In John 7:6, we find two words that we normally don’t like to hear. Those two words are “not yet.”

Do you like to wait — waiting in traffic, waiting for the delivery of an important package, waiting in a hospital emergency room? 

Waiting is hard. It feels like a waste of time.

In John 7, this is how the brothers of Jesus felt. They tell him to stop wasting his time in Galilee and go to Jerusalem. That’s where the people will be … celebrating the Feast of Booths. They want Jesus — as they say in verse 4 — to “show [himself] to the world” (v. 4).

But Jesus says to his brothers, “My time has not yet come” (v. 6). The time was not right.

Jesus is someone who was used to waiting. Think about it: he waited 30 years before he began his public ministry, living in obscurity. Does that seem like a waste of time to you? If he had started earlier, he could have done much more teaching and performed many more miracles. But that wasn’t the plan of God. So Jesus waited for 30 years.

Waiting is hard. It’s not easy to wait on God’s timing.