Patience is the Key (Part 1) – James 5:7-9
August 12, 2012
Patience is the key of making it through life.
Are you patient? There was a psychology experiment about patience. Young children were placed in a room and given one marshmallow. They were told that if they wanted to, they could eat the marshmallow. However, if they waited until the researcher came back, then they would get an extra marshmallow. A hidden video camera recorded the children’s behaviour. Take a look. (Show video.)
Patience is the key of making it through life. This little experiment didn’t just end with the marshmallow test. After the test the university researchers then studied the developmental progress of each participant child into adolescence, and reported that children able to show patience by waiting were psychologically better adjusted, more dependable persons, and, as high school students, scored significantly greater grades in the collegiate Scholastic Aptitude Test. Patience is important in life and that’s not just true in terms of social adjustment and school performance, but it is also true in spiritual matters. Patience is the key of making it through life. That’s exactly what it says in our passage this morning in James 5:7-12 (read passage).
Pray.
Patience is the key of making it through life. This passage can be separated into two sections. The two sections speak about the two different kinds of patience. Both sections have three parts. First there is the command. The second part gives examples. And the third part is a warning. The first type of patience is found described in verses 7-9. This is patience in waiting for something good to happen. This is the kind of patience that the children were called on to practice. They had to wait for something good, the marshmallow. I’m sure you’ve experienced this kind of patience. As a child you looked forward to Christmas morning and opening all of your presents under the tree. You had to show patience and not rip open those gifts beforehand. But in this passage we are called to wait for something that is incredibly better than a Christmas present. We are called to wait patiently for the coming of Jesus Christ.
Take a look at James 5:7 (read verse). Here we see the command. We are to be patient, waiting for the Lord to come again. When Jesus Christ was crucified and then raised again to life he stayed on earth for 40 days and after that He was taken up to heaven before the eyes of His disciples. As they were looking up as Jesus disappeared in the clouds, two angels appeared and told then: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” And since then Christians throughout the ages have been waiting for Christ’s return.
I don’t know what you think of when you read that verse, but for me, I don’t really look forward that much to the Lord’s coming. I’m kind of like the third man in this story:
Father Murphy walked into a pub and said to the first man he met, "Do you want to go to heaven?"
The man replied, "I do Father."
The priest said, "Then stand over there against the wall."
Then the priest asked a second man, "Do you want to go to heaven?"
"Certainly, Father," was the man's reply.
The priest said, "Then stand over there against the wall."
Then Father Murphy walked up to O'Toole and said, "Do you want to go to heaven?"
O'Toole said, "No, I don't Father."
The priest said, "I don't believe this. You mean to tell me that when you die you don't want to go to heaven?"
O'Toole said, "Oh, when I die, yes. I thought you were getting a group together to go right now.
I’m happy to know that I’m going to heaven when I die, but I don’t really want to do that right this minute. Can you relate with me? The writers of the New Testament often take it for granted that their readers were impatiently waiting for Jesus to return. Why is it that so many of us in our North American culture don’t really look forward to Christ’s return? I can think of three reasons.
First, we are too comfortable here on earth. The Christians in the New Testament longed for heaven because they had hard lives. They were persecuted and often killed for their faith. They couldn’t wait to get to heaven.
But for us in North America, we have life pretty easy. We have food, homes, and lots of belongings. And Christianity, though not as respected as it once was, still is the norm. We aren’t very excited about the prospect of Jesus coming again because we don’t want to leave all of the treasures we’ve built up here.
But if we look deep in our hearts we come to quickly realize that this world can’t really satisfy. I just finished reading Ecclesiastes in my quiet time and one thing that rings so clearly is that life here is meaningless. And any contentment, happiness and fulfillment we find on earth are only temporary. There is a yawning emptiness waiting for anyone who is willing to look deeply in their souls. We can try to cover it up with entertainment and other escapes, but we really know deep inside that something is wrong. This life on earth was never meant to meet our deepest longings.
Instead of spending all of our time on things that are empty and meaningless, we need to invest in the eternal. That’s exactly what Jesus says in Matt. 6:19-20. There is a story of a man who was shipwrecked on a tropical island. He was taken captive by the natives there and at first he feared for his life. But instead of killing him and cooking him, the islanders treated him like a king. They fed him, clothed him and looked after every whim and desire he had. After a couple of months he was able to pick up some of the language and through broken exchanges he was able to converse with some of his servants. He asked why he was being treated so well. At first the natives didn’t want to answer, but slowly he was able to gain their trust and they told him. The islanders, to appease their gods, would choose one person to sacrifice each year. They would take that unfortunate soul and leave them on a small rock of an island to starve to death. To somewhat mitigate this terrible fate, the sacrificial candidate was given one year where they were treated like royalty. They could have and do whatever they wished.
Well, when the sailor heard that story, his attitude quickly changed. He stopped feasting and enjoying the comfort and pleasure his position allowed. He secluded himself for three days, taking nothing but water. At the end of that time he came to a decision. He came out of his comfortable hut and ordered that work crews be formed. He had the islanders take canoe loads of dirt from the island to the small rock island where the sacrificial victims were taken. After weeks of work, he had the natives stop bringing dirt, but instead start digging up fruit trees and vegetables and bring them over to the small island. All the while the sailor worked tirelessly with a group of natives on the sacrificial island digging wells and making irrigation ditches. After that was done he had some of the work groups plant the trees and vegetables while he built barns and houses. At the end of the year the sailor was brought to the sacrificial island, but it wasn’t a desolate rock, but a green garden paradise.
We need to change our attitude about this earth. This is not the place where we are supposed to find comfort and joy. This is the place we are supposed to work to prepare for the place we will really find true contentment and satisfaction – heaven. We need to work here to store up treasures in heaven.
The first reason we don’t look forward to Christ’s coming is we are too comfortable here on earth. The second reason I think we don’t look forward to Christ’s coming is we don’t understand how unspeakable wonderful heaven will be. What do you think heaven will be like? I think some of us aren’t looking forward to heaven because we think all we will be doing is sitting on clouds and strumming harps for eternity. I think we have undersold heaven. The Bible doesn’t speak a whole lot about heaven, but what it does say, we can’t ignore. In Revelation we learn that in heaven there will be no longer any tears, death, mourning, or pain. According to Hebrews it is a place where we will be reunited with the righteous who have gone ahead of us. We will see loved ones again if they are in Christ. And it will be place where we will be in the very presence of our heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. We will see Jesus face to face. And when we do we will be changed. Look at 1 John 3:1-3 (read verses). To me this is one of the most incredible promises in the Bible. When we see Jesus face to face we will be like Him. I don’t know about you, but I grieve over how much I am not like my Saviour. I struggle with sin, with anger, with selfishness, fear and shame. One day all of that will change. When I see Jesus face to face, then sin in my life will disappear. I will be holy, I will be loving, I will be compassionate, I will be filled with faith, I will be free from every lust and temptation. I will be like Jesus. That’s what heaven will be like. Heaven is unspeakably wonderful.
But you may wonder what you will be doing in heaven. I always kind of secretly worried that heaven would be boring. Don’t get me wrong, I love singing praises to God, but to do it day in and day out for all of eternity seems kind of repetitive. But then I realized that God is infinite. There is no end in Him. In heaven we will not stop growing. We will always need to pursue God to know Him better and love Him more. We can seek to know God for all of eternity and still not know Him completely. I love the picture that C S Lewis paints of heaven in the last book of the Narnia series, “The Last Battle”. The old Narnia is destroyed in fire and cataclysm and the children and the other followers of Aslan pass through the door into the heavenly Narnia, everyone immediately knows that something has changed. Lewis writes:
It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore hoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried:
“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.”
But they were only on the outskirts of Aslan’s country, so the call is to go “further up and further in”. Then they all run like the wind chasing after the heart of Aslan. But they find that the deeper they go, the bigger and the more beautiful the country becomes. Finally as they explore, Aslan, Himself comes and the children forget everything else. Aslan says:
“The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”
Let me read you the last paragraph of the book:
And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia have only been the cover and the title page. Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the great Story which no one on earth has read; which goes on forever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.
We need to understand how unspeakably wonderful heaven is. It is the place that our hearts are longing for. It is the place where our greatest desires will be met and surpassed. I believe that until we learn how great heaven is and learn to long for it with all of our hearts, we can’t live life here on earth. This is not our real country. As Lewis says, this is the “Shadowlands”. One day we will come home and be with the One our hearts cries out for.
The first reason we don’t look forward to Christ’s coming is we are too comfortable here on earth. The second reason I think we don’t look forward to Christ’s coming is we don’t understand how unspeakable wonderful heaven will be. The third reason we don’t look forward to Christ’s coming is we don’t love Jesus Christ enough. This is really the heart of the issue. If we really loved our Saviour then we would long to be in His presence. We wouldn’t want to be separated from Him and we couldn’t wait until we were together again.
Have you ever fallen in love? Don’t you remember what it felt like? You couldn’t stand to be apart with him or her. When you weren’t with them, then all you could do was think about them. When you were together, you never wanted to be apart. If we loved Jesus Christ that way, then we would long for His coming again. We would count the days until He appeared.
Konstantin Simonov was a Russian war correspondent in World War 2. He wrote a poem for his wife in 1941 called, “Wait for Me”. Let me read it to you.
Wait for me, and I'll come back! Wait with all you've got!
Wait, when dreary yellow rains tell you, you should not.
Wait when snow is falling fast, wait when summer's hot,
Wait when yesterdays are past, others are forgot.
Wait, when from that far-off place, letters don't arrive.
Wait, when those with whom you wait doubt if I'm alive.
Wait for me, and I'll come back! Wait until the end!
They will never understand how amidst the strife,
By your waiting for me, dear, you had saved my life.
Only you and I will know how you got me through.
Simply - you knew how to wait - No one else but you.
Do we wait for Jesus Christ in this way? If we don’t long for His appearing that is an indication that our relationship with Him is not all that it should be. We will never look forward to Christ’s return if we don’t learn to love Him now with all of our hearts. The first reason we don’t look forward to Christ’s coming is we are too comfortable here on earth. The second reason I think we don’t look forward to Christ’s coming is we don’t understand how unspeakable wonderful heaven will be. The third reason we don’t look forward to Christ’s coming is we don’t love Jesus Christ enough.
The next verses tell us how we should wait by giving us an example. Look at the end of verse 7 and 8 (read verses). The example is given of the farmer. Just like a farmer has to wait for the crop to ripen and has to wait for rain, so we should wait for Christ’s return. A couple of points jump out at me through this illustration. First, to the farmer, rain is everything. Think of how dependent the farmer is on the rain. Without it his crop will fail, his livelihood will disappear and he will be ruined. Most, if not all of us, don’t come from an agricultural background and for us city folk, I don’t think we have a real understanding of how important rain is to a farmer. To him, it is everything. He would be lost without it. I’m going to show you a video clip from the movie, “Sarah, Plain and Tall: Skylark”. It shows a family living in the old west trying to run a farm. Rain doesn’t come and the drought pushes the family to make hard decisions. Take a look (show video)
Just like Jacob longed for the rain, that’s how we should long for Christ’s coming. Just like the farmer is absolutely dependent on the rain to come for his survival, so we are dependent on Christ’s coming to make it through this life.
There’s another point that comes out clearly through this example. The second point is, the farmer has absolutely no control over the rain. What control does a farmer over when the crops will ripen? How about when the rain will fall? He doesn’t have any control. Of course he knows about when it will happen. He can see the signs in the crop that the harvest is near. He can look to the skies and see the signs that there may be rain coming. But he can never control the exact time. That’s exactly like us as we wait for the Lord’s coming. We can’t control when that will be, but we can look at the signs and know when His coming is near. And according to verse 8 the Lord’s coming is near.
Now let’s talk about the timing of the Lord’s coming for a minute. James said that the Lord’s coming was near, yet he wrote this letter about 2000 years ago. Was James wrong? In Matthew 24:36, Jesus Himself said that He didn’t know the time of the second coming. That was not under His control, but only the Father could determine it. So if that’s true, any prediction that the world is going to come to an end on such and such a date is wrong. Do you know what these dates have in common: Sept. 15, 1829, Oct. 22, 1844, June 21, 1982, Sept. 6, 1994, Sept. 30, 2008, and July 19, 2012? These are all dates that people predicted that Christ would come again. Did you notice something, Christ hasn’t returned. We are still waiting. The next big date is Dec. 21, 2012. That’s the date of the end of the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar and a number of people believe that it spells the end of the world. That’s the date that the movie 2012 is based on. Do you know something, I’m not a betting man, but I would bet anyone here that Dec. 21, 2012 will not be the end of the world. I know that’s a safe bet because if I lose I won’t have the pay anyway. But seriously, we cannot predict the date.
What does it mean that the Lord’s coming is near? The theological term is the Lord’s coming is imminent. That means that Christ could come at any time. We can’t predict exactly what the day or hour will be, but it could be any time. In fact, every generation of Christians from the book of Acts on, have thought that Christ would come in their lifetime. And if you take a look at what’s going on in the world today with the climate change, the rise in civil wars and unrest, with the unstable economic situation and with the increasing godlessness in the world, don’t you think that Christ could come soon? I think that Christ could come in my lifetime. And you know, that’s how we should think and that’s how we should live our lives here on earth. Christ’s coming is near. He could come at any time and we have to be ready.
The well known preacher, Dr. G. Campbell Morgan, said, "To me the second coming is the perpetual light on the path which makes the present bearable. I never lay my head on my pillow without thinking that maybe before morning breaks, the final morning may have dawned! I never begin my work without thinking that perhaps He may interrupt my work and begin His own. This is now His word to all believing souls, till He comes.”
In verse 9 we have a warning (read verse). The warning is not to grumble against each other. I don’t know about you, but when I have to wait for something often I become impatient and get a bad attitude and start grumbling against other people. I’ll get home from work and I’m hungry and I’ll start yelling at the kids. I find I get much more settled after I have some food in my stomach. It's a natural tendency to grumble when our patience is stretched. When we become aware that this world doesn't measure up to our needs, that it doesn't match our expectations then we grumble. We grumble against our husbands or wives because our marriages aren't as fulfilling as we envisioned them to be. So because our wife or our husband doesn't meet our needs, then we complain and express our disappointment. We grumble. That happens in the church when a fellow church member doesn't treat us in the way we think they should. They overlook us or say something harsh and hurtful or attack and criticize us, and we think, "How can they call themselves Christians?" And we continue to grumble against them in our hearts. The reality is that we are just as bad as them. We have overlooked people and said hurtful things and criticized others. There's an interesting verse in Ecclesiastes 7:21-22 that says: "Do not pay attention to every word people say, or you may hear your servant cursing you - for you know in your heart that many times you yourselves have cursed others."
That's true isn't it? The things we grumble against others about, we ourselves are guilty of. But the difference is when we do it we expect people to forgive us. In fact, if they don't forgive us we think they aren't acting as true Christians. We need to turn our attitude 180 degrees. Instead of judging others, we should judge ourselves. Instead of expecting forgiveness from others, we need to extend forgiveness to those who have wronged us.
The warning is that when Jesus Christ comes, He will come to judge. And if we grumble we will be judged. We have to be clear here. When we long for Christ to come, He will come to bring in a new, wonderful world order, but He will also come as the judge of the world. Instead of grumbling against others, let’s pray for them. Instead of criticizing we need to show them love.
You know BTBC is going through a hard time right now. Rev. Cheung, the senior pastor is retiring and Pastor Robert Gin has decided not to renew his contract with the church. When things seem to be going wrong, our first reaction is to try to find the person or people to blame and then get rid of them or punish them. But there is a problem with that. We aren’t the judges. There is only one judge and that’s Jesus Christ. Instead of judging and grumbling, we are called to be patient and stand firm as it says in verse 8. For me that means that I need to be committed to this church. I believe that God called our family to BTBC and my mindset is that we are here for the long haul. I’ve said from the pulpit before that I believe this is a good church and God is working here. I believe that because the church is not the building, the organizational structure, or the programs. The church is the people of God. It’s you and me. We are the church. And when I think of the people here at BTBC I’m encouraged. I see God’s love and life in the people here. Though I’ve only been at the church for 4 months I’ve grown to love you all. There are so many special people here who are serious in growing to know God better and who want to serve Him. I count it my privilege to stand with you.
Of course BTBC has problems, some of them which are very distressing to me. But the truth is that no church is perfect. We long for a better church. We are tempted to run off to another place of worship. But once we get to know the people there and how things work we experience more problems and conflict. We will never experience a church that will satisfy our needs on earth. We long for something that is yet to come. We long for heaven when all Christians from every age, language, tribe, nation and culture will be joined together in the song of praise to the Lamb.
Until then we need to pray and ask God to guide us and help us. We need to speak out the truth in love. But we also need to be free from grumbling and judgement. We need to continue to show grace and forgiveness even when there has been wrong done. And we need to be patient and stand firm. Won’t you commit to stand firm with me? We have to because patience is a key of getting through life.
