There are some stories that we love. As a child I loved David vs Goliath; small guy vs the big guy. The small guy wins. It was great. I really liked hearing about how each time, the underdog succeeded in spite of their failings. They were small, but with God it didn’t matter.
Of course, those are not the only stories in the Bible. Those are just the ones we like. We like to hear about the good guys winning against insurmountable odds. We love Gideon because he took just a few guys and routed a whole army in God’s name. We are not so sure what to do with Job.
We get a little uncomfortable when we talk about Abraham sacrificing Issac to God. It is one thing to praise a great faith, it is another to talk about a man prepared to sacrifice his son in a heart beat because God asked it. We don’t like that so much. We are really edgy when it comes to Job. He was a devout and faithful man, but he was tested. He lost everything. We cry out, “Hey that was not fair.” He was covered with sores and ready to die because it was his turn to be tested?
We love the image of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, but we side step the 40 years he spent in exile. We love this image of God’s heroes just going in and getting the job done. Their personal lives frighten us. They were ready for what God gave them – and it wasn’t milk and honey. We need to hear of these painful moments in God’s story so that we are reminded that God’s work is not done in an instant, but built into a person’s life. We need to hear these stories so that we remember what God is doing has nothing to do with a single interaction I have but with every instant of every day. These stories of sacrifice and waiting scare us. They should. They call us to a level of commitment that we have not yet reached.
They ask us to sacrifice and wait upon the Lord.

~JCPunk