A Family Room Filled with Patience

Pastor Burcham's Sermon

Sunday, October 9, 2005

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

This morning, as we go through the house God has designed for us, we move into the family room. The family room should be the warmest room of the entire house. This should be the most welcoming place of any other room. Lots of conversations may happen in the kitchen. The foyer might set the mood for the entire house, but it's in the family room where we can kick back, we can relax, we can de-stress.

In the house God designs for us then, in the family room, it's marked with the fruit of the spirit, patience. You see, it takes patience in the family room, patience to play a game with a 3 or 4-year-old. If you've done that, you know what I mean. It takes patience to sit up and wait for your teenager to come home, especially when it's five minutes after curfew and now every minute just kind of ticks by. It takes patience as you talk to your parents and you try to explain to them and then you explain again and then you explain again why this is so important to you and you can't live without it. Patience in the family room. It goes hand in hand with self control, and patience contributes to the overall atmosphere of love that's in a house. So God gives us the gift of patience.

We have a great challenge in front of us, though. Because, although God wants us to be patient people, we live in a very impatient world. In fact, living right now, right here today, I almost think our culture is working against us more on this fruit of the spirit than any other. It seems to me the virtue of patience is lost. It's gone forever. Society is working too hard against us on that because we're an impatient people. I'm an impatient person.

Think about the world we live in and the lightening speed things happen and the instantaneous results we want and instant gratification we look for. When's the last time you sat down and actually wrote a letter and put it in the U.S. Post. No, we send e-mails. And if somebody doesn't answer us within a day, a half a day, maybe even within a couple of hours, we start wondering if something's wrong. “Well, they haven't gotten back to us in the last six hours.” So we shoot off another e-mail to make sure it got through. Maybe we follow up with a phone call. “Is your server down? Is something wrong?” We want instant messaging back and forth with one another. We live in a world when you go into a fast food restaurant, have you ever noticed no longer is it just one person who takes your order, but it's two. In other words, you walk up to the register, there's one person who's going to punch in the order and also take your money and give you change but, while they're doing that, there's another person who is filling your order so the expectation is, by the time you get your change back and put it back in your wallet, they're handing you your food. And if they're not handing you your food and telling you a number, you're wondering what's wrong. “I thought this was a fast food restaurant.”

How many times, on the way home, you're going there to pick somebody up to take them someplace else. What do you do? You pick up the cell phone and you call home and you say, “Now, look, I'm about five blocks from the house. I want you standing at the front door so when I pull into the driveway, you can pop out, get in the car, and we can get moving to where we need to be.” How often have you gotten irritated in Target when the guy in front of you obviously has more than ten items and you are on the express lane and then you really get frustrated when one of the things scans through, it doesn't have a price to it. “How long am I going to be here? How much do I have to endure, Lord?” We are an impatient people. We want instant gratification. We don't want it next week. We want it today, at the very worst, tomorrow. No longer do we order things by filling out a form and then sending it in or even faxing it in because that's not quick enough. We go to a web site and we fill in our order and they give us the option of next day shipping so we can have it before noon tomorrow. We live in a world that says you have to act now. You have to buy quickly. Lost is the art of saving. We don't save up for big purchases. No, it's easy financing. It's charge it. Is it any wonder in the paper it says the average household has $8,000 worth of credit card debt? How much of that is because we're impatient? We won't wait. We won't take our time. The impatience of our culture, though, has infected our relationships. It's infected and, therefore, it has affected our relationships.

Has your son or daughter come home and they start to tell you about their day and they're finding trouble trying to get the exact words and so they stumble and say um and ooh a lot? Do you fill in the words for them so you can find out what's going on in their day and move on to something else? How many times do you wish your junior higher would just grow up? You say to yourself, “Aren't they ever going to mature? Aren't they ever going to get it and act like adults?” How many times do you get frustrated with Mom and Dad as you're trying to explain something to them and you say, “You know, all of my friends were able to do this at this age. Why can't I have this privilege? Why can't I have the car? Why can't I be out until 2:00? Why can't I dress this way? What do you mean I have to wait?” How many relationships, whether it's with friends or with your spouse or with other family members, when you hit a low point in that relationship, you start thinking, “I just don't know how much longer I'm going to put up with this. I mean really, how much longer do I really need to deal with all this kind of hassle and pain?”

Impatience is divisive and destructive. Impatience breaks up families, destroys friendships, throws responsibilities out the window. Impatience says we'll throw out pets, we'll throw out family, we'll throw out responsibilities because things haven't worked out the way we want it to or at least not as quickly as we thought they should have. Impatience is destructive to family and relationships, and it's time for us to reclaim the virtue of patience. It's time for us to reclaim for the sake of our families, for the sake of our relationships, for the sake of the home God wants us to live in, it's time for us to reclaim patience. Thankfully, patience is a gift from God. Patience is something God has given to us and, even more than that, it's something God has demonstrated to us because that's how God deals with us.

Our first reading this morning was from 1 Timothy. Paul paints a picture of himself as an example of Christ's patience with him. He says, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I'm the worst. But for that very reason, I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe in Him and receive eternal life.” Paul says his very life and the way God has dealt with him is to serve as an example of God's unlimited patience. A few verses before that, he demonstrated why he felt he was the worst of all sinners. He says, “I was a blasphemer. I was a persecutor, and I was a violent man.” We learned from the Book of Acts that Paul, early on in his career, saw it as his number one priority to destroy Christianity. Anyone who claimed to be a follower of Jesus, he would arrest them. He would throw them in jail. At times, he would even see them sentenced to death. It was Paul who stood by holding everyone's coats so they could get a better swing at Stephen and watched him die because of his faith in Jesus. That was Paul. He says, “I am the worst of sinners.” And he says, “Now if Jesus was patient with me, if He patiently waited and put up with all of my sinfulness, won't He be patient with you?” He says, “That's why He came. He came to save sinners.” And He shows us His unlimited patience.

He has unlimited patience with me. I don't want to tell you how many times I have confessed the same sin again and again. I know it's wrong. I know God doesn't want me to live that way, and I live that way anyway. And each time I come back to God and I confess that sin again. You know, me, being an impatient person, I would think to myself, “At some point in time, God's finally going to say, ‘You know, Ron, that's enough. You have come to me with this I don't know how many countless times. I have to tell you one more time, and then we're through. Okay? We're done. We're not going to mess with it anymore.'” God doesn't do that. God says no matter how many times we fall to sin, no matter how many times it's the same sin, He promises us, if we come to Him and confess that sin with a true and contrite heart, He will forgive that sin and it will be wiped off the record books forever. That's patience. That's unlimited patience.

He's shown that unlimited patience in your life. How many times have you come to Him with the same sin, the same infraction, the same mess up? And yet, God wipes it clean. Have there been times in your life when you've wandered away from God? You just kind of turned your back on Him? Maybe you sat out in the pew, but you really just had your back turned to God. And yet, God is patiently waiting for you. No matter how far away you wander, God's there with open arms to welcome you back, to show you His grace. That's unlimited patience.

If God has shown us unlimited patience, He also empowers us to be patient people. He says that's one of the marks of what it is to be one of His people. Once we've been captured by faith, once we know of God's patience and His love and His forgiveness, one of the fruits of the spirit, that is, the spirit that's living in us, one of the characteristics we'll display is that of patience. So not only is God patient with us, but He allows us to be patient with other people. What that means is patience can be learned. We can learn to be more patient. We can go against society and culture, which says we should be impatient and impulsive, and we can learn to be patient people.

It seems to me we can learn patience in one of two ways. We can learn it positively or we can learn it negatively. From both instances we can learn. Positively, we learn patience because we see people who have displayed patience. We see God's unlimited patience and know that's how He wants us to be. But more than that, we can look through the pages of scripture and it is just full of examples of people being patient, patient with life, patient with distress, patient with God Himself. If you think of patience in the bible, you have to think of Job. He is like the poster child of patience from scripture. Job lost everything. He lost family. He lost all of his possessions. He lost his health. Everything was gone. His friends said to him, “Job, why don't you just curse God and die? You've lost it.” And yet, Job hung on. He displayed incredible patience waiting for God to reveal to him what was the point in all of this? How about Abraham? Abraham, as a young man, God comes to him and says, “Abraham, out of you, I'm going to make a great nation.” Abraham says, “Really?” He says, “Yeah. Look at the stars in the sky.” “Yeah?” He says, “You can't count them. That's the number of your descendants.” Abraham says, “Alright. I'm going to have that big family I always wanted. Great.” Then he's 30 and he has no kids. 40, no kids. 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years old, he still hasn't had a kid. And God's still saying, “Your descendants are going to be as numerous as the stars in the sky.” He's 100 years old before he has his first bouncing baby boy. He waited 100 years. That's patience, my friends. Patience to stay faithful to God, knowing He's going to deliver. They can stand as examples for us. This is what it means to be a patient man or woman of God, to be faithful to Him.

More contemporary. I'll bet you can think of people in your life that are just patient. You don't know how. They put up with incredible things. They never seem to lose their cool. They never seem to rush anyone around. Can you think of somebody in your life that has great patience? Maybe God has put them there as an example for you to say, “This is what I want to aspire to be. This is how God wants me to be. That's what He's equipped me to be, and I'm going to look to that person as an example of what it is to be a patient person and how to react in certain situations.” That's learning patience positively.

You can learn it negatively. We probably learn more of it negatively. I don't buy the thing when you're going through something and you have no escape, you say, “God's teaching you patience.” No, He's building up character. You don't learn patience then. When it's all over and you look back and you see what God has accomplished through that, then maybe you learn patience for the next time around. But when you're in the middle of it, you're not learning patience. When I say learning patience negatively, what I'm talking about there is when you see impatient people and you see the negative side of what impatience causes, that should instill in you more of a commitment to be patient. What I'm saying is, when you're at the mall, and you see some parent dragging the kid behind them saying, “Would you hurry up? We've got to move. Will you just hustle up?” And you look at this little guy and he's moving about as fast as his little legs can handle. When you only have legs this tall, you only move so fast. And you see the anger and you see the hurt in that little guy's eyes. That should instill in you a commitment to be patient, to exercise a little bit more self control.

The best example is probably in the airport. You're sitting in the airport. It's 15 minutes before it's time to board the plane. So they announce, “Folks, in about 15 minutes, we'll be boarding the plane.” 15 minutes. Fifty people stand up and get in line. Why? I'm one of them. Why do I stand there? Why do I want to stand in line for 15 minutes to get into a little bitty seat that's far more uncomfortable than the chair in the airport? But there I am. And then you see people pacing. And then you see people grumbling and acting rude to one another and elbowing one another as if they have to get on the plane before someone else. They practically race themselves down the jet way so they can get on the plane first. The next time you're there, stop and take a look and say, “Is that really how I want to be? Is that how I want to look? Is that the example I want to give to other people of what it is to be a godly man or woman, to be that impatient?” We can learn negatively. Because each time we see the negative effects of impatience, that should instill in us a commitment to be more patient, to rely upon the gift God has given to us. Because He says His spirit is in us and one of the fruits of that spirit, one of the characteristics He gives us is that of patience, which means, because of God's gift, you have it in you to be more patient.

You can learn positively or you an learn negatively, but I believe we need to reclaim the virtue of patience. And I'm probably talking more to me than I am to you. It's time we reclaim the virtue of patience. It's time we take time to listen to our kids and watch them grow up. It's time we're patient enough that, through those rough spots in our relationships, we'll wait and we'll see until it comes back up again and the relationship is soaring high again. It takes patience to do that.

We have a lot against us in the culture, powerful forces out there in society. But we have one who is more powerful than that because we have the one behind us who is God Almighty. And through His unlimited patience to us, He gives us the gift of patience. Amen.

Copyright 2005 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church