Now or Later?
So I was in the Word this morning and read a verse I’ve read a thousand times before.
James 1:2 My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, 3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience.
I’ve read these verses many times in the midst of many trials and been very encouraged by them. I’ve danced, shouted, and praised God about the trials I’m going through because it means that I’m getting more patient. I’m in a trial right now so I set my faith on this verse once again, but this time it jumped out at me. I realized that, I know I’m getting patience, I know patience is good, I know what it is, but not why I want it. Other than God having just said it’s something that I should want, I really had no idea what benefit it gave me.
The Word could have offered me rubber chickens for going through trials, and I would have been equally joyful. Clueless about the purpose, but joyful.
Thinking about it, I concluded that hundred dollar bills, as a reward, would probably be better. So I told God he should change it, but He wasn’t “feelin” that. So I began to converse with God and find the usefulness of patience.
The Holy Spirit said very, very quietly, “Patience is the perfect obedience.”
I didn’t get it. So I meditated on this Word some.
From Webster’s 1828 Dictionary
Patience is
1. The suffering of afflictions, pain, toil, calamity, provocation or other evil, with a calm, unruffled temper; endurance without murmuring or fretfulness. 3. The act or quality of waiting long for justice or expected good without discontent. Patience springs from a Christian submission to the divine will.
We don’t often expect or want to wait when we pray or believe for something. We pray for healing, NOW, financial relief, NOW, financial blessing, NOW, a new job, NOW, more friends, NOW, a marriage partner, NOW. We rarely pray for them to come in God’s timing and even more rarely listen to find out if God is saying “Wait for them.”
“Patience is the perfect obedience.”
My worldly mindset and foolish ways have many times in the past caused me to believe for something, NOW, that didn’t turn out very profitably.
Funny Story: In an effort to test my faith, I’ve actually taken some faith scriptures and said “the Word says that if I say something and believe in my heart that it will come to pass, I will have it.” Not kidding. I’ve foolishly picked out a piece of grass and told it to grow to be a foot long, immediately, before my eyes. And I believed in my heart that it would grow! It didn’t grow. I confessed faith scriptures over it, I confessed prosperity scriptures over it, I rebuked it for not following the commandment of a Christian because we have authority, I’ve cast out all of it’s demons, I even used the mighty name of Jesus’. All over a piece of grass. And I’m not proud of it but I’ve done this for hours before… and not just once. I can think of three times off the top of my head that I did it.
The grass never grew. Needless to say it wasn’t one of my shining faith moments.
Patience is the ability to wait. Waiting sometimes is the most important act because timing is extremely important to God. The right timing can mean the difference between someone getting saved or not. If God has called you to go out street evangelizing one night from 6pm to 9pm, but you decide to be super, super holy and go early to get an extra hour in, you might miss His entire purpose for you being out that night. There might be one specific guy that you are supposed to talk to that will become the next Billy Graham. But you might pass by his house and miss him entirely cause you were disobedient.
“Patience is the perfect obedience.”
Often we come to God wanting to know what to do to stop the trials and tests. We pray, “God, I’m going through this how do I fix it, what do I do.” But He doesn’t want the trials to stop immediately, otherwise He wouldn’t have given them to us in the first place. When your house is burning and crumbling around you, anyone can pray and obey, if God says put it out or run out of the building, but who has the faith to stand there and smile at the fire and go through the trial. That is perfect obedience, to be even burning and wait, just because “God said so.”
“Patience is the perfect obedience.”
The next verse in James says, “let patience have it’s perfect work.” I’ve always read that and thought the perfect work was only internal, within me, but patience also does a perfect work externally on the tests that you are waiting to be delivered out of resulting in perfect timing.
The next verse says, “that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.”
The Word says that we can be perfect, complete, and lacking nothing!
When you are delivered out of tests in a perfect timing, you will receive tremendous blessing and spiritual growth, so much so that you may even become perfect and complete, lacking nothing.
That’s amazing. Truly amazing, to think that if we count it all joy when we fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of our faith produces patience. And we let patience have it’s perfect work, then we may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.
“Patience is the perfect obedience.”
P.S. I shared this word with a few of my closest friends and one brought up what I thought was a great example.
Just for fun let’s call her Barbara.
Barbara’s Revelation: Think about patience and how we always want something, now, often before it is in the right timing. If we didn’t wait for a baby for 9 months, it wouldn’t be whole and complete. Sometimes, we aren’t patient and say I wish this time would hurry up. But it’s through that time that the baby has to grow, develope and become complete. It has to have everything that it needs to survive out in the world.
P.P.S. If rather than praying for the grass grow immediately before my eyes, I had just prayed for it to grow and been patient, the grass would have grown. It would have grown even miles and miles over a long enough time, if it were only nurtured and pruned(cut) properly.
Next time you ask God for something NOW, reconsider and figure out if maybe He wants you to be patient.