"Patience"

2 Peter 3:8-15

Pastor Tom Johnson, December 7, 2014

The word patience in Peter’s second letter to believers (μακροθυμία) is a literal rendering from one of my favorite passages. God says to Moses, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exod 34:6). Patience is slowness to anger. God is patient. And so, Peter says we should also wait patiently. “Patience!” says our Scripture. “Bring down the boil of your anger to a simmer; and then turn off the burner completely. Put the brakes on your rage. Delay your indignation.” As James similarly says, “Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.” We live in our quick-tempered, road-raging, instant-gratifying, short-fused, demanding world. And if you really think about it, impatience is irrational and self-destructive. We are only hurting ourselves by not being patient.

Consider tailgating. Someone drives their car right up on your back bumper and begins to honk. What makes them think that they are in any more of a hurry than I am to get to my destination? Why should I break the law and drive faster and risk getting a speeding ticket so that they can get to the stop light sooner? They will be one car-length closer to the red light than me. Let’s calculate the time gained: a second or two?

Consider sitting down at a restaurant for dinner with that special someone. You sit down and don’t see a server for ten minutes. Another family of twelve people come in and sit down. The server shows up at that moment and hands them menus.  They have 12 questions about the menu. “What is the soup of the day?” “Should we order off the child menu for our 12 year old?” “Does it contain any nuts?” Each passing moment accelerates your sense of injustice and anger.

Consider a much more serious matter: another shooting in the news. Another young person is killed. There are more questions about how law enforcement or the legal system handled the situation. No matter what side you find yourself on, a sense of injustice and anger begins to quicken your spirit. Or consider another Christian who is imprisoned, driven from their home, or killed. “When one part of the Body suffers, the whole Body suffers.” And we are right to ask, “Oh Lord, how long?”

“Wait patiently,” says our Scripture. It’s not worth the high blood pressure. “Be patient,” says the Lord. Don’t let stress and anxiety take it’s toll on your minds, bodies, and spirits. Our demand for immediate justice will only speed us along a course of greater chaos and conflict. “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.” Our text says, “We wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.” It’s a beautiful truth but a tough pill to swallow: we may never have the fullness of God’s justice until Jesus comes back in his glory in the second Advent. That is just way too far into the future—too slow to satisfy our sense of right and wrong. In the meantime, we feel like time is wasting away. We may believe that God’s silence and inactivity is proof that he either does not exist or does not care.

This, I believe, is why many people do not believe in (or trust in) God. How can God allow so much injustice, pain, and sorrow to go on? He seems too slow. So slow, in fact, that he seems altogether absent. Our Scripture says, “With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” God stands outside the universe with all of its laws of gravity, time, and space. He is not slow about his promise as we perceive time and the flow of human history but slow to anger. He is waiting patiently. As someone’s grandmother once said, “God may not act when we want him to, but he is always on time.” He is patient because with one glance he sees the birth and death of the universe. He knows that what went wrong in the Garden of Eden will be made right when Jesus ushers in Paradise. In the meantime, he has purpose.

And that purpose flows out of a desire of “not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” Compassion keeps him from angry outbursts. Mercy restrains God from punishing. Love for all his creation constrains his justified wrath. “Regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.” In other words, patience is not only a virtue; patience is redemptive. Patience makes room for people to grow and change. Patience gives time and space for life-transformation. And so God invites us to extend that same space and time to those around us—to wait patiently and to pray earnestly for those around us to experience the same grace. Waiting patiently means to trust in God and compassionate toward others.

Our Scripture invites us to put the best construction on God and our unbelieving neighbor: he only seems slow because he works patiently by his Holy Spirit to draw all people to himself. He is eager to see us turn toward a path of reconciliation with him and one another. He is so eager, in fact, he sent his Son. The first Advent helps us prepare for the second Advent. The eternal Son of God became a human child to adopt us and make us ready to live as daughters and sons in our eternal home. This is the God we serve—our heavenly Father who not only waits patiently but acts deliberately to bring the whole world into the fullness of his justice and blessing. And so we pray, “Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!”