Thought for the Day:
We’re
reading Phil Ryken’s book, “Loving the Way Jesus Loves” in my Sunday School
class at church. The book looks at each
aspect of love from 1 Corinthians 13 and then shows us how it was demonstrated
by the life of Jesus Christ. This week’s
chapter deals with love being patient.
Rykin says that God is “patient both in the sense of being slow to anger
and in the sense of waiting for just the right time to do something.” He illustrates this characteristic with the account
of death of Lazarus (John 11:1-44).
John
11:5-6 “Now Jesus loved Martha and her
sister and Lazarus. So, when he heard
that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.”
Jesus hears
that his good friend is deathly ill and instead of rushing to get to his side,
Jesus delays his departure for a couple of days. When Jesus finally arrives, Lazarus’ two
sisters are upset with Jesus over their brother’s death. They blame Jesus for his death. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have
died.” (John 11:21). Jesus doesn’t
respond harshly to their accusations. He
gently speaks words of faith and encouragement to them. From the full account it is obvious that
Jesus knew His delay would result in Lazarus’ death; but He delayed anyway
because He had something greater in mind than raising a sick man from his
bed. He planned on raising a dead man
from the grave.
But the family didn’t
know this. All they knew was the grief
and sorrow of having a loved one die.
They felt the frustration of knowing Jesus could have stopped him from
dying but chose not to do so. By the
time Jesus arrived, Lazarus had been dead and buried for four days. Four very long days of sadness and mourning
for Martha, Mary, as well as for their family and friends.
In the end, Jesus
restores Lazarus to life. I’m certain
that the joy of having their brother restored to them totally erased the grief
they had known. In the process, Jesus is
shown to have greater power than they had imagined and God is glorified and
praised.
What really captured my
heart as I read through this chapter in the book was Ryken’s conclusions. “John 11 does something more than show us the
loving patience of Jesus Christ. It also
helps us understand why WE should be patient—patient with God, patient with our
circumstances in life, and patient with other people.”
Ryken cites four reasons
that love is patient:
1) God is always in control.
2) God is at work.
3) Love waits through suffering.
4) God will make everything turn out right in the end.
As I
look back over my life in the past year, I remember events and times when I questioned
why God hadn’t stepped in and stopped what was happening. I questioned whether God cared. I wondered why He didn’t act if He could
have. Contrary to the testimony of the
bible, God certainly didn’t seem to be involved in human affairs—at least not
mine. I eventually found peace with what
has happened soon after the events; but Ryken’s reasons helped me gain a
greater perspective (or at least reminded me of what I already knew to be
true).
Here’s
the lesson to be learned. Suffering does
not mean that God has forgotten about you, is punishing you, or hates you. It doesn’t mean that life is outside of His
control or ability to influence. It
doesn’t mean that He has given up or stopped caring or working behind the scenes. Here is where faith comes in. We have to trust Him even when we don’t
understand what is happening and we desperately want a different outcome. Will we allow God to be God? Or will we turn our backs on Him and give up
on faith the moment things don’t seem to be turning out the way we had hoped
for?
Ryken
includes a prayer for patience in this chapter: “Lord, I’m so impatient right
now that I can hardly stand it. But deep
down I know that you are in this situation, not outside of it, and that you are
doing something good here. Help me to
see what you are doing, or at least to believe that you know what you are
doing, even if I can’t see it.”
The
chapter on “Love Waits” concludes with these remarks: “This too is something to remember whenever
we get impatient: God will make everything come out right in the end. Jesus is never early and never late but
always right on time. He is not indifferent
to the suffering of a fallen world, any more than he was indifferent to Lazarus
and his sisters. In his love, he plans
to bring all our sufferings to an end.
His great day will come at exactly the right moment. When it comes, we will see his glory. Then we will know that he was in control all
along, working everything for good, even through suffering, and that there was never
any reason for us to be impatient at all.”
I
recommend you pick up the book and read the complete chapter for yourself. Although I’ve grown in my patience over the
last year—I still have a long way to go.
I’m appreciate of the reminder that God is in control and at work. Sometimes I forget that. It is all too easy to just accept the world
and our situation at face value and never look behind the veil and see the
spiritual dimension that is on-going.
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