brothers he could say “It was not you who sent me here, but God,” because a man whose portion was God rather than deliverance can look across every pit and every prison and see God’s hand in them without collapsing under what they cost.
I am not there yet. I am still in the season where the door has closed and I sometimes sit in anger with God, the One who knew me before I was formed in my mother’s womb… But the song has come while I have been sitting there, and the song has been quiet and persistent and it has not left me alone. In every single season, my confession stays the same. I was made to glorify your name…
When I began this series, I did not know was going to end with my own testing on the material I had been teaching. If we are faithless, He remains faithful. He cannot disown Himself. And the confession that stays the same is not the confession of a man whose portion has been delivered but the confession of a man whose portion is the Lord alone, whether or not the delivery ever arrives on the timeline I had hoped for.
So this is the note the series ends on. Not with a fist-bumping victory that closes the arc cleanly, but with a song God has put on my heart in the middle of the breaking, with a renewed surrender because with all I am I must worship Him. I leave you with it because it is the only thing I have left to leave.
I sing:
I was made to glorify your name.
I was made to glorify your name.
In every single season, my confession stays the same.
I was made to glorify your name.
Here’s my heart, here’s my song.
Here’s my oil, have it all.
Here’s my life, all I do.
With all I am, I worship you.
We Pray
Lord who remains faithful when we are faithless,
we come at the end of this series with the confession you have been teaching us to sing, and we sing it not because we feel it but because you have not stopped being who you are while our own faithfulness has broken down under the weight of what we thought you were going to do.
Teach us that you alone are our portion. Not you and the deliverance. Not you and the answered prayer. Not you and the door that opened. You alone, and if we have to unlearn what we have quietly attached to your name in order to sing it honestly, unlearn it in us until the confession is clean.
Teach us that the boundary lines have fallen in pleasant places even when the geography does not look pleasant, because the pleasantness was never in the geography but in the God who is our inheritance inside it.
Do not let the extended seasons be wasted seasons. Do not let the pain be pain without instruction. Do the work of the wait in us, the work you did in David before the crown and in Joseph before the palace, so that when we are asked to look across our own pits and our own caves we can say what they said, that you were sending us there for a purpose we could not see and could not have chosen and would not have survived without you.
Give us the song. Not as a summary of what we have understood but as a benediction on what we have not yet understood. Give it to us for the mornings when the door closes and the walls do not fall and the season is extended rather than resolved. Give it to us when the prayers cannot find words and the anger has settled in and the ideas we had for our lives have not materialized in the ways we thought they should. Give it to us until it is the last thing we say and the first thing we sing.
In every single season, our confession stays the same. We were made to glorify your name.
In the name of the One who kept His confession in the garden and on the cross, who said not my will but yours while the door was closing on the deliverance He had asked for, and who was raised on the third day into the joy that was set before Him.
Amen.