Wait Training

Rev. William "Buck" Day

James 5:7-12

Dear brothers and sisters, you must have patience when you wait for the Lord’s return. Consider the farmers who eagerly look for the rains in the fall and in the spring. They patiently wait for their precious harvest to ripen. You too must be patient, and take courage. For the coming of the Lord is near. Don’t grumble about each other, my brothers and sister, or God will judge you. For look, the great judge is coming, and he’s standing at he door. For examples of patience and 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. Job is an example of a man who endured patiently. From his experience, we see how the Lord’s plan finally ended in good, for He is full of tenderness and mercy. But most of all my brothers and sisters never take an oath by heaven or earth, or by anything else. Just a simple yes or no so that you will not sin and be condemned for it.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God

Pray with me please:

Lord God, we ask that by your spirit, you would quicken us, quicken our hearts, to hear what you have for us this day. We ask that in the name of Christ. Amen

Well tell me if this sounds familiar: You’re heading home from work, you rush into the grocery store to pick up a few things. And you go and grab what you need, heading towards the front of the store. Now as you head towards the checkout lines, what is the first thing you do? You do a quick scan don’t you, of all the checkout stands, to see which one might be open with no one in it, right? Now you’re heading for the express checkout, and you’re thinking, okay! You get a little closer, maybe there are a couple lanes open, and what do you do? You start counting the items that they have. You do a little quick math, and that’s the line you get in. You get in line, and perhaps the person in front of you is dawdling a little bit, maybe digging for a pen or looking for some extra change, what happens? You start…(fidgets impatiently) oh come on, come on, come on. Right? Or is that just me? We all want to get in and out as quickly as possible. Our life is always in fast gear. We’re always in a hurry, and convenience for many of us is a deciding factor in what we will, or what we will not do. I think the song from the musical group Alabama had it right when they said, “I’m in a hurry to get things done. I rush and rush until life’s no fun. I just gotta live and die, but I’m in a hurry and I don’t know why.” Patience in our world is too easily thrown out the window because we live in a world where we have to have it done yesterday.

Where we need that immediate gratification, and yet as followers of Jesus Christ, we are to be different, aren’t we? We are to have patience as part of our character because we have the Holy Spirit in us and that’s one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. We are to be growing in patience. So James comes at us today with some very practical tools from our text. I thought what better time to do a little work out? We’re going to work out…we’re going to do a little “Wait Training”.  We’re going to be learning the why, and the when, and the how to wait so that the Holy Spirit might have more control in our life. There might be more fruit in our lives. James in our text today uses three examples that we’re going to kind of interact with a little bit. Then I’m going to add one more from my life. Not because I’ve got patience nailed…far from it. But simply to see what patience might look like in an every day, ordinary kind of life.

So we want to start with “When should we wait?” When should we have patience? James starts by telling us that we should have patience when the circumstances are uncontrollable. He uses the example of a farmer. Think about it. A farmer needs lots of patience, don’t they? They have to wait to get into the fields to till. They have to wait until it’s time to plant, till it’s time to do any trimming or weeding. They have to wait for the harvest as well, don’t they? Farming takes a lot of patience because there’s so much beyond their control. Things like weather, like the commodity price of what they’re growing, or even how well the crop will grow.

My experience: Many of you may or may not know this, but I’ve been ordained in this denomination for only about a year. As part of my ministry experience, I’ve been in different ministry contexts for over twenty years. A little bit more than six years ago, I was approved by the Presbytery to be ordained. All I needed to do was to find a church that would want me to become their pastor, and then have the presbytery approve it. That’s where I was over six years ago. I needed to find a place, just like I found here last October. At that time I was working at Hope Presbyterian Church in Richfield in a non-ordained position. Hope wanted to make that position an ordained one and they wanted me to fill that. Now if you’ve ever been on a Pastoral Nominating Committee, you’d know that that is not your typical kind of search and call process, but it’s not without precedent within our denomination. We see it around the denomination, and we’ve even seen that happen in this presbytery as well. The presbytery decided in my case that they would not ordain me into that position at Hope, or into any position regardless of the search process. There were lots of reasons for that, some perhaps more understandable than others, but the bottom line from the Presbytery was, “this is not going to happen for you, Buck.” Hope at the time needed more ordained help because of things that they were going thru, and yet Hope and I were both in a situation that was beyond our control.

When you’re in that kind of situation, James tells us to wait. James also says that we should wait when people are unchangeable. When people won’t change, when they won’t make a difference, James says to have patience. He uses the prophets here. What was the role of the prophets in Israel? They were to make the people change, to bring the people back to God. There was behavioral change that was to take place through the prophets. Because the people would not change, the prophets suffered because of that, but they had patience in the midst of that suffering. Do you know what? People haven’t changed much since then. In general, people don’t like change. James calls us to wait when people don’t want to change, even if that involves suffering. At one point in my experience with Hope, the chairperson of the committee that needed to approve my ordination came and actually met with the staff at Hope. The staff wanted to tell me all the reasons that this made sense for Hope, and for me, and even for the Presbytery. The person who came and met with the staff would not be moved. No amount of logic, no amount of persuasion was going to change this person’s mind. There was no hope, so to speak. It left many people at Hope frustrated, because this person was unchangeable. And to that, James says wait…wait. We should wait when the situation is uncontrollable, when people are unchangeable, and when the problem is unexplainable.  Here, James uses Job. In many ways, Job got “jobbed”, didn’t he? All the suffering that Job went through and he had no idea why this was happening. After all that happened to him, he of all people should have been able to say to God, “why me God, why me?”  Life is not fair but God never said it was going to be fair – at least this side of Christ’s return. Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense from my perspective that the Presbytery wouldn’t ordain me into that position at Hope. I actually wondered if the people at the Presbytery had it out for me in some way. I couldn’t understand how they could not see that it made sense for Hope, as well as for me. In the midst of all of that, all I could do was wait – wait to see what was next, even though I had no idea what that was going to be. There are times in all of our lives when God calls us to wait, when we need patience. James has given us some examples.

You may be asking, “Why should we wait?” James answers that why question by saying that God is in control. Three times in our text, James talks about that the Lord is near, the Lord is going to return. The idea is that Jesus is coming back. You want some proof that God is in control. Jesus is going to return. God is in control of His story. It is all planned out. Everything is on schedule from God’s perspective. History is moving towards God’s ordained climax - and do you know what? His timing will be perfect. It always is.  Any delay that we may experience will never thwart what God is up to. God is in control. Another reason that we should wait, is that God rewards patience. Blessed are those who persevere, we are told. Think about Job. After Job’s ordeal was over, he was more blessed in the second half of his life than he was in the first half. The rewards that God gives us, comes in many ways. Our character grows, we may get along with people better, we may be more happy, we may reach the goals that we’re looking for. Others will honor you when they acknowledge your patience. James gives us a third reason we wait: We should wait because God is working it out. In our text today, verse 11 says, “see how the Lord’s plan finally ended in good.” God was working all the time in Job’s life, even when Job didn’t see it. When Job didn’t understand it, God was working nonetheless. Delay doesn’t mean a denial. There is a big difference between “no” and “not yet” when we’re asking God to act. We may want it now, but God calls us to be patient because God is at work, even if we don’t see it. In my situation at Hope, it would have been very easy for me to become angry. Angry at the people at the Presbytery.  Angry at God. I knew that I had to fight my anger, not that anger is bad, but I knew that this anger would take me to a place that would be very unhealthy for me because if I let my anger take root, it would very quickly move to bitterness. A pastor in Los Angeles by the name of Irwin McManus says that bitterness is anger facing backwards. What he means by that is when we become bitter towards another person, we seek to hold that person prisoner to the actions in the past that had embittered us to them because we believe that somehow we can hold that person captive and not allow them to move forward. The truth to that however, is that bitterness holds no one captive but ourselves because bitterness requires that we live in the past. Hope requires that we live in the future. And so I had to be patient and I had to not allow my feelings towards the people who put me in this situation – or so I believed – to take me to an unhealthy place. So, we are to wait because God is at work, God rewards, and God is in control.

Then James turns to “How should wait?” He says first off that we should wait expectantly. Think about a farmer. When a farmer has done all the things they need to do and it’s time to let their fields grow, what do they do while they’re waiting for the harvest? They start preparing to receive it, don’t they? A farmer demonstrates their expectation by their preparation.  And so it should be for us as well. We should prepare as we are waiting for God to move.  So we should wait expectantly, we should also wait quietly. When we have to wait, what do we do all too often? Don’t we grumble? Don’t we kind of run off at the mouth? It’s hard to remain quiet when you’re frustrated, isn’t it? When we’re frustrated, we typically want to let everyone know it, don’t we? Because it’s a whole lot easier to wait when we’re complaining, and yet God says to us in Lamentations, “It is good for us to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord”, and even in Habbakuk, “These things I plan won’t happen right away. Slowly, steadily, surely the time approaches when the vision will be fulfilled.” If it seems slow, wait patiently for it will surely take place. It will not be delayed. We are to wait quietly.

Swearing at the end of our text is very much in the same vein. It’s easy when we get frustrated to let the words fly and James simply says don’t go there…don’t go there. So we should wait expectantly, we should wait quietly, and we should also wait confidently. Job never lost his confidence in the Lord. When the outlook was bad, he looked up. The prophet Micah says, “I will wait confidently for the Lord.” When the problem is unexplainable, people are unchangeable, the circumstances uncontrollable, we are told to wait confidently, because God is working in that situation. Well, what does that confidence look like? It’s about being still, not being anxious, not taking matters into our own hands. Psalm 37 says, “be still in the presence of the Lord and wait patiently for Him to act.” In my situation at Hope, it was obviously uncontrollable, there were people that were unchangeable, and yet I knew in my heart that God was at work. Perhaps not the way that I had hoped or planned, but I knew that God would do something. He would open some door, so I waited expectantly and confidently, and as quietly as I could. Part of my ability to do that was not some kind of ‘super-human’ skill that I tenaciously hung to, but it really came out of my understanding of who God is because I had seen God demonstrate His faithfulness to me in my life time after time after time. So I knew that God would do something, and so I waited. Part of my greatest strength during that time of waiting was gratitude, for I knew that God had brought me out of some dark places into that position at Hope. He didn’t have to, but He did and I was thankful for that and I rested in that and let it be a part of my soul as I waited. Gratitude goes a long way to short circuit bitterness. In fact, it’s the antidote for bitterness, so I waited. I waited and I waited. For 18 months I waited until God opened a door for me. He opened a door for me to serve in a church in South Minneapolis where by the way, I became ordained. I believe that had God not taken me on that path and grown me in patience, that I would not be here before you today. For God is good all the time as the saying goes. All the time, God is good. Even in those times when we need patience, it is about letting God’s spirit have full reign in our lives so that we develop that heart of patience. Blow-pops or Tootsie Rolls are an example of patience, aren’t they? We need patience to get to the good stuff in the middle. Take that home as a reminder of the value of patience, of how God rewards us, how God is working even when we don’t see it. For God wants us to be growing in character, in patience because that is one way we can become more like Christ each day. Amen