SE111002
CHARACTER UNDER CONSTRUCTION
2. Patience
INTRO
Patience is no virtue in our society. We’re the society that invented
- fast food,
- microwaves,
- the Concorde jet,
- drive-thrus,
- pizza delivery in 20 minutes or less,
- and express lanes. (Confession time, how many have you ever found yourself counting the number of items of the person in front of you in the express checkout line? Raise your hand.)
I bet almost all of your pet peeves revolve around impatience of some kind or another:
- Long lines anywhere,
- waiting for hours at the doctors office,
- slow service at McDonald’s,
- long sermons,
- slow drivers in the fast lane.
Speaking of traffic, here’s a George Carlin question for you: why is the hour when traffic moves the slowest called “Rush Hour”? Rush hour is revealing about our patience level. I have a favorite story about that:
This woman had her car stall in heavy traffic. The cars began to back up as she tried again and again to start it. A chorus of honking horns blared behind her. She got out to look under the hood as the honking continued. Finally she walked back to the first driver behind her & said,
“I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to get my car started. If you’ll go up there & give it a try, I’ll stay here & honk your horn for you."
We might think impatience is a quaint little quirk in our character, but today we’re going to find it’s more insidious than that. Hiding just under the surface of our impatience, is a caldron of anger, and selfishness and a spirit of entitlement and something dysfunctional about our relationship with God.
So today I want to first lay the foundation of how important this character trait is by underlining the cost of impatience. To do that, I want to tell the story of a Bible character named King Saul. But then I want to spell out the benefits of patience, and how we might acquire more of it with God’s help. To do that I want to tell the story of a Bible character named Job.
SAUL
King Saul was the very first king of the nation of Israel. After the period of the Judges that I mentioned last week, the nation demanded a king and even though it was God’s ideal to have only himself as their king, the people persisted and God decided to grant their request.
The prophet Samuel anointed Saul as the first king of Israel. Saul was a tall man, of impressive bearing. He led the country to it’s first military victory in years over one of it’s oppressive neighbors. Everyone’s happy. But there’s a problem in Saul’s inner life that is going to grow and spell disaster for him and the people around him.
Another oppressive neighbor taking advantage of the kingless Israelites were the Philistines (Sampson). But now, with a king, the Jews have a new sense of boldness, and desire to throw off the oppressors and be free people under God. So they start border skirmishes with the Philistines.
Word gets to the Philistines that Israelites in full revolt and aren’t going roll over for them anymore. So they say, we’re going to teach these upstarts a lesson they’ll never forget. Then the Philistines mustered a huge army against Saul’s brand new regime.
Needless to say, there’s the Israelites are afraid, and a large part of Saul’s army loses it’s nerve goes into hiding in caves, holes, rocks, tombs and cisterns. Despite these worsening odds, Samuel has charged Saul to look to God for protection and victory and not trust his own power or lack thereof!
As an expression of that trust, Samuel has told Saul clearly… to wait for him for 7 days and he would come and offer the sacrifice and officially invoke God’s blessing on them and victory would be assured. But he’d have to wait, with the Philistine army breathing down his neck, with deserters fleeing left and right and the remaining army shaking in their boots.
Every day that passes, every hour, another deserter, and the chances of victory are growing slimmer and slimmer. Saul waited impatiently for 7 days and finally he took charge and said,
“that’s it, Samuel’s not coming, bring me the burnt offerings and let’s get on with it already! If we need a priest, here I’ll play Samuel, let’s, offer up the sacrifices, sing a few songs, pass an offering plate, sing 5 verses of “Just As I Am,” close in prayer – then can we go already?! I’m losing men by the second, come on, come on! Let’s go! Time’s a wasting here, folks, if we need holy water sprinkled on us before we go to battle, here, give me the Evian bottle… let’s GO!!!!!
See a problem right here? A little impatience perhaps? Yes, but the most important thing is what the impatience is pointing to in Saul’s heart. That’s made clear in the next part of the story.
Just as Saul was finishing the burnt offerings, Samuel shows up. He smells cooked lamb and he’s a little suspicious. Saul comes trotting out to meet him and bless him and Samuel says,
What on earth are you doing?
And you can just imagine this look on Saul’s face: I am so busted! And so Saul stammers out his excuses:
When I saw I was losing my army from under me, and that you hadn’t come when you said you would (he came on the 7th day like he said), and with the Philistines were poised to come down on me here, and I haven’t yet come before God asking for his help… well, I just took matters into my own hands, I guess.”
Many things are revealed in these excuses that relate to our own justifications for impatience:
- first we justify impatience for the sake of prudence. “I was losing my army after all, I just did what any sane person would do.” When you think about our own impatience, friends, how many times is it not justified under the same grounds: I was just being prudent. God’s timing isn’t very reasonable. So…
o I get that ill-advised loan because we have all these “needs” that just HAVE to be purchased.
o I quit my job and hamstring my family’s finances because it’s not reasonable to endure my boss for any length of time.
o I rush into marriage with this person I don’t know really well because I’m lonely and waiting isn’t reasonable.
- then, there’s a second set of excuses for impatience that sound even better than prudence, and that’s piety. Saul says, “I can’t go to war before I’ve said my prayers! That would be wrong!” Just like that, some of our impatience is excused on spiritual grounds:
o I know God wants to bless me with this or that, so I’m just going to go out and get it… I know that’s what God would want
o I need guidance from God in this area, and so I’m just going to lean on my horoscope or consult this mystic, because I need an answer right now, and I know that’s what God would want.
o I have a vision from God to do great things, and God’s not showing up when I expected him to, so I’m going to just push it along myself a little bit, play amateur Holy Spirit and manipulate people and circumstances to achieve great things for God!
Friends, we’ll excuse impatience … in the name prudence, in the name of piety, and we say, it’s not a big deal. I’m impatient for all these good reasons… I want a good thing done, I want direction, healing, protection. But underneath, the seed, the motive, reveals something out of whack.
Look at Saul. As he is sputtering out his excuses the REAL reason comes out of him. He said to Samuel,
- “I took matters into my own hands.. I felt compelled to do it, I just had to. I needed to take control of the situation.”
Allen Creek, if we could crystallize what’s behind our own impatience, there it is. We must take matters into our own hands. Now whose matters has Saul taken into his own hands? Who has he wrenched control away from? God, that’s who. The God who loves him, who seeks his best, who is powerful to care for him and nurture him and parent him.
That care and protection is not good enough for Saul and it’s not good enough for many of us. We can’t relax in God’s control, we must take control for ourselves. And in taking control we violate our relationship with God and reap hard consequences. Think about we do because of impatience:
- we go looking for guidance in spiritualists and mediums, because we can’t wait for a real God to give answers,
- we work ourselves through the weekend because for self imagine or security, we can’t trust God and wait until Monday.
- we’re impatient with the weaknesses of our parents or bosses so we rebel against their authority because God’s not reigning them in.
- we lash out in hate or resentment against our neighbor because we’re too impatient to leave it to God to avenge.
- we lust and misuse our sexuality, because we’re too impatient to have our physical desires satisfied in the proper context of marriage.
- we take from our company or sink ourselves with debt that we don’t pay back because the culture tells us we should have all this stuff and we can’t wait until we can legitimately earn these things - we have to have them NOW!
- we play it fast and loose with the truth because we can’t slowly develop authentic, real relationships, so we put a façade, or lie.
- we envy someone else’s job, spouse, house, car, and bitterness rises in us because God is not taking care of our needs fast enough.
All of that, from lack of patience. Friends, in case you didn’t catch it, I just listed ways that we break every single one of the 10 commandments in the Bible because of impatience. Allen Creek, I’m asking you now to consider what is behind all this impatience and law breaking and sin? Behind it all is a problem with God.
It was the same thing at work in Saul’s life: he did not trust God. At root is a deep and tragic disconnect with God. He’s not acting fast enough
- he’s not meeting my needs
- he didn’t stop that bad thing from happening
- he’s not rescuing me fast enough from this trouble I’m in
And just like Saul, we take matters into our own hands. Samuel looks at him and says,
Saul, that was a fool thing to do… this experience has uncovered a heart that is hard toward God, untrusting, without faith, a heart that refused to cling to God’s love even when it got hard. As a result of you not waiting on God and trying to become your own god, your kingly rule is already falling to pieces. Your dynasty must end and the Lord will chose a new king who will be a man after his own heart.”
Saul lost his kingdom for lack of 2 or 3 hours of patience… if that seems steep men and women, the story is meant to teach us the importance of waiting on God. Why? AS an expression of our hearts total dependence and trust in him. Behind our prudence and our piety – impatience says, I don’t trust you God!
JOB
Now if this true, then when we come across a patient person they should be a person with great trust in God. And I’d us to observe just such a person: JOB. Job is a famous enough Bible character that most of us have heard the expression “he has the patience of Job.” Let me explain why that is…
God has given Job a lot of great stuff. Job was a man who was trained by a close relationship with God, to trust God’s love and God’s limits. Job has learned that godly, moral, hardworking and wise people reap many rewards from God. There’s a cause and effect relationship with living a life like that!
So the opening chapters we find this out about Job… he was honest inside and out, a man of his word, who was totally devoted to God and hated evil with a passion. God blessed him: he had many children, a lot of property and livestock, a huge staff and a lot of influence.
So far, everything makes sense. Everything is properly ordered morally speaking. And then? Chaos. Devastation. In a single day, Job life is ravaged, his children are killed in a freak of nature, his properties are all stolen or destroyed, and all his servants are murdered as well.
Now there are two situations where we are most prone to be impatient. One is when we’re not experiencing a good thing we really, really want to have BEING. Two is when we are experiencing a bad thing that we really, really want to have END I guess impatience is most difficult in the latter situation - that’s what Job endured.
The hardest thing was that the bad was undeserved. He couldn’t look at his life and say,
- “oh, I abused my body and that’s why I’m sick,” or
- “oh, I really raised those children poorly and that’s why they died,” or
- “oh, I disobeyed God’s commands about honesty or hard work, or sexual faithfulness” and that’s why this has happened.
No, Job is all about the mystery of suffering that cannot be explained by moral cause and effect. And that is the most trying of places to be - therefore one of the best laboratories to study patience.
Here’s how Job responds to unjust suffering and I’d like you to note the differences in heart between he and Saul. Job says,
I came from my mothers womb with nothing, and I’ll return to the womb of the earth with nothing.
His wife was more of a Saul type character, and Job’s response just made her more bitter and angry with God. She saw him in anguish with God, so she said, look, you can at least get rid of one problem, by just getting rid of God. You won’t lessen your physical suffering, but at least your spiritual anguish can go away if you reject God. Then hope for a speedy death.
But still Job clings to his trust in God and tells her:
We take the good days from God – why not the bad days also?
So we see someone tenaciously hanging on to faith in God. Patiently waiting on God for an answer, for hope, for deliverance or some sign of his care. But before you get the idea that a person who patiently hangs on to trust in God in hard times is some whitewashed saint, take a look:
Job was brutally honest with God about his suffering. He asks, “why?;” “Why me?” He rejected his friends clichéd answers and simple fixes. He did not take his suffering quietly or piously. But here’s the key: he put his questions to God. He didn’t paste on a smile and he didn’t reject God… he took his stance before God… and there poured out his complaint.
Friends, when we’re in a bad situation that we want to end, or when we’re hoping for a good situation to start, we will be tempted to take matters into our own hands, like Saul did. Or we can wait on God, like Job did. And Job shows us that waiting on God is not only a passive thing. The Bible says in
1 Pet 4:19 So then, those who suffer according to God’s will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good.
You see, waiting on God involves two thing:
- daily committing ourselves to God. Committing our situation into his hands. If needs be, crying out to God. Let him know that we’re perplexed, impatient, needy, confused. Then reaffirm our trust. Job did this very thing.. “though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.”
- Waiting on God also means continuing to do good. We commonly associate patience with doing nothing. Yet there is a patience that can carry on. It’s one thing to relax and not run ahead of God by taking matters into your own hands, but it is a harder thing sometimes to carry on under stress; to endure, to have a great weight on your heart and still run; to have a deep anguish in your spirit and still perform daily tasks. To wait is hard, to wait while we continue to "do good " is and even bolder statement of trust.
CONCLUSION
Many of us are convinced that God wants to give us happiness and wholeness and blessings. And there’s a feeling of entitlement that comes with that, I deserve these things, and that’s when we get impatient and reach out and try to get them on our own. The result as many of you know is misery, wanting and wanting and never being satisfied.
The Bible says that God does want to bless you, friend. But that relationship can’t flourish until the roadblocks are taken out of the way. So that’s why the Bible says he sent his Son Jesus Christ to earth, to die as our substitute, to pay the debts we’ve incurred by our impatience – all the commandments that get broken when we take matters into our own hands.
But hear this: to receive this gift, the Bible says, you must trust him FULLY and only. Jesus will not settle for you turning family or friends, or health or work or fun or pleasure into an idol while you relegate him to the back seat – because he knows only he can satisfy your soul.
That’s why sometimes he’ll put us into a waiting period. While we’re waiting for some blessing, family or friends or health or work or success or fun or pleasure, we’re getting totally focused on Jesus Christ. Why? So that you learn to seek him, to cry out for him, to beat your fists against his chest and say,
God, you’re my only hope, I’m waiting on you, you’re all I have, I trust in Jesus Christ alone.
In that moment, friend, you’ll have gained something of infinitely more worth, than family or friends, or health or work or success or pleasure… you will be leaning on Jesus Christ alone in radical trust and faith. That is it’s own reward.
I don’t know what you may be impatiently looking for today, but I will tell you this. It pales in comparison to a relationship with God. Some of you are just investigating and you can’t imagine how a relationship with God could be worth all the waiting and trusting and leaning and faith.
But others of you are close to letting go… to really letting go and surrendering, to give up all your other crowns if you can just know peace of mind. That’s what Jesus offers you today. Nestled in his arms, in his forgiving love, you can learn patience, you can learn to wait on God, and you’ll wait for him and accept no substitutes.
