Patience

What God wants the most, even He has to wait for.

God not only agrees with the perfection of the natural moral law, He lives it perfectly Himself.

If the current process at hand requires patience over time, then even God submits Himself to patient waiting if the rightness of the process requires it.

Even God cannot make instant saints.  Even God cannot instantly manufacture the “bride of Christ”…the Christian church…through instantaneous fiat creation.

Within the constraints of our earthly dimensions, bringing many sons and daughters to glory takes time.

Adam and Eve impulsively jump at the chance to obtain the knowledge of good and evil.  But the process of Jesus slowly and patiently bringing the disciples to a point where they can stand in faith on their own two feet, and capably listen and walk in the Spirit…after He ascends into heaven…takes a full three and one-half year period.

This standing on their own two feet…walking in the Spirit…occurs after their privileged, singular experience of listening to and observing Jesus up-close…the greatest teacher of all time…in action on a daily basis.

There is something singularly unique about patience that burns away the chaff of the superficial, and purifies the genuine and real.

Patience is a valuable component of the commendable process of becoming the actual, real thing in truth…after which achieving the given task at hand rises in importance to the point where worldly recognition and acclaim fades away into insignificance.

If God calls us out to become the king of Israel, or governor of Egypt during a great famine, or as the deliverer of a nation in bondage, or to become the father of faith, or to discover real truth to be able to write New Testament epistles to the early Christian churches…we may have to exercise patience and wait for some period of time while events and circumstances in our journey of faith develop.

The process of getting there and actually becoming the capable person uniformly through-and-through is more important to God than the thin veneer of outward appearances.

“Getting there” correctly and honorably is paramount (Ps. 22; Isa. 53; Jas 1:17).

What Abraham wants the most…to become the father of descendants as numerous as the stars of the night sky as promised by God…he has to patiently wait for.

What Joseph wants the most…to fulfill his potential according to his two earlier prophetic dreams as a young man in Canaan…he has to wait for patiently through his preparation in Potiphar’s house and in Pharaoh’s prison.

What Moses wants the most…to fulfill his destiny as the deliverer of his people in bondage in Egypt (Acts 7:25)…he has to patiently wait for.

What David wants the most…to become king and to rule the nation of Israel finally in peace and security with its surrounding neighbors…he has to patiently wait for.

What Peter wants the most…to fulfill his potential as a “rock” to courageously lead the early church…he must patiently wait for through many character-building lessons, setbacks, and failures.

What Paul wants the most…to discover real truth…he has to wait for through the long journey of a walk of faith as a missionary evangelist to the Jews and the Gentiles of the first-century Greco-Roman world.

What God wants the most, as expressed in the final prayer of Jesus…that Christians might be as one even as Jesus and the Father are one (Jn. 17:21), thereby setting up the context for genuine peace, joy, and love in His kingdom for all eternity …even God has to patiently wait for.

This prayer of Jesus has not been fulfilled yet, as today’s Christian church is divided by factions, disagreements, and denominations.

The last part of John 17:21…”that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” is greatly undermined today by this outward show of debilitating divisions and disagreements.

The actualization of this divinely uttered prayer of Jesus is still awaiting fulfillment within the complex and highly specified arrangement of events and circumstances in the upcoming last-days.

The soon-to-be-addressed issues of contention between God and the “son of perdition” of 2 Thessalonians 2:3 are larger and more complicated than human intellect can currently fathom (Dan. 7:25-27; 8:23-25).

This final instructive confrontation between truth and error, between darkness and light, on a massive and intensified scale, will require a premeditated, divinely composed, macro and micro-engineered life-script for the world and for the Christian church on earth…of an unprecedented, panoramic scope and quality.

The end-times will require a God-composed script of such brilliant creativity and subtle complexity as to rival and surpass anything heretofore in Christian apologetics, in theology, in our burgeoning comprehension of the marvels of the physical universe today, or in any of the great journeys of faith recorded in the Bible… except for the life and ministry of Jesus Christ in the first-century (Dan. 8:23-25).

If the God-composed life-scripts of the people of faith in the Bible serve as a preview of what we can expect in the upcoming end-times, the scenario of events will include a large dose of patience as Christians likewise wait for what they want the most…the return of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ…during a period of time described as being the most intensely challenging in all of human history (Mt. 24:21-22).