Patience!

Readings: Issiah 65:17-25, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13, Luke 21:5-19, Romans 8:18-27
Preached at First Presbyterian Church, Baldwin, NY, on November 17th 2013

A printable PDF file can be found here

I was looking through a cataloger that was advertising T-Shirts with Christian messages upon them. One of them caught my eye. It said simply, “Be Patient. God hasn’t finished with me yet”.  Romans 8:25 in the Good News Version of the Bible reads, “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience”.

The context of the verse is a section in Romans that deals with freedom. Whilst the gospel promises to set those who embrace its message free, that freedom does not come in an instant. Deliverance can be a lifetime process that involves many struggles along the way. Paul urges us to persevere in the knowledge that God’s Holy Spirit is with us and working in our best interests.

Patience is therefore something essential to Christian life. We need patience with ourselves, with the Church and with God.  This text relates patience to faith. It is not putting up with situations that never change, but believing that with God all things are possible, even when they take time!

Allow me then to ask you some rhetorical questions regarding patience. Firstly let me ask you;

Are you patient with yourself?
The hardest battle on our hands for many of us is the battle with ourselves. Much of our lack of patience with others is a projection of our own feelings about ourselves. We tend to give ourselves a lift by dragging someone else down. Attempting to be Christian people can make this worse! For part of turning to Christ is being ruthlessly honest about ourselves. And what that can reveal is the slowness of our growth in character.

We find that the same old problems and sins continue to haunt us. We find that attitudes we thought were dead and buried start to show their ugly head again. We discover things about ourselves that we hadn’t realized were there.

All this is part of Christian growth. That’s why the Christian life demands patience. Patience with ourselves. There is no instant-Christianity. We can go to the store and get instant everything from potatoes to thousand dollar loans, but there is nowhere that sells “instant disciple” programs.

You can buy books that say, “Learn to drive in 3 Weeks”, but I guarantee that if all a person does is the read the book and never gets behind the wheel then you are not going to be wanting to go any rides with them.

There are no short cuts to being a disciple. Yet, with a persistent and patient faith, there are also no limits to the heights of character that we could reach. There are no limits on the victories we could achieve if we could only learn to wait patiently and walk humbly before our God.

Patience is a strong and active virtue. It means perseverance when the times get rough, plodding on when we feel the situation is hopeless, pressing forward when others around us are throwing in the towel. It requires fixing our eyes on what is not yet seen, walking by faith that God knows best.

Are you patient with yourself? If not then remember that God hasn’t finished with you yet. A second question.

Are you patient with the Church?

I was going to ask, “Are you patient with others?” in a general way, but I think a more pertinent question in our day, and seeming as the church is the body of Christ, a place where we have a particular calling from God to get along with each other, it seems more focused to ask “Are you patient with the Church?”

It is fashionable today to be impatient with anything institutional. The church is no exception. Impatience with the church is as old as the church itself. Radicals and Reformers have been in evidence in every age. And rightly so.

But unless protest is subjected to the discipline of patient love then it is on shaky foundations. It is easy to pick fault with the church. So easy.  But picking fault is neither radical nor reforming. What is difficult is rolling up your sleeves, throwing yourself wholeheartedly into service of others and working hard to put things right. Such is the demand of love that Christ lays upon us. Love never stands aside and criticizes.

We must be patient with the churches hypocrisies. I’m not saying we must approve of them, I’m saying we must be patient with them. No church is what it should be, by a long shot. There is a yawning gulf between the actual and the ideal. There is no church in all creation that perfectly embodies the life and teaching of Jesus Christ in all its purity and splendor.

And even if such a church existed I don’t think I know anybody who would qualify for membership. Fact is that the church is hewn from the rough material of human nature; nature that is being transformed by the touch of God’s Spirit. Jesus welcomes sinful, struggling, weak, slow, ungracious people! As He put it, “It’s not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick”.

We also need to be patient with the churches traditions. I’m not just speaking about the things that denominations enshrine into their way of doing things, but also the local churches ‘ways of doing things’. That can be hard because often we have come into those traditions as an outsider and carry our own thoughts and ideas about how things should be done. However we should recognize that the positive side of traditions, particularly those of the different denominations, are often things that were formed in the heat of dispute and conflict, which provided a way through difficult times that has been passed on from generation to generation. Such accumulated wisdom should not be dismissed.

Yet, a new and changing day demands new methods and new ways of doing things. The change from one to the other can be a difficult and painful process, and is certainly one that demands patience.

That also means being patient with the churches decisions. They are not always our personal decisions. I'm pretty sure they are not always God’s decisions! It is far more difficult for a community to decide what is right in any given situation than for an individual. And the church community, made up as it is of fallible and sinful humanity, has made and will make many more mistakes.

As a pastor I am well aware that I’m as prone to failure as much as any other member of this congregation. Thankfully the church is a whole lot more than a pastor or a session or any group within the church. It’s people. People who are being redeemed by the love of Jesus Christ, but have a way to go before truly being the folk God wants them to be. So be patient with the Church. God hasn’t finished with her yet! Let me ask you, thirdly;

Are you patient with God?

Many of us wrestle with God, baffled by God’s reticence, impatient with God’s slowness. We are in a hurry and God does not seem to share our concern. We bombard heaven with our prayers and complain about God’s absence when instant answers are not what we ordered we ask,. “Lord, don’t You know what life is like down here?”

We wrestle with God. But we had better hope to lose. The very greatness of God is in God’s long-suffering. The majesty of God is God’s mercy. The power of God is in God’s patience. Where would any of us be were it not for the divine patience that works lovingly and gracefully for our salvation?

Christian patience is rooted in the conviction that God’s time is always the best time, the right time and the only time. You cannot force the hand of a God who chooses to make His approach to us through a Cross on a hillside, who could break us with Divine power, yet rather stoops to win us over by love.

Here is the heart of the matter. Christ died for us whilst we were yet sinners and prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”. There is the divine patience. Oh, how we need that patient love to combat our impatient striving! How we need to grasp a vision of what God can do for our lives and the Church and for this world!

Be patient! God hasn’t finished with us yet! When they nailed the Son of God to that cruel cross, the words came from His lips, “It is finished”.  That was not a cry of defeat, but of victory. For in that moment, God provided all that we need to be the people God wants us to be.

Living a faithful and patient Christian life depends not on which Church we go to, or who our pastor is, or where we live. It’s so much more. It’s about the reality of the empty tomb. ‘Christ is Risen”. Through His Holy Spirit He is transforming the most God forsaken lives, the only requirement being preparedness to go forward with Him, listening for His voice and patiently traveling on.

I was preaching one time when I noticed a spider crawling along the pulpit and to the end of the lectern. What was it going to do? Jump off, spin a web, turn back, go in a different direction? That little spider had no idea that it was in a pulpit of a Presbyterian Church. What did it know of elections and wars and debates on ethics and trying to balance the checkbook? How did it perceive its place in time and space?

I sometimes feel that our mental grasp of the love of God is as fractional as a spider’s grasp of the daily world in which we live and move and have our being. If the majesty and love of God is infinite, is it any wonder that from time to time we wonder what on earth is going on?

What is amazing is that Jesus, with all His divine authority, could say, ‘You do not now know, but one day you will understand all things” Paul speaks of how we presently see only ‘thru a glass darkly’, but one day all will be clear.

In the between time, let us exercise patience. Be patient with our self, with our church, with our God. Patience is nurtured through faith. Through having an inner conviction, that no matter what, God will work things out in the end, in God’s time and in God’s way. Patience comes through focusing, not on others, not on ourselves, but on God, on the way God has worked in this world through Jesus Christ and can work in us and through us in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 8:25, “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience”. Be patient. God hasn’t finished with us yet. All around us may change. People come and go all around our lives. Everything changes. That’s life. Yet with our focus on the love of God, and the possibilities that the ways of God’s love open up to us, we can set our sights high and rejoice that a life lived in the knowledge and love of God is a life well lived.

May God, through the action of the Holy Spirit, build into our lives a gentle and patient spirit, that reflects the nature of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.


The Reverend Adrian J.  Pratt B.D.