Crushing: God Turns Pressure into PowerSample

A Vat Full of Wait

Some years after I finally accepted my calling, I remember pleading with God to allow me to preach. It was one thing to not even want the calling in the first place. But to be called and then be forced to sit in the background and listen to people speak from books of the Bible they couldn’t even properly pronounce was the most aggravating experience of my life. It was during my inner court period that the Lord was developing my gift. I would be in the shower, preaching to bars of soap and washrags. I would be walking through the woods of West Virginia, laying hands on trees. All of this might sound comical to you, but I now see these moments as part of a season of fermentation. 

I spent years cleaning out the baptismal pool and leading devotional services before worship began, wondering when it would be my time to stand and proclaim the infallible Word of God. My heart would ache because I knew I had something to offer. Like the disciples, my heart was rent because the process didn’t happen like I wanted. 

But waiting was far more beneficial because the Lord was working on something marvelous in a secret place. He was working on my character. He was working on my heart. He was working on my nervousness. He was working on my motives. He was working on my wisdom. He was working on me, boiling off every single impurity because there was no way God was going to present to the world an unrefined, unfermented underdeveloped product. 

When it comes to winemaking, the fermentation stage is nothing more than a waiting area for the grapes. They have already been crushed, and now the grapes find themselves in an aspect of the process where there is no pain, so to speak. It’s in that transitory moment of waiting that God is preparing you for the next step. Destruction comes swiftly on the heels of moving too soon. After crushing us, God exercises His grace by allowing us to ferment in the supposed stillness of transition so that we might be ready for the next stage.