May 9, 2004

"Mom Said, "Patience is a Virtue" "

Things my mother taught me:

1—My mother taught me about anticipation: “Just wait until your father gets home.”

2—My mother taught me about receiving: “You are going to get it when we get home.”

3—My mother taught me to meet a challenge: “What were you thinking? Answer me when I talk to you. Don’t talk back to me.”

4—My mother taught me logic: “If you fall out of that swing and break your neck, you’re not going to the store with me.”

5—My mother taught me about medical science: “If you don’t stop crossing your eyes they’re going to freeze that way.”

6—My mother taught me to think ahead: “If you don’t pass your spelling test you’ll never get a good job.”

7—My mother taught me humor: “When that lawn mower cuts off your toes don’t come running to me.”

8—My mother taught me to become an adult: “If you don’t eat your vegetables you’ll never grow up.”

9—My mother taught me about genetics: “You’re just like your father.”

10—My mother taught me about my roots: “Do you think you were born in a barn.”

11—My mother taught me about wisdom: “When you get to be my age you’ll understand.”

12—My mother taught me about justice: “One day you’ll have kids, and I hope they act just like you.”

But if there was one virtue that Mom taught me more important than all others, it would be patience. When you have five kids and live to tell the tale, you model patience for your kids more eloquently than any sermon.

As the fifth of those five kids, a classic underachiever with a smart mouth and a lazy attitude, I probably stretched my mother’s patience thinner than piano wire. I often wonder what she would think today, but the deepest wish of my heart is that she would think that her patience had been rewarded, that I turned out OK.

I still can hear my mother say, “Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can. It’s seldom found in woman, and never in a man.” Well, I don’t know if it’s never found in man, but it does seem to be rare, in women or in men. However, patience is an important virtue as we make our way along the road to heaven. How many of us have someone in our lives who totally bugs us, really pushes our buttons. How many of you are sitting beside the person who really bugs you? Just kidding.

But all of us have someone, on the job, in the neighborhood, maybe in your own home, but somebody somewhere really grinds your gears, right? I remember on “Seinfeld,” Costanzo’s father would walk around screaming “Serenity now” whenever his wife would get to him. I imagine that wasn’t exactly helpful in dealing with stress.

There are practical lessons we can take from scripture on dealing with the stress in our lives. That’s why patience is the second stop in this sermon series as we talk about Building the Christian Character.

If I were to ask you, “Tell me one of the most commonly spoken prayers in the world,” you’d probably give me a blank stare, but I guarantee you that nine out of 10 people in this room, at minimum, have prayed the following prayer: “Lord, grant me patience—but I want it right now.” We all have terrible difficulty submitting to God’s timetable to get through the tough times in life, don’t we? Yet that’s what patience is all about. Patience has been defined as accepting difficult situations as coming from God, without giving him a timetable to remove them.

Sometimes God’s timetable can be maddeningly slow. I’d be the first to agree with you on that. But God the master craftsman takes his time sculpting souls. In fact, it takes a lifetime. In Romans we read, “Do not conform yourselves to the standards of this world, but let God transform you inwardly by a complete change of your mind.”

Wouldn’t becoming more patient qualify as a complete change of your mind? Paul continues, “Then you will be able to know the will of God—what is good and is pleasing to him and is perfect.”

Adults and children alike want to know all the answers immediately, but that only counts on “Jeopardy.” The fact is, we often don’t even understand the question. And without understanding the question, the answer is useless to us.

How many of you remember what it was like in math class when we were called to the blackboard to solve a problem, and you knew you were dead. But you prayed that God would grant you a miracle and let you guess the answer, and amazingly, that’s just what happened.

And then the teacher said, “Now Johnny, show us how you solved the problem.” And you were back to being dead.

Many of life’s problems can’t be solved with a guess—only patience will reveal the answer.

And God is showing great patience with the world. There are many wicked sins going on in the world; some people think that the world is more sinful than it’s ever been. I don’t know if I can go that far, but no one would deny that the world is sinful. Most people commit some kind of sin every day, while God is perfectly holy. And it begs the question, why, then, doesn’t God judge the world now? Why doesn’t he just wipe out all the evil in the world and establish his kingdom of righteousness? One hint to the answer can be found in the story of the Apostle Peter.

In his second epistle Peter wrote, “Bear in mind that the Lord’s patience means salvation.” He added, “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” This is the same Peter who had denied Christ three times when the chips were down. But the Jesus who prophesized those denials also predicted that Peter would grow into the role of the rock that he could build his church upon.

In the same way that our mothers could always see the potential in us, so God always sees past the present, all the way to possibility.

While on a family vacation, the driver found himself behind a long Army convoy traveling 40 m.p.h. on a two-lane road. After much difficulty, the driver managed to pass the entire convoy, one truck at a time, until there was nothing in front of him but open road. Just then he hears a voice from the back seat: “Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom.” Wouldn’t that drive you crazy?

Now think how God feels, to bring the world along so patiently and lovingly, not wanting to lose any sheep to the enemy, and along comes the least temptation and God’s plans are out the window.

I want to tell you, every one of us has frustrated God’s plans for him or her. Every one of us. Just when God has nurtured us to the point where we have started to tap into the potential he put in us, when we’re just getting ready to roll as the man or woman of God we were created to me, boom, we’re pulling off the road with some silly distraction. Yet he remains patient with us.

So in talking about developing patience as part of our Christian character, there are three thoughts I want to leave you with this morning. The first is, Be patient because God is always working to bring good out of evil.

When Paul wrote that “love is patient,” he’s using Jesus as his role model, the very nature of God. In fact, patience is one of the main themes of the entire Bible—God is slow to get angry and is infinitely patient with his people. Once God has adopted people for his own, he does not give up on them. The people of Israel constantly turned their backs on God, yet he always sought them out and called them back. The whole history of God’s relationship with his chosen people, from the pilgrimage of Abraham to Christ’s death on the cross, could be summed up with the words, “God is patient.”

In fact, there’s a story, supposedly a traditional Jewish story, about Abraham and the difference between God’s patience and ours. Abraham was sitting outside his tent one evening, when he saw an old man, weary with age and travel, coming toward him. Abraham rushed out, greeted him, and invited him into his tent. There he washed the old man’s feet and gave him food and drink. The old man immediately began to eat without any prayer or blessing. So Abraham said, “Don’t you worship God?” The old man replied, “I worship only fire and do not honor any other god.”

When he heard this, Abraham became angry, grabbed the old man by the shoulders and threw him out of his tent into the cold night air. God then called to his friend Abraham and asked where the stranger was. Abraham replied, “I forced him out because he did not worship you.” God answered, “I have suffered him these 80 years although he dishonors me. Could you not endure him one night?”

And that’s why we need to cultivate patience in our character, because we know that God has an infinite capacity to bring good out of evil. We act like lemons, and God insists on making lemonade, and we need to remember that God is at work in the universe. Nobody ever showed more patience than Joseph, and more confidence in God. Through his betrayal by his brothers, his enslavement, imprisonment and slowly working his way up the ladder of power, Joseph never gave up on God’s ability to make flowers bloom in the desert.

Now most of us would understand perfectly if Joseph, when he had his no-good brothers in front of him, had just taken his sword and wiped them all out. It’s easy to think that God takes too long to punish those who deserve punishment? Sure, we’d love to take over at the wheel and run the universe for awhile. What fun that would be. Look out, telemarketers who call at suppertime. Watch out, IRS agents. Stay out of my sight, appliance repairmen who don’t show up when they’re supposed to. Once we get rolling on this vengeance thing, we’re going to do it right, baby.

But that’s not how Joseph saw things at all. What he told his brothers was, “Fear not. Am I God, that I should have power of life or death over you?”

God used the sin of Joseph’s brothers to save a whole nation, Egypt, from dying in a famine. And if Joseph had not been enslaved in Egypt, his family, the forerunners of the Hebrew people, would have died of hunger. God brought good out of evil. And he always does. Look at the cross. From the human standpoint, Jesus’ death represented a terrible defeat, a lost cause. But out of that defeat, out of disgrace and death, came a world set free from sin and Satan and death. Look at the cross and say, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”

More patient than that, no one can ever be. No wonder the church calls that day Good Friday.

The second point is that the ultimate victory goes to the persistent, not to the powerful. Remember that the entire Grand Canyon was carved not by a powerful explosion, not by a bolt of lightning, but by the persistence of the river wearing away the rock over many thousands of years.

A scientist once conducted an experiment in which he hung a one ton iron ball from the ceiling. Beside it he hung a little cork ball with a motor that kept the cork ball tapping against the iron, over and over. After several days the iron ball began to move, and eventually began to swing in an arc, just from the tapping of the cork ball.

Almost everybody, when they are listing their own faults, says that they have a problem with patience. We need to understand that Christians have to be in it for the long haul. The author of the book of Hebrews wrote, “Let us run with patience the race that is set before us, our eyes fixed on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.” This race that we must run, it is a marathon, not a sprint. If you know anything about marathon running, you know the runner who gets impatient and tries sprinting to the front early won’t even finish, much less win the race.

The story of the tortoise and the hare is the classic illustration of this point. The tortoise won the race because he ran with patience, while the hare didn’t take the race seriously. He was careless and casual about running, wasn’t conditioned for the race and had no deep desire to do his best. To his chagrin, he lost the race he should have so easily won. The tortoise, plodding and persistent, ensuring and determined, moved unswervingly toward his goal and won his laurels because he was prepared to achieve. He had the patience and the will to win. 

Finally, understand that you can’t learn patience without people. If we could all live by ourselves in a cave, it would be easy to be a Christian, but we are made to live in community, which means learning to live with other people.

If some people in your life rub you like sandpaper, maybe they are God’s way of smoothing out some rough edges in your life. Or they could be a test, to see how much you’ve learned about patience. But always remember, there are no accidents in life. God puts people in your path that you can help, or who can help you. If other people cause you pain, that too is part of learning patience.

There’s nothing microwaveable about Christian character, but patience can happen to us. However, we have to be willing to endure to the finish line. To win the marathon, the runner must be not only patient, but also willing to put up with the pain that will surely come. When Frank Laubach was honored for his worldwide work on literacy, he responded to the award, “I must remember that when I stand before the Lord, he will not ask to see my trophies, but he will ask to see my scars.” Out of those scars, God can make us real people, if we’re patient.

I thank God for the patience that my mother showed with me, and I thank God even more for the patience he has taken in sculpting my soul. And he’s not finished yet. Neither is he with you. I don’t care if you’re 8 or 80, God is not finished with you yet, and that is both reassuring and awesome. Accepting the gift of the days that are yet to come, let us run the race with patience, honoring both the mother who gave us life and the Christ who gave us a role in his plan for the salvation of the world. To him be all glory and honor and praise forever.