(Part 1)
“Dear brothers and sisters, be patient as you wait for the Lord’s return. Consider the farmers who patiently wait for the rains in the fall and in the spring. They eagerly look for the valuable harvest to ripen. You, too, must be patient. Take courage, for the coming of the Lord is near. Don’t grumble about each other, brothers and sisters, or you will be judged. For look—the Judge is standing at the door! For examples of patience in suffering, dear brothers and sisters, look at the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. We give great honor to those who endure under suffering. For instance, you know about Job, a man of great endurance. You can see how the Lord was kind to him at the end, for the Lord is full of tenderness and mercy. But most of all, my brothers and sisters, never take an oath, by heaven or earth or anything else. Just say a simple yes or no, so that you will not sin and be condemned.”-James 5:7-12
Waiting! Does waiting weary you? It does me sometimes. I am not going to lie, I am not very good at waiting. If I pull up on a drive thru at a restaurant and there are more than three cars in line…I just pull off. When I am ready to go and my wife and the girls are still getting ready, I pace around the house like a nervous nelly until they are ready to go. When I am at the doctor’s office and my appointment is at 2 p.m. and it’s already 20 minutes pass that time, I get a little irritable. I guess that is why this passage is so difficult for me. To be quite honest, I struggle to see the spiritual significance of having to wait.
Funny thing is the Bible is packed with stories of people having to wait. Time and time again from captivity to exile, to simply waiting on the Messiah to come; waiting emerges as a key theme throughout the Bible. The reality is that each of us spend significant seasons of our lives waiting for something: waiting to get out of school, waiting on job offers, waiting on test results, waiting to close on your first home, waiting on a dying loved one to pass or waiting on a child to be born. Whether we like it to or not, waiting shapes us. God uses that time to work on our inner man.
Consider the farmer. James uses a farmer waiting patiently on the rain to come as an example of how to conduct ourselves as we wait:
“Dear brothers and sisters, be patient as you wait for the Lord’s return. Consider the farmers who patiently wait for the rains in the fall and in the spring. They eagerly look for the valuable harvest to ripen. You, too, must be patient. Take courage, for the coming of the Lord is near.”-James 5:5-8
Something to keep in mind as we consider this passage is a thought I read in a commentary: “If the rain doesn’t fall, the crops don’t grow. Rain becomes a matter of life and death. Without the rain the farmer and his family may not have a source of income. Without the rain, the farmer has no guaranteed way of keeping his family alive. And yet James says, the farmer waits patiently”.
Farmers know it’s a process and don’t expect a harvest in two minutes. It takes a lot of faith to bury your future in the dirt and trust God for a harvest that you cannot see. Then have to wait through a process of growth to reach it’s fullest potential.
How patient would you be in that situation? Patience would not be my immediate response to those circumstances. How many of you would become frantic, try to control something out of your control-by worrying, and perhaps take your anxiety out on those around you. Waiting does not always bring out the best in us.
Pastor Scott Burr
Dayspring Community Church
No comments:
Post a Comment