Impatience isn’t an emotion simply tied to non-believers. Just because they have a relationship—even a strong one—with Jesus Christ, believers have been known to get more than a bit antsy from time to time.
Rusty George, the lead pastor at Real Life Church in Southern California, one of the fastest-growing churches in America, is in touch with those feelings. It’s what prompted him to write his book After Amen: What to Do When You’re Waiting on God. He also touches on the subject often on his podcast, Leading Simple with Rusty George, on the Charisma Podcast Network.
George says his new book was birthed out of conversations with congregation members who often get impatient when they pray about a certain need but aren’t hearing from God in a manner that they deem timely.
“People will come up and say, ‘I’ve got this problem, and will you pray for me,'” George told Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of the Greenelines podcast on CPN. “And I say, ‘well, sure. Have you prayed about it.’ They say, ‘well, I did, but God doesn’t speak to me. I didn’t hear anything from God. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.’
“It really got me asking the question, ‘what do you do after you say Amen?’ After you hang up the phone, or when you text somebody and then you see the three little dots come up, like they’re texting you back, and then sometimes it goes away, you wonder, oh, what do I do now? I started looking for books out there about what to do after you pray, and there are very few of them. So I decided, let’s go to Jesus, and we did a deep study on all the people that came to Jesus and asked for something. Very few of them got a ‘you got it,’ from Jesus.
“They all got homework. I want you to go show yourself to the priest. I want you to go wash yourself. I want you to believe that this will happen as you head back to your son. There were various things people had to do, like fill in the water jars for his first miracle. I noticed in the Bible there were trends of these things. So we put them in a book—seven things to do after you say, ‘Amen.’ This has produced a lot of fruit for us.
“Many are just surprised that there are things to do afterward. I think they just assumed that because the heavens didn’t part and they didn’t get their answer immediately, God was mad at them or God was waiting for them to do something like produce more passion. In reality, the answer kind of shows up as we work along the way and do the next right thing. That was a big ‘aha’ for people.”
For more of this compelling interview with Pastor Rusty George, listen to this Greenelines podcast. And make sure to tune in to Leading Simple with Rusty George on CPN. {eoa}
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