Introduction:
Take a look at a list of God’s favorites — and look at how much they suffered.
If we can figure out what’s going on there — well that’d be a pretty good use of our time.
And what’s going on there has to do with the importance of patience. More precisely, the value God puts on patience.
I don’t know if you noticed, but life doesn’t come with a fast forward button. You can’t skip the hard parts. But why are there hard parts at all?
Once again, this has to do with the value God places upon patience.
There are probably three basic forms of patience in the Bible.
The Patience of a Farmer —
This is patience expressed positively. You do good things, and in the short term have nothing to show for it. You have to wait for the seeds you’ve planted to grow. And in the meantime, you keep planting more seeds.
This is best expressed with Galatians 6:9
And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.
This is the kind of patience you need to work in anonymity.
To read your bible when you don’t see any point to it.
To develop an expertise in something.
To read a book.
To stick to a diet.
To raise a family.
The Patience of a Neighbor/Brother —
This is patience expressed reactively to the sins, weaknesses, quirks, of the people around you.
This is best expressed in a verse like Colossians 3:12-13
“Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”
This is the kind of patience you need in traffic
In a church
In a marriage
Wherever you rub elbows with fellow sinners.
The Patience of a Sufferer —
This is patience with hard circumstances falling upon you.
Romans 12:12 — Be patient in tribulation.
This is the kind of patience you need when you get sick
When you are persecuted
When a famine hits the land
When you miscarry
And a person can’t live the life that God wants for them unless they learn these three forms of patience.
Take Joseph for example.
The first thing we learn about Joseph is that he is doing the humble work of shepherding his father’s sheep (37:2). I won’t go into detail here, but we have a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest that he was one son who took his job seriously and did it excellently.
And for his troubles, he nearly winds up being killed by his brothers, and then sold into slavery. Now the Bible says that he is carried down in captivity into Egypt. All of his excellent service to his father before God seems to have been entirely wasted. You can imagine voices whispering in his head, “look at what all of that hard work got you.”
But when he arrives at Potiphar’s house, he goes back to doing excellent work. (39) Even though his previous efforts appear to have yielded nothing, he goes all in in his new “job” and does excellently there as well. This winds up being punished as well. He is thrown into prison. Once again, the voices stir up — look at all the hard work you put in. Surely it has come to nothing. Or even worse than nothing.
But then at the end of chapter 39, we see him in prison, going back to work, serving his new master the warden as unto the Lord. There he extends kindness to two of Pharaoh’s servants and asks, when you are released, please do your best to get me out of jail. The recipient of his kindness forgets about him. And once again the voices of discouragement come to him and say, “behold the fruit of your efforts.”
And once again, Joseph goes back to the work of serving with the Lord with excellence. He does this for 2 whole years until he is finally taken out of prison by Pharaoh and eventually placed as a kind of prince.
And what kind of job is he given? He’s given a long-term project. He must manage bountiful harvests over seven years with nothing but faith in the Lord’s vision that all of this hard work is going to pay off in the end.
All of the timelines I consulted suggest he was in Egypt for 20 years before there was hard evidence that his work had paid off. The famine he believed was coming did indeed come. Egypt had plenty of food. And in the end, he was presented with the opportunity to return his brother’s cruelty with kindness.
Throughout this whole period, Joseph is living out positive patience. He keeps sowing faithfulness even though, for most of the time, he is only rewarded with evil. He learns how to suffer and not grow bitter. He successfully evades one of the most cancerous attitudes a person can have — victim status. He does what he can do and trusts the Lord with the result. And in the end, he extends forbearance and forgiveness to his brothers.
All of that to say that without patience (the three forms of patience I referenced earlier), Joseph would not have been who he became.
Likewise, you and I are laden with potential. But without patience, very little of that potential will be realized.
Now let me talk a little bit about the idea of potential.
I am a calvinist. This means that I believe that God is sovereign over all things. I get that from the Bible. But in the same bible, I am also clearly instructed that what I do matters. And like the stewards in the parable of the talents, I am responsible for taking what God has given me and doing my best with it.
Potential on two levels: You have two main areas of potential.
Firstly, your potential as an image bearer.
We were created to reflect the nature of God. This is our most essential purpose. We are supposed to represent the nature of God. And God is patient. EXPAND
Exodus 34:6 says,
The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
God is these things, so we must be these things. If we are going to live up to our potential as image bearers, we must embody these virtues. This is why we were saved in the first place. To reveal God’s patience. That’s what Paul says in 1 Timothy 1:15-16
The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.
You cannot live up to your potential as an image bearer without becoming patient.
Think about this, of all the gifts Joseph wound imparting to his people, his greatest gift was theological. He taught them something about God. And what did he teach them about God? It is summarized in this statement — “But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”
He taught them something about God that they had forgotten. That God is patient. He plays the long game.
Secondly, you exist to build a world.
You were created to rule and subdue. To be fruitful and multiply. To take the gifts God has given you and multiply them with careful stewardship. Legacy.
Farmer patience — you have to successfully navigate the gap between effort and outcome. Otherwise you’ll never build anything of lasting value. Neither will you develop any significant knowledge base. Etc…
Brother patience — You have to successfully navigate the gap between that way people should behave and the way people do behave. Otherwise, you’ll wind up estranged from people you were supposed to build a life with.
Sufferer patience — You have to endure. You have to not self-destruct. You have to not grow bitter.
As we turn to Exodus in the coming weeks, we will find a people who kept self-sabotaging for lack of patience. A relatively short journey from the other side of the Red Sea, through the wilderness and into the promise land turned into 40 years wandering in the wilderness. The sin, above all others, that self-sabotaged them was impatience.
Now remember the question we started with. Why do we see such suffering in the lives of God’s favorites?
Two basic principles:
Patience is an essential virtue. Patience is not a Christian accessory. You can’t do the Christian life without it.
My guess is that some of you find this discouraging. You do not see yourself as very patient.
Illustration: Navy Seal candidate who joined without knowing how to swim. Such a desire to be a seal that he was willing to enter completely unqualified.
None of us start out the Christian life knowing how to be patient. And the Lord knows this. He will teach us how to be patient.
Given the nature of patience, problems are an essential part of the Christian life.
We won’t learn patience if we do not have problems. Time and time again, Jesus teaches us that God is the perfect father. His reflexive inclination is to show us only good. When he allows various kinds of trials into our lives, he is only doing so because there are certain blessings we can never obtain without experiencing difficulties. Patience is a necessary virtue that is necessarily conveyed to us through problems. The Seal candidate could not be a seal unless he learned how to swim. And he could not learn to swim without entering the water. Likewise, we cannot be successful Christians without patience and we cannot get patience without entering the waters of difficulties.
Joseph and the promise…
The whole Joseph story begins with a promise the Lord gave him in a series of dreams. He would be the leader of his people. And the story ends with him in this position.
What happens in the middle? Pain. Problem after problem. Tribulations and trials.
Joseph’s story is just one of many such stories in the Bible. All of the patriarchs lived similar stories. In Genesis 12, Abraham receives a promise. But his wife’s infertility stands in the way. In 1 Samuel 16, David is anointed king of Israel. But Saul stands in the way.
All of the heroes of the faith have this in common. A gap between promise and fulfillment. And that gap is filled with pain.
Why does God do it this way? Why does he give his promise so far ahead of his fulfillment? He does that to inflict pain. Do you see that? The promise actually causes pain. What does Abraham’s life look like without the promise? He stays in Ur. And his wife’s infertility becomes only a minor inconvenience. He will take other wives.
What does David’s life look like without the promise? He never gets on Saul’s bad side.
Now, to be clear, God could’ve fulfilled his purposes for these men without telling them about his purposes so far in advance. He could’ve had Sarah conceive Issac. He could’ve led David very gently and ignorantly on to the throne without telling him about it in advance.
So why did God feel it necessary to fill their lives with short and mid term disappointment? Why did he tell them what he going to do so far in advance of him actually doing it? Because patience is an essential virtue and it cannot be learned without pain.
We know the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, and so forth. And it is perfectly understandable to read that and think these fruits just kind of magically appear from the Holy Spirit within. But in reality, these fruits are imparted to us through means. And the fruit of patience blooms in us through pain.
The truth is that the young Joseph with the dream of ruling was not yet qualified to rule.
The Abraham of Genesis 12 was not yet qualified to be the father of all who believe.
The David of 1 Samuel 16 was not yet qualified to be the king.
All of these had to learn patience. And the pain that came in-between the promise and the fulfillment was God’s way of giving them this essential virtue.
The Joseph of chapter 39 was a boy.
The Joseph of chapter 50 was a man.
In chapter 37, he had the aspiration to rule.
In chapter 50, he had the ability.
In some mysterious sense, we see that this pattern held true even for the Lord Jesus. He entered the world with the promise of ruling it. But in-between the promise and the fulfillment we find pain.
There are many interesting connections between Jospeh and Jesus.
Both were uniquely beloved by their fathers — to the point where his kin developed murderous jealousy.
Both were stripped of their special cloaks.
Both were sold by a man named Judah. Judas is just a greek version of the name Judah. Both Judah and Judas were given silver in exchange for him. With Judah it was 20 pieces of silver. With Judas it was 30 pieces of silver.
Both were bound.
Both were condemned with two other criminals. Each time one of the criminals lives and the other dies. In Jesus’ case, the criminal who lived received eternal life.
Both entered slavery to fulfill the plan of God. Joseph did so non-voluntarily, Jesus did so voluntarily — Philippians 2:6-7 says
“who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”
Jospeh’s ordeal involved a kind of metaphorical death. The pit. The prison. Etc…
Jesus’ ordeal involved literal death. His pit was the grave.
Both men suffered all of this so that in God’s providence, these men’s enemies might be saved.
And oh friends, we do need saving.
So many of our sins have to do with impatience. This is the source of much of our anger, anxiety, and many of our addictions have to do with hitting a chemical fast forward button — we do so many wrong things just to avoid making peace with our current circumstances.
Our grumbling and ingratitude and greed are almost always fruits of impatience.
Indeed impatience is at the root of nearly all of our most acute relationship problems.
This is a fire kindled by the devil, by striking a proud heart against firm providence… It often sends out its hellish smoke in passionate expressions by the mouth, and scorches others by the sinful deeds it puts them on: for such are as madmen throwing about firebrands, arrows, and death. It makes a man an enemy to himself; and flies up against God, accusing him of injustice, folly, and cruelty. — Thomas Boston
That is why Jesus had to endure the cross.
There he hung — and suffered. With every possible provocation and temptation to impatience. The people were scoffing. The disciples were fleeing. His body was screaming even more loudly than the jeering crowd.
Everything was saying to him — give up! You oh Son of the Most High do have a fast forward button! Call down the angels! Consume your enemies!
But he endured the cross. He endured the cross.
The first step to becoming more patient is to repent of your impatience. Do you see it as a sin?
Christ crucified is evidence how seriously God takes the issue.
We started this sermon by asking, why does God allow his favorite people to suffer so?
Jesus is his most favorite person of all. And he sent him to endure the cross to win forgiveness for an impatient people.
And in addition to forgiveness, he secured real freedom from the sin of impatience.
Friends, when this service is over, you will go back out into a world of pain.
Difficult people.
Delay between good works and harvest.
Diseases, persecutions, loss
But the same patience Jesus displayed on the cross is now yours. Every blessing in the heavenly places is yours in Christ Jesus. His perfect patience. His perfect peace. Is yours in Christ Jesus.
Closing Prayer:
Lord Jesus, we now see that patience is an essential virtue, without which, we cannot be who you created us to be and do what you created us to do. We now understand why you allow us to suffer. The opening of the book of James says, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” We are always reluctantly enrolled in the school of pain. None of us would choose it. But you, according to your fatherly love, bring about seasons of suffering because this is the only way we can learn patience. Lord we confess our impatience. We repent of our impatience. We want to be like you. We want to build a life that pleases you and blesses the world. And we now see that we can do neither of these things without patience. So great God, we do the thing you have commanded us to do. We look to the cross. We look to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith who endured the cross for our sake. There we see the blood of Christ flowing to win our forgiveness and there we freedom from impatience. Lord God, through your Holy Spirit, we have access to peace that surpasses understanding. Please Lord God, replace our impatience with peace. Let us trust you. Let us be still and know you are God.
Communion:
For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.