Time Is On Our Side

In June of 1979, I became pastor of a small church in the inner city of Chicago. Twenty-five of us met on Sunday mornings in a leaky, crumbling, 75-year-old building. The weekly offerings averaged $300, from which we payed expenses and my full-time salary. We suffered none of the temptations of prosperity.

For my first year, that salary added up to $13,000, which, to put it mildly, cramped our lifestyle. We drove an old Malibu in which, when it rained, inches of water would collect on the floor. We lived in a second-floor apartment that was a drafty, uninsulated icebox in the winter and a sweltering oven in the summer.

Unnerving things happened all too often. One Sunday night my wife had to stay home from church with the kids. Just after the service ended she telephoned. “Brian, something’s happened downstairs. Hurry home.”

Minutes later I found police cars parked in front of our apartment. Blood was spattered over the stairs and porch. “I live upstairs,” I told the officers at the doorway.

“Don’t worry,” they said. “Everything’s okay up there.”

“What happened?”

“Two brothers got in a fight, and one of them grabbed a knife.”

Thank God, although their kitchen was a sea of blood, no one died.

Then there was the oversized challenge of developing a productive church. It felt like carving a statue from granite with your fingernails. The neighborhood seethed with the typical ills that disease the city and fill the headlines.

I often just held on, at times unwillingly, occasionally by the tips of my fingers. Because we didn’t quit, however, God did something.

Brick by brick, living stone by living stone, he built his church. Progress was maddeningly slow as only a few people came to Christ yearly. But attendance did inch upward. We started ministries such as a food pantry, clubs for boys and girls, and neighborhood outreaches. The mortar of love was in ample supply.

In 1987, God directed me to resign. I felt deep satisfaction as I appraised our time there. The church was relatively small but established, with the mortgage paid off, a parsonage, committed leaders at their posts, solid income, and $5,000 in savings. By God’s grace the church had progressed over eight-and-a-half years, not spectacularly but steadily. Although the toll on me and my family had been steep—emotionally, physically, and financially—at the end we could say, “It was well worth it.” In fact it broke our hearts to leave.

Through all of this, the Lord taught me a lesson I will never forget: Time is on my side. Although I am nothing special, if I simply persevere, with prayer and obedience, faith and work, the Lord will fulfill his perfect, better-than-I-could-ever-plan will for my life. With God as my friend, time is my ally.

My schooling, nevertheless, was incomplete.

One Anchoring Scripture

I didn’t think I needed to learn more about perseverance, and I didn’t expect to need much in our new church. Granted, it was struggling to survive—forty people attended on Sunday mornings, and the weekly offerings fell short of break-even—but I thought we would progress quickly. Wrong, naively wrong.

The first six months were excruciating. Also, we still felt a painful loss over our previous church. In many respects, it seemed we had lost everything. Yet I knew God had led us; never had any decision been confirmed to me in so many ways.

During this period of grief, a sanity-saving Scripture, Hebrews 10:36, caught my attention: “You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised.”

Prior to this I had never sensed the weight of this verse, but now it became my anchor. I memorized it and in times of despair repeated it over and over and over. It taught me two lessons:

There is usually a delay between our obedience to God’s will and the fulfillment of his promise. Often we step out to follow God based on an assumption that is quite different. Subconsciously we expect that when we obey God, everything should go well. Rough times disorient us. “What’s going on, Lord?” we wonder. “I’m obeying. Why aren’t you holding up your end of the agreement?” Through Hebrews 10:36, however, I realized I was in the pause of promise.
By giving up I would forfeit what God had promised. This verse showed me the cost of quitting. If I folded tent, the pain already suffered would be wasted and future blessings lost. Despite the anguish, I had to obey longer than a while; rather, I had to persevere as long as necessary.

God’s promised blessings can be nipped in the bud. For their fulfillment resembles the blooming of a rose. The bud forms, hard and small and green, nothing particularly attractive. Yet, bound tightly inside are the forming petals, soft and red and delicate. The petals grow unseen. Only later as the rose blooms do we see their beauty. So it is with God’s work. His perfect plans for us are forming in the bud—secretly—and as we persevere, we will, in God’s perfect time, see them blossom.

Craig Brian Larson is editor of PreachingToday.com and Preaching Today audio, as well as pastor of Lake Shore Church in Chicago. He is co-author of Preaching That Connects (Zondervan, 1994).

To reply to the editors of this newsletter, write Newsletter@LeadershipJournal.net.