This is the second of ten sermons on Living the Christian Life. So much of the time, we know just what we are to do as Christians. We know that we are to become kind, to be patient. To love deeply, to break our slavery to addictions, to control our tongues, to trade fear for hope, to stop gossiping, to make good habits, to become joyful, and generally to follow Jesus. We know very well we are to do all of these things. But the problem is how.
How to become kind, How to develop patience. How to love deeply. How to break addictions. How to control our tongues. How to trade fear for hope. How to stop gossiping. How to make good habits. How to become joyful. How to follow Jesus.
That is the subject of this sermon series. It is a sermon series on How to live the Christian life. Last week we covered kindness.
Today, we’re going to cover patience. I didn’t want to make you wait very long for it…
Many years ago, I was the marketing manager of a 150-employee company near Buffalo, NY. The company had slowly grown over the previous thirty years, and then a pair of hotshot entrepreneurial types convinced the owner that they could grow the company in two or three years to double or even triple in size. They persuaded the owner to bring in an entirely new layer of management, which included myself and about a dozen other experienced managers. It was an exciting time, but there was considerable friction between the new managers and the older management, since we were all from different backgrounds. Many afternoons, we sat around a large conference table and hashed out a strategic plan and an entirely new way of doing business. Those meetings were very lively and loud as everyone fought to be heard over their other rivals.
But I noticed that one man, John, the 70-year-old financial vice president of the company never said anything during the loud parts of the meetings. Sitting there, calm and cool, John just listened and smiled. But after the arguments had been put forward, after the tempers had been raised and cooled down, the owner and president of the company would turn to John, who hadn’t said a thing. “John, what do you think?” the owner would ask.
John would say a few words, and that was what we would do. John, you see, had learned the lesson of patience and thus he had both the appearance of wisdom…and always had the wisest counsel because he had the benefit of listening to everyone else. In effect, John made the decisions because John had the patience to listen.
John also had the benefit of having attended church his entire life. And so John had read and heard our passage from Proverbs, especially the first couple of verses:
Do not exalt yourself in the king’s presence,
and do not claim a place among his great men;
it is better for him to say to you, “Come up here,”
than for him to humiliate you before his nobles.
John had also heard the parable that Jesus told that evening, as Jesus watched all these people pushing and shoving for the honored seats at the banquet:
“When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Jesus said, “Be patient. Wait for your host to recognize you and bring you to the front. Don’t be impatient and grab the best seats right away or you’ll be embarrassed. Patience wins in the long run.”
Buried in this proverb and in this parable are the keys to helping us understand patience – and, in particular, why we have such trouble being patient.
Patience, you see, is not something that our world supports. Oh, we want other people to be patient, but we don’t want to be patient ourselves because we are told that life is a race, that we need to win the race, and that the key to winning the race is to get out in front early and stay there. We are always pushed to be in a hurry, because we know that the fastest worker is usually the most productive worker, and we know that our managers and supervisors and bosses and teachers are looking to see who is fast! The early bird gets the worm!
We start out in first grade. Some students read before other students do, and we label the early readers as “smart” and the late readers as “slow”. By third grade, we are studying multiplication tables and the students that memorize those multiplication tables quickly are said to be “good at math” and those who take their time or never quite get around to it are said to be “bad at math”. I know…I used to get both kids in 7th, 8th, and 9th grade algebra, and those kids and their parents still believed that the kids that memorized the multiplication tables early– a hundred specific facts – were good at math and those who took their time were bad at math.
And yet, as soon as we started algebra, an entirely different skill set was needed and taught and at Thanksgiving, my parent-teacher conference schedule was filled with the parents of those students who had memorized quickly wondering why Bobby was having trouble with math. You see, in algebra, you need to be patient and steady and put things down on paper to succeed, and so those hotshots who memorized those 100 multiplication facts so quickly and did mental multiplication quickly had trained themselves to fail algebra. Just like the tortoise and the hare, the slow and steady students were strong at algebra – as soon as I convinced them they actually were good at math. Because they were a bit more cautious, a trifle more thoughtful, and understood patience and persistence, they were more successful at algebra. Perhaps the early bird gets the worm, but we should also remember that the second mouse gets the cheese!
We get to college and speed and quickness are still taught. Maybe if you are smart and fast, you can take summer courses and graduate a semester, maybe even a year early. Don’t be one of the people who takes five or six years to get a four-year degree! Don’t be slow on the job. Bill, you’re slow – speed is important! Sell more – pack an extra sales appointment in each day and watch your commissions go up! Hurry across town! There’s customers on the lot! Who gets to them first? Who can sell six cars today instead of four? Get to lunch and back – fast food! Hurry up, Hurry up, hurry up!
Who has time? We’ve got to make sure the kids get to their music lessons and their dance lessons and their math tutor fast today, because you know there’s a game on Friday. Hurry, hurry, because we need to get out of work quickly on Friday if we want to get to the restaurant before everybody else. If we work on Saturdays, we can get ahead of the other department, so everybody come into work Saturday. And we don’t make it to church on Sundays because, honestly, there’s so much to do and Sunday mornings are the only chance we have to sleep in. Besides, we need to be back home by noon for the Steeler’s game. Our busyness makes us impatient.
So when we stand in line at the restaurant and the woman tells us that we have a 45 minute wait, we get angry. When we go to the doctor’s office and we sit in the waiting room an extra 20 minutes because he had to do emergency surgery to save someone else’s life, we get upset – our time is valuable. And when there’s a backup on the Interstate because the rescue squad is using the jaws of life on someone’s car to free them, we get very, very hot because we have things planned.
And so the problem that drives impatience, the problem that our culture puts into our lives, the root issue that sets most of us on the road to impatience is: Our desire to be successful by the world’s standards.
You see, the world’s answers to most problems is to work a bit harder and faster, to do more. That extra work puts more demands on our time and we no longer have the time to get stuck in traffic. We have become a slave to time. But there are ways to get free from this slavery.
Last Thursday, Saundra left Methodist Theological Institute in Westerville, OH around 4 pm. She looked at a map, (which is always dicey for Saundra) thought she was south of Columbus and headed south on US Route 23. Unfortunately, the seminary is actually north of Columbus. Five minutes later, she was stuck in rush-hour traffic on a road that went through the heart of downtown Columbus. A woman following her was impatient and headed for Interstate 70 – multiple lanes of traffic moving at five miles per hour.
Saundra, though, was in no rush – she calmly waited while traffic moved four car lengths every traffic light. You see, Saundra knew that this was a Thursday and the next thing she had on her schedule was Sunday morning preaching at 9 am. It was tremendously freeing for her. And so she just watched the people crossing the streets back and forth. And relaxed. And enjoyed the sights of downtown Columbus, the people, the houses, the restaurants.
So what do we need to do to develop patience in our character and remove impatience from our lives?
The first question to ask yourself is: What is pushing me? What am I afraid I’ll be late for? If there’s no time pressure in your life, why be impatient?
Let’s realize something. The personal clock was an relatively recent invention. The first portable clocks were not developed until after the year 1400, and the pocket watch didn’t come about until the late 1600’s, after all thirteen American colonies had been settled. And watches remained expensive until after 1900. So how did people tell time?
The answer: They didn’t bother to worry about minutes and seconds. Since ancient times, people had looked at the sun and decided, “Oh, it’s about sunup, it’s midmorning, it’s noon, It’s midafternoon, It’s almost sunset.” And so, when you made an appointment, you told your friend, “I’ll see you mid-morning” and it worked. The church bell rang and you knew church would start up in a "few minutes", so you started walking for church and when everyone arrived, the service began.
What a difference! I had a boss once who was so focused upon the precise time that he never scheduled appointments for 9:30 – always 9:25 or even 9:27 so you’d be right on time – He said that people who heard 9:30 might not show up until 9:35 or so.
Our farming ancestors didn’t care.
And so, as you move forward, begin to make appointments with those people you can the way the old farmers did: “I’ll be there this afternoon,” or “I’ll be there after supper.” That’s what I try to do. When I go to the hospital, I don’t hold to a tight schedule, for I never know who will be awake and who will need to talk. I don’t know if you’ll be in your room with relatives or whether you’ll be getting x-rays. And so I just tell you…”I’ll try to get there today.”
And you know…for most people that works. I respect you by not demanding you be ready to talk to me at 1:15. If you can’t talk then, I’ll come back after I see someone else. So set your appointments so you aren’t under time pressure. Be less precise about your appointment times and those relaxed times will work in most cases.
Now in other circumstances, when I am dealing with people who live by the minute. I plan to arrive in plenty of time for these people for I know that they will be very impatient with me if I’m late – yet will usually not be ready to see me if I’m early. But, you see, that’s their problem. Take this one doctor I know of in another town…His office is a mess, always running 2 hours late by 1 pm. Your appointment is for 2 o’clock, you’ll be lucky to get seen by five. But I have a solution for these people, also.
Part of my job involves reading. You may not realize it, but I probably read a book the size of the Bible every month or six weeks. I’m reading articles, theology, the Bible, books on preaching, novels, mysteries, and pretty much whatever I can get my hands on.
And so, when someone is running late, I’m reading. I plan to do it. You’ll even see that when I arrive here early for a meeting, I’ve got my phone or my Kindle out reading when the next person shows up. And so, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time – I’m just doing a different part of my job, a part of my job that can be done almost anywhere I am.
I learned this trick years ago when I was traveling on business. I’d hurry up and get to the airport only to find that my plane was delayed two hours because of equipment or weather problems. There was nothing I could do about it, so I read. I recognize that God is in control, so I make plans to be productive while I wait on God to act, the way any good servant is productive while waiting on the master of the house to come home. I want to be a good servant of God.
And that’s a key part of conquering impatience. Impatience is that feeling you have that you can control the world around you and make those other people do what you want when you want them to, as though you are a little god. And it is frustrating because the real world steps in and tells you that the real God is in charge and no, you aren’t able to control this situation, and that makes you, the little god, angry because you can’t get your way.
Developing patience is when you realize that there already is a God who loves you and is controlling everything.
Go back to the airport. Zig Ziglar told the story of one evening he walked up to the airport counter in Pittsburgh, and said, “I’m booked on the seven o’clock flight home to Dallas.” The ticket agent looked back at him and said with a wince, “I’m sorry, that flight is delayed.” Ziglar said, “FANTASTIC!”
The ticket agent must have looked somewhat surprised, and said, “You’re not angry?”
Ziglar continued, “That flight must be delayed for some good reason. Maybe there’s bad weather, and I don’t like to fly during bad weather. Maybe there’s a mechanical problem on the airplane and I really don’t want to fly on an airplane with mechanical problems. Or maybe there isn’t a qualified crew ready to fly the plane, and I certainly don’t want to be flying on an airplane without a qualified crew. So FANTASTIC! I assume you’ll page us when it’s ready to go?”
Ziglar, who taught a huge Sunday School class at First Baptist of Dallas for many years, understood two things that are critical to develop patience. First, he understood that every person is an image of God, so when you are rude to someone, you are being rude to the image of God.
And second, Ziglar understood that God is in control. Every delay, every traffic light, every grounded plane is part of God’s perfect plan to bring us good in this life, and when we learn to go with God’s flow, we will be happier, and secure, and say “FANTASTIC” to the delays in life, like the delays that kept certain people from boarding the 9/11 airplanes.
Patience.
Jesus had patience. Do you realize that Christ and God the Father had worked out the entire Good Friday and Easter plan before the Universe was started? And Jesus had to wait until it was time. Do you realize that Jesus was born as a little infant and had to wait another thirty years before He began to teach us and the disciples? Do you realize that Jesus had to wait and teach three years before He could go to Jerusalem, be arrested and beaten and executed on the cross. And then do you realize He had to wait three days before He could come back and talk again to His friends, His mother, His brothers, and tell them that He was ok, He was actually more than ok, He was better than before, with a glorified body now? And then, Jesus had to wait another forty days or so before He was able to go back to His Father in Heaven, to sit down beside the Father, and now He has been waiting for His Kingdom to form for almost two thousand years, waiting, waiting, waiting for that trumpet to sound and for His enemies to be crushed? Even now, He is waiting for your to make a real commitment to follow Him. He's been waiting for you for years.
Don’t tell me about waiting until you have waited since before the beginning of time for a victory, as Jesus did!
And when He went to the cross, was sacrificed, and was resurrected, something else happened that can completely destroy your impatience, that can give you tremendous patience, that will calm your heart whenever you are waiting in line, anywhere…
Jesus destroyed death. And this means that those of us who follow Jesus have eternal life. And if we will live forever, please tell me again why you are in such a hurry today?
There are two voices that speak to us every day. There is the voice of the world that tells you to hurry - and the voice of the Holy Spirit that reminds you of God's truths. Which will you listen to?
When I remember that I have hundreds and thousands and millions of years ahead of me, it puts things into perspective. Who cares if I am a few minutes late? Why does it matter that I’ve been in the McDonald’s line for thirty minutes? What difference does it make if I finish this sermon by eleven o’clock or not?
For I am no longer concerned about time in my life. As an adopted child of God, I can afford to be patient. My only concern with time is the effect of time on your life and other people’s lives. I know that I have eternal life ahead of me, because I am following the Patient One, the Jesus who waited for me from before the beginning of the Universe and whom I will follow beyond the end of the Universe. I have within me the Holy Spirit of God, that was given to me at my baptism. How about you?
Are you following Jesus and have you announced that fact in public, perhaps up front at a church in a profession of faith? Are you listening to that Spirit that was given to you at your baptism? Do you know for sure that Jesus and you have a leader-follower relationship, which takes away all concern for time in your life? Have you been baptized?
For time is running out for that decision. The buzzer may ring, the trumpet may sound, time may run out at any second. Will you be standing on the floor of life’s basketball court, still dithering about committing to following Christ completely, like a player holding a basketball, not sure whether to shoot or pass the ball when suddenly the buzzer sounds? “Shoot!” we are saying. The fans are shouting “Shoot the ball!” And you are standing there, looking back and forth between the altar and the world that enslaves you, while the seconds tick away. Today you need to shoot the ball and come to the altar, kneel down, and ask Christ to take full control of your life before the buzzer sounds. You need to be baptized. You need to declare that even though you have been coming to church for years, you never understood until recently, maybe even today, that walking away from the world and following Jesus is the only thing that is eternally important in this life. It is the key to patience in this life. It is the key to eternity.
By all means, love your friends, your neighbors, and your family by helping them see that this world is passing away, by helping them see that choosing to follow Jesus and being baptized with Him and receiving the eternal Holy Spirit is the only way to eternal life. For that love, to help them secure that eternal life, impatience is a virtue. Ask your friend today, maybe even right now…Do you want the patience that Christ can give you?
But for everything else, be patient and accept life at the pace our Heavenly Father sends it to us. Accept that baptized followers of Christ live forever and relax. For you have all the time in the Universe – and beyond.
When I remember that I have hundreds and thousands and millions of years ahead of me, it puts things into perspective. Who cares if I am a few minutes late? Why does it matter that I’ve been in the McDonald’s line for thirty minutes? What difference does it make if I finish this sermon by eleven o’clock or not?
For I am no longer concerned about time in my life. As an adopted child of God, I can afford to be patient. My only concern with time is the effect of time on your life and other people’s lives. I know that I have eternal life ahead of me, because I am following the Patient One, the Jesus who waited for me from before the beginning of the Universe and whom I will follow beyond the end of the Universe. I have within me the Holy Spirit of God, that was given to me at my baptism. How about you?
Are you following Jesus and have you announced that fact in public, perhaps up front at a church in a profession of faith? Are you listening to that Spirit that was given to you at your baptism? Do you know for sure that Jesus and you have a leader-follower relationship, which takes away all concern for time in your life? Have you been baptized?
For time is running out for that decision. The buzzer may ring, the trumpet may sound, time may run out at any second. Will you be standing on the floor of life’s basketball court, still dithering about committing to following Christ completely, like a player holding a basketball, not sure whether to shoot or pass the ball when suddenly the buzzer sounds? “Shoot!” we are saying. The fans are shouting “Shoot the ball!” And you are standing there, looking back and forth between the altar and the world that enslaves you, while the seconds tick away. Today you need to shoot the ball and come to the altar, kneel down, and ask Christ to take full control of your life before the buzzer sounds. You need to be baptized. You need to declare that even though you have been coming to church for years, you never understood until recently, maybe even today, that walking away from the world and following Jesus is the only thing that is eternally important in this life. It is the key to patience in this life. It is the key to eternity.
By all means, love your friends, your neighbors, and your family by helping them see that this world is passing away, by helping them see that choosing to follow Jesus and being baptized with Him and receiving the eternal Holy Spirit is the only way to eternal life. For that love, to help them secure that eternal life, impatience is a virtue. Ask your friend today, maybe even right now…Do you want the patience that Christ can give you?
But for everything else, be patient and accept life at the pace our Heavenly Father sends it to us. Accept that baptized followers of Christ live forever and relax. For you have all the time in the Universe – and beyond.
No comments:
Post a Comment