Is there any question we ask more than “how long will this take?” I’ve started noticing lately that the vast majority of our questions revolve around time. How long will this take? How much farther? Will this be done soon? What time will you be here? We don’t just live in time we seem to be consumed, maybe even controlled by it. Time is an interesting thing. Every day is a gift and yet most of us can’t wait to get to tomorrow or jump right to the weekend. We know our lives are just a vapor, here today and gone tomorrow and yet we spend a lot of that vapor wondering how long it will last or when it will end. When we are young we can’t wait to be older and when we get older we wish we were younger. Time, rather than being a boundary that helps to guide us to value all we’ve been given and to be productive and thoughtful with the gift of each day has in many ways been distorted if not perverted into being some sort of race against the clock in which we must constantly hurry up or something will be missed, lost or taken away. Time is not our enemy but I’m not sure that time is meant to be our friend. What if time is simply one more construct given to teach us to trust God? What if time is one more opportunity to see that the things we worry about are things that God is in complete control of? What if time was given to teach us patience rather than to make us hurry? James 1:4, in reference to having our faith tested by “trials of many kinds”, settles on this command about trials, testing, suffering and time, “Let patience (also read perseverance, steadfastness, endurance) have her perfect work, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” What if the things we lack and the things we fear we might lose if we don’t hurry up can only be rightly and deeply established if we actually slow down? What if patience is not only what we might be missing but it’s the one thing that would show us how to best use our time?
Recently, while reading the book of Revelation, I noticed that in two different passages that speak of the intense and even deadly opposition that believers in Christ will receive during what we refer to as “The Tribulation”, the final statement of each was “Here is the patience . . . of the saints.” We have stripped patience down to the point in which all it has become is the ability to wait. We talk about patience in reference to waiting in lines, driving in traffic and dealing with people that don’t agree with us but patience is part of God’s character, it is a large part of who He is and who He created us to be. Patience is not this folded arm waiting for something to be over or to get started the way we have pictured it, patience is love in the midst of discord, it’s peace when judgment would be easier, mercy when our senses tell us that our time is being wasted, humility when pride is what we are being faced with and trust when we aren’t getting our way in our time.
When we talk about patience from a Biblical point of view we often head straight to II Peter 3:9. Peter was addressing the growing concern that maybe, since Jesus hadn’t returned yet that He was never going to fulfill His promise and come back from heaven for His church. Peter wrote “The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.” We think of patience in reference to the return of Christ, as if He’s on the edge of His throne, just waiting for the moment when the Father will finally give the word so that He can come and defeat His enemies, gather His Bride and establish His throne. If I may be honest we are the ones in need of patience when it comes to Christ’s return, He is content because He trusts the Father and He has already seen the end from the beginning. This is another place where we have applied our sensibilities to Christ rather than asking Him to add His to us. Peter is actually writing to teach us to be patient with God by showing us again His patience with us. It’s as if Peter is saying, “Stop worrying that He won’t return, He is being gracious with you by giving you time to be transformed into all you were created to be, trust Him, be patient, He will be who He is and will do what He has promised.”
I believe that if we truly want to see the patience of God we don’t need to look toward His return, we should look at Jesus’ incarnation. Everything that God has ever done on our behalf has been slow, methodical, humble, righteous and patient. He created us to be His image, to be like Him, to walk with Him, represent Him and more than anything else, live in a relationship of love and obedience with Him. We rebelled, we rejected His authority and questioned His love, we were impatient in the relationship and chose the immediacy of our desires rather than trusting that He was working out beauty far greater than we could fathom. From that point God didn’t just send judgment, He began the journey of grace. Clearly, I’m going quickly through the narrative, but He took an elderly man and a barren woman and far later than they had hoped, gave them the desire of their hearts, a son that God Himself didn’t just bring into being but would use to build for Himself a nation. The nation wasn’t great, it wasn’t the largest or most powerful but it was His and He chose it so that He could show that His character was not to take what was valuable for Himself but to show the value of everything that He had made by giving His love and His mercy through His patience. He established a Law that revealed His holiness and how far from His standard we were, just so that He could show us that we were in desperate need of a Savior, so that He Himself could be that Savior for us. He created us for Himself, we chose ourselves over Him and then He gave Himself to buy us back. His patience is extraordinary. God didn’t sit in the cosmos with His arms folded waiting for us to get far enough away that we would finally ask Him to take us back, or waiting for us to get what we deserved so that He could swoop in and save the day so that we would see Him as some sort of hero. He constantly walked with those that were too impatient to walk with Him, protected those that were in too much of a hurry to wait for Him and rescued those that had been too stubborn to trust Him. The story of the incarnation, of the birth of Christ, of God coming to save us is the story of the patience of God.
One of my favorite passages of Scripture is Romans 5, especially verses 3-5 which says that we should rejoice in our sufferings because suffering produces perseverance (patience) and patience produces character and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us “because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” Verse 6 is the part that makes this so important, “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” Paul is trying to teach us to trust God in our past, current and future situations whether they are expected or unexpected, difficult or easy, fair or unfair, joyful or filled with sorrow because everything that is happening in our lives is met by God. What happens when God meets us? We are changed. God is using the events of our lives to build patience, because patience then builds character and, contrary to what we believe, it is the character within us not the events that happen to or around us that build hope and fight off disappointment. The same way that Christ came at just the right time, God is working in each and all our lives so that, at just the right time, He can transform us into His image, to have His heart and His mind, to be able to have His character and to live like His Son. The incarnation of Christ is the story of God’s patience so that we will submit to having Him build His patience in us.
In Revelation those that endure the unfathomable hardship of “The Tribulation” are those that have had God’s patience built in them until it has become their character. We might not be facing anything as drastic as “The Tribulation”, we may not even be facing anything as dire as many in the world we live in, but we are facing our own situations and God is doing in us what He does in all, building His character, which I believe starts with patience. If discipleship is the three steps that Jesus described it as: self-denial, carrying the cross and following Him, then being a disciple will result in not just going where Jesus went but walking through what Jesus walked through by having Jesus’ character formed in us. This Christmas I pray that each of us will thank God for His patience, that He endured with us until it was the perfect moment to come and become like us. In giving thanks I pray that we will then commit ourselves to follow Him, asking the Father to make us like the Son, to allow the testing of our faith to build trusting patience that builds godly character that builds unshakable hope. If you are disappointed today with what you have or have not, I pray for you to have what I believe Jesus is also praying for you to have, patience that conquers disappointment. You might not be there yet, but with God, there is a beautiful promise, there will be a moment that He calls “just the right time” and in that moment, you will be all that He created you to be and He will give all that He has promised to give.