Waiting on the Morning

Samuel D. Dean
First Baptist Church
Clinton, TN
January 20, 1985


One night as I was a little bit delirious with fever, I longed for the morning to come. When you can't sleep, the night becomes very long. And there is a great deal of anticipation for morning to come. I remember going through moments of grief when the same thing happened. When you lose a very dear loved one and you go to bed, there is something about your psychology that makes you almost rebel against sleep. And if you sleep, you sleep in short segments. It's a restless sleep and you long for the morning to come and for the night to be behind you. The same thing happens when you are wanting to go on a great trip. You can get so excited about the trip, that you anticipate the morning so much. My wife was kidding with me this morning (no...she really wasn't kidding with  me....she was being very honest). My family also gave me a rough time this morning. They said that I acted more like a child than my own children when it comes to snow. Because at midnight last night what was I doing?....Watching the snow! I got up and checked on the snow twice in the middle of the night... I guess to make sure it was going to make it without me. I was the first one up. My wife told me to go back to bed. I didn't listen to her, and I got up anyway.....thus I was the first person here at church this morning. Our janitors couldn't make it, so I came and unlocked the church and made sure everything was in shape. Partly because I was eager, ready to go. I told  my wife that I would be delighted today to drive to Bristol if she wanted to go because I LOVE to go in weather like this.  I know I'm crazy, but I just delight in getting up in the morning and going in the snow. There's something about the anticipation of the breaking of day with all of its possibilities. That, to me, is exciting times.

Now I've said all that so you might get a little bit of the feeling of what the psalmist had in mind when he wrote these words. He had the same thirst for the morning when he said, "My soul waits for the Lord more than a watchmen (or as one translation says...they that watch) for the morning." As you well know, in Biblical days, they had people who would keep watch over the city. The night was divided into four watches, three hours each. It was the duty of the watchman to make sure that the city was going to be safe. It was a rather boring job, in the sense, because generally the city was going to be safe. However, you had to have someone there to watch and be sure that someone, or an army, wasn't going to approach the city to do harm to the inhabitants. The last watch was a crucial watch.....it was the one when everything would be very still before the dawn. The watchman would certainly anticipate the rising of the sun because the rising of the sun would mean several things. It would mean that the city had made it though another night safely. But it also meant the end of a day's work, or a night's work. And so, the watchman would be eagerly waiting for the first ray of morning to come. He would be looking for it and longing for it. So the psalmist said, "My very being longs for God, more than those who watch for the morning." Why did he say that? In verse one he tells us why. He said, "Out of the depth I cry to thee, O Lord." What depths? He doesn't really say, and that's one thing about good poetry, good songs and good literature....sometimes it has the ability to be a little allusive and take you in a direction without tying you down very specifically.

Here he is talking about the depths of his soul. He doesn't tell you quite what the depths are that he had gone to, but you know that he is really down. He may be down because of feelings of guilt. He may be down because of personal failures. He may be down because of what is happening currently in his country. Whatever it is, something has brought him down very low, has engulfed him with darkness, and he feels that the night of the spirit has descended to his soul. He is like a watchman waiting, longing, hoping, crying and praying to God for the first break of dawn to come and to offer him some hope.

There are some meaningful insights here. First, notice that he is so personal. He said out of the depths I cry. He is sharing his personal life. You know, one thing about problems is they become personal. And one thing about struggling with problems is usually you have to make a decision.....no one else can make it for you. You maybe in the depths of despair, struggling, trying to know what decision to make. It may be that night has engulfed you. And it becomes so personal. You can talk to your friends, they can give you advice, but you go home and feel you are back to where you started. YOU have to make the decision. You can talk to God and even as you cry to God, you turn away from Him and reflect.  You still are aware that YOU have to make the decision. There's something personal about problems that sometimes provoke us into moments of despair, when we feel that we are in the depths. The depths may be many things in our lives. What can we do when we face them? He says, "I wait for the Lord....I wait." One of the hardest things to do in life is wait. We want to do something immediately, but there are moments in our lives when we can do nothing else but to wait. "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength." There is a divine type of waiting that is necessary. When you are sick, sometimes you have to wait to get better. I learned that again this week when I tried to get up several times. I was on the verge of fainting and I had to run to bed as fast as I could go. I wasn't worried about my dignity. I was worried about getting back to bed where I could wait in order to get some strength. Sickness is that way. You cannot have surgery and the next day go out and resume normal schedule. God has a time table that it takes to recover. Your body demands time. You have to wait. And when you go through bereavement, you just cannot go back to work the next day and live as if you have not lost your loved one. There is time that God has allocated for the healing of the soul that goes through grief. It will take days, weeks, and if it is a husband or a wife, it may take months and years. There is the divine waiting for the healing of God to become effective. We have to WAIT on the Lord.

Sometimes we are like Jonah. We like to run away from God. But sometimes, we want to run ahead of God. We want God to do it our way, on our time schedule. Sometimes we Christians make this mistake. We think that we can do something and we ought to have immediate results. But the results sometimes come very gradually, over a period of years. I love what Paul would say to us. "Let us not be weary in well doing, for in due season we shall reap if we faint not." What in the world is the due season? The due season is the season of God. If you do what's right, eventually you will reap. It may not be tomorrow, it may not be next month, maybe not next year, but there is a spiritual principal which is at work. ..that when you do what is right, eventually there will be a harvest from that rightness. We need to be able to wait on God and His process to work in our hearts and lives.

But there's another thing. Not only did he say I'm going to wait on the Lord, but he said, "I hope". For in spite of all the darkness, he was hoping, trusting, believing in God's Word.... that somewhere out there, dawn was going to break. As sure as he was alive, he believed that there was a dawn ahead for him. My friends....I believe this with all my heart. Whenever you are down and out, try to look for the breaking of dawn. Always face your life toward the East....toward the rising sun. Always face your life toward Christ where you can see the breaking of His light and His grace in your life.

Alex Haley noted an interesting fact about graveyards here in the Appalachia area. They face East....they face in the rising sun.......the belief that when Christ comes, He will come from the East. It is encouraging to stand in a graveyard and to feel the sun rays of the morning at a sunrise service, for the graves many times do face the East....the breaking of a new day. I believe as Christians, we need to always have that faith, regardless of how bad it is....regardless of how difficult life is.....regardless of how sick we are....regardless of what problems our country faces.....that there is a God who can break forth, and there can be a new day dawning in our lives. And that gives us hope and faith to go through the darkness, trying to anticipate the morning.

As Annie says in the play, "The sun will come out tomorrow.....you can bet your bottom dollar." As Christians, we can say that too. The sun will come out in all our lives, tomorrow. And even for all our friends and loved ones who are facing death, we Christians can still say and believe that the sun will come out tomorrow. And God's great eternity will offer a ray of hope, a blessed future for them as well as for us. "My soul doth trust in the Lord, and I watch for the morning..." Keep your eyes toward the East, where the rising sun of God's presence will break into your life and will bring purpose, joy, and brightness....even in the midst of what seems to be an all-engulfing gloom and doom.

Will you pray with me....