Day 1—The God of Our Salvation

Psalm 62:1 - For God alone my soul waits in silence; from Him comes my salvation.

If salvation indeed comes from God, and is entirely His work, just as creation was, it follows that our first and highest duty is to wait on Him to do the work that pleases Him. Waiting becomes then the only way to experience a full salvation, the only way, truly, to know God as the God of our salvation. All the difficulties 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 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.

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 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 redeemed man there is no power of goodness in himself: he has and can have nothing that he does not each moment receive. Waiting on God is just as indispensable, and must be just as continuous and unbroken as the breathing that maintains his natural life.

Christians have the need of absolute and unceasing dependence, and the unspeakable blessedness of continual waiting on God. When 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 hope and joy. As he realizes how God, as God, as Infinite Love, delights to give 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 day. God unceasingly gives and works; His child unceasingly waits and receives: this is the blessed life.

"Truly my soul waits upon God; from Him comes my salvation." We wait on God for salvation. We learn that salvation is only to bring us to God, and teach us to wait on Him. We find what is better still, that waiting on God is itself the highest salvation. It is giving to Him the glory of being All. It is the experiencing that He is All to us. May God teach us the blessedness of waiting on Him.

"My soul, wait only upon God!"