Patience of God

In an interview with Denzel Washington, it noted that the actor has been getting more explicit about his Christian convictions. In 2019 Washington called himself “a vessel of God.” Privately over coffee with the interviewer Washington added:

The enemy is the inner me. The Bible says in the last days — I don’t know if it’s the last days, it’s not my place to know — but it says we’ll be lovers of ourselves. The No. 1 photograph today is a selfie, “Oh, me at the protest.” “Me with the fire.” “Follow me.” “Listen to me.”

We’re living in a time where people are willing to do anything to get followed. What is the long or short-term effect of too much information? It’s going fast and it can be manipulated obviously in a myriad of ways. And people are led like sheep to slaughter.

Don’t play with God. Don’t play with God. You hear what I said? Don’t play with God. You heard what I said? Don’t play with God.

Then the interviewer mentions that Washington urged her to download and use a daily Bible reading app. Washington said. “You have to fill up that bucket every morning. It’s rough out there. You leave the house in the morning. Here they come, chipping away. By the end of the day, you’ve got to refill that bucket.”

Mary, was a local drama student at a large university. The professor of her introductory acting class had asked all the students to present “something extreme” to the class. Mary decided that, as a Christian, she would write a hymn of love to Jesus and sing it.

Alice was the student presenting before her. Alice took a Bible, led the class out by a trash can on campus, and proceeded to slowly read portions of the Old Testament about commands to make war, God punishing the nations, and sending Israel into exile. She read imprecatory psalms. With each violent passage, Alice would say something like, “Who would ever believe in a God like that?” Then she would tear out the page from the Bible, burn it, and drop the page in the trashcan. It was extreme drama.

This was the warm-up for Mary. She pulled out her guitar, said a brief prayer under her breath, and sang a love song to Jesus. The class was silent and then went home. All, that is, except for Alice, who came forward with tears in her eyes. “That was beautiful. That is the God I want to know. Can you help me get to know Jesus?” And so, after a few days of Bible study and prayer, Alice gave her life to Christ.

Hollywood stuntman Robert Wilton shares his journey through doubt and fear to faith in Christ.

Beginning in my 20s, I worked for decades as a film and television stuntman, facing injury and even death for a living. On the set, I rubbed elbows with celebrities and movie stars. I was living my dream. At age 26, however, I received a gut punch when my 32-year-old brother suddenly collapsed dead from a heart attack. In rare moments of quiet, usually after a considerable intake of alcohol, I would ponder the senselessness of his death.

While doing film work one day, I overheard someone talking about God with one of the stunt guys. To my utter surprise, it was none other than the movie stunt coordinator himself. Eavesdropping on that conversation conjured up some old memories and questions. Did I still believe in God, or had I outgrown the childishness of Sunday school stories?

For one film gig up the coast, I caught a ride with the stunt coordinator—a man I dubbed “the Preachernator.” When conversation inevitably turned to religion, I told him I was doing fine without God. I began regaling him with stories of my close calls and narrow escapes on set. There was the time, for instance, when I was tapped for a fire stunt. The idea was to paint myself with a flammable substance, land on the roof of a car, whose driver would set me on fire, and peel out toward a wooden wall. But nothing went according to design. First, my rope line snagged. Then the fire wouldn’t light and I gave up and signaled for the driver to floor it. When he stomped on his brakes, I went flying through a wooden wall, only not on fire as planned.

As I picked myself up my heart leapt into my throat. I realized I had completely forgotten to apply the protective stunt gel to my head and face. Had I actually been set ablaze, I almost certainly would have sustained serious, possibly fatal, injuries.

The Preachernator listened to my story and said, “Sounds like God was still looking after you.” His words cracked my pride; Could God have been looking out for me, even when I was so far astray? I found myself thinking about God on a daily basis. Could he really love me again after I had turned my back on him?

Everything came to a head one night. I had been hired to jump off of a 60-foot-high catwalk, grab a chain with one hand and slide down to the cement floor below while firing a pistol. Fear began to overwhelm me, and I couldn’t shake the thought of possible catastrophe. I wondered if the moment to give my life to Jesus had finally arrived.

An internal debate raged within. One side of me said, “You’re only doing this because you might die, you hypocrite! Do it after you finish the stunt.” But another side said, “No, the whole point in giving my life to Jesus is in case I die. It’s smarter to do it right now.” So that’s what I did.

The following weeks confirmed (that) God had indeed heard my prayer. Before long, I worked up the confidence to evangelize my fellow crew members. God granted me dramatic change in some areas, but in others he gave the gift of struggle. In fact, I have experienced some of the greatest grief life has to offer. Once, a crew member asked me why his friend’s child had died. Where was God in this tragedy? I tried explaining God’s heart to him. The crew member said that much of what I shared made sense. But he also wondered whether my faith would survive the death of one of my own children. So did I.

I think of this conversation from time to time, because the question has been answered. I have lost children since that day. I watched my wife as she rocked our 19-day-old son while he died in her arms. Three years later, my wife watched me cradle our newborn daughter as she met the same fate.

God never promises us a life without pain and suffering. However, he more than sustains us through challenges. From the tremendous joy of a beautiful, 20-year-old daughter to the depths of deep sorrow, my life attests to the truth that absolutely nothing can separate me from God’s love (Rom. 8:39).

An article on NPR claims that we have become "the Impatient Nation." We want quick answers to complex problems. The article puts it this way:

We: Speed date. Eat fast food. Use the self-checkout lines in grocery stores. Try the "one weekend" diet. Pay extra for overnight shipping. Honk when the light turns green. Thrive or dive on quarterly earnings reports. Speak in half sentences. Start things but don't fin ...We cut corners, take shortcuts. We txt.

We: Send new faces to Washington every two years, then vote the rascals out two years later. Clamor for more safety in the skies, then complain when security takes too long—and is inconvenient. Can't take the time to drive to the video store or to wait for a DVD to arrive in the mail, so we order them on demand or stream them on the Web—well, clips of movies at least.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) God's patience—In our impatient age there is a benefit to God's slowness to act. Scripture tells us that God is slow to act in judgment. God is patient with his people and with a sinful world. (2) Impatience; Patience—Our need to overcome our impatience.

What if God took the radical step of setting a deadline for ridding the world of evil? Suppose God announces that next Monday at midnight he will step in and stop all suffering caused by evil people. How would he do that? Let's say God decides to use a tool carried by many police officers—a Taser gun.

A Taser gun shoots an individual with a temporary high-voltage current of electricity. The makers of Taser guns claim that a shock lasting half a second will cause intense pain and muscle contraction. Two to three seconds will cause a person to become dazed and drop to the ground. Anything longer than three seconds will drop an attacker for up to fifteen minutes. The makers of Taser guns boast of a 95 percent compliance rate. In other words, hit a person with enough electricity and you can get him to do anything.

When the deadline for stopping evil comes, God gets us to comply with his wishes by shocking us. Start to tell a lie, and you are hit with a half-second zap. Try to rob a person, and you get two seconds of shock. A would-be murderer would be incapacitated. However, knowing that evil thoughts often lead to evil actions, God also zaps us for sinister thoughts. But God's still not finished. Since it's evil to fail to do good when given the opportunity, God zaps us for failing to show mercy, kindness and justice. As a result, people are zapped for doing evil acts, thinking evil thoughts, and failing to do what is right.

What would be the result? A world of twitchy people, who obey God like cowering, beaten dogs.

In his sermon, "The World's Best Love Story," Haddon Robinson said:

There was once a young man from Chicago who went down to the bluegrass regions of Kentucky where he met and wooed a young woman who ultimately came back to Chicago as his bride. They enjoyed three lovely years of marriage, and then one day in the midst of a sickness in a seizure of pain the young woman lost her mind. When she was at her best, she was a bit demented. At her worst, she would scream, and neighbors complained because the screams cut the air and it was hard to live with.

And so the young businessman left his home in the middle of Chicago, went out to one of the western suburbs, built a house, determined that there he would try to nurse his wife back to health and sanity again. One day the family physician suggested that perhaps if he were to take his wife back to her Kentucky home that something in those familiar surroundings would help her restore her sanity, and so they went back to the old homestead. Hand in hand they walked through the old house where memories hung on every corner. They went down to the garden and walked down by the riverside where the first cowslips and violets were in bloom. But after several days nothing seemed to happen.

So, defeated and discouraged, the young man put his wife back in the car, and they headed back to Chicago. When they got close to the house, he looked over and discovered that his wife was asleep. It was the first deep, restful sleep she had had in many weeks. When he got to the house, he lifted her from the car, took her inside, placed her on the bed, and realized she wanted to sleep some more. So he placed a cover over her and then just sat by her side and watched her through the midnight hour, watched her until the first rays of the sun reached through the curtain and touched her face. The young woman awoke, and she saw her husband seated by her side. She said, "I seem to have been on a long journey. Where have you been?" And that man, speaking out of days and weeks and months of patient waiting and watching said, "My sweetheart, I've been right here waiting for you all this time."

And if you ask me, "Where is God?" the answer is very much the same. He's right here, right here waiting for you to respond with love to love, waiting for you to respond with trust to promise, waiting for you to cast yourself with a reckless abandon upon the grace of God, and waiting for you to discover what it means to be loved by God.

In a blog for Kyria entitled “The Sweet Relief of Grace,” Marian V. Liautaud writes:

My dad kept a coin jar on his dresser. Every night when he got home from work, the first thing he did was head upstairs to change his clothes. You could hear the familiar jangling of coins as they spilled from his pocket and he set them in the jar. When I was about nine years old, I decided his coins should be mine. Over time I pilfered a few nickels here, a handful of pennies there. Before I knew it, I had successfully swindled my dad out of his loose change, and he never even noticed.

Sometime later, guilt gripped me. I knew that what I'd been doing could only be considered stealing. I had no way to explain away my behavior. With a pounding heart, I penned an apology to him, confessing my sin and asking him to forgive me. I tucked it under his coin jar along with a pile of pennies as restitution.

I waited anxiously for my dad to confront me. Day One went by, and he didn't say anything. Another day passed; still nothing. And then another, and another. Eventually, I forgot about the note.

Then one day out of the blue, my dad stepped into my bedroom and said, "Marian, I got your note and the pennies." My heart raced; my throat felt like a marble was lodged in it …. I was expecting punishment, but … he seemed on the verge of tears. But that didn't make any sense. I had wronged him. He had every right to be mad and punish me. Instead he said, "Thank you." And then he gave me a hug.

And then he left.

We never spoke of it again.

I stood there dumbfounded. Why, when I fully deserved my father's wrath, did he instead show me mercy? I didn't deserve it; I hadn't earned it. I felt like a criminal let off scot free!

This was my first powerful lesson on judgment and grace. Since then I've never gotten over the way grace feels. It's like waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never does. It's experiencing utter relief and humility in the face of guilt because you know how bad you can be, but God (or your daddy) chooses to love and forgive you anyway. It is truly God's riches at Christ's expense.

On a recent visit to two California vineyards, author Margaret Feinberg discovered that vintners must adopt a long-term approach to their work. According to Feinberg:

The first year a vintner plants shoots of vines rather than seeds because these yield the strongest vines. At the end of the first growing season, he cuts them back. A second year passes. He cuts them back again. Only after the third year does he see his first viable clusters of grapes. Serious vintners leave those clusters on the vines. For most vintners, it's not until year four that they bring in their first harvest.

For those growing grapes for winemaking, they'll bottle their harvest, but won't taste the fruit of their labors until year seven or eight. Most vineyards in Napa Valley won't reach a breakeven point for their investment until year fifteen, eighteen or beyond.

Applying these insights to her spiritual life, Feinberg writes,

Sometimes I look at my own life and wonder, Why am I not more fruitful? And why does pruning have to hurt so much? Why does cultivating a healthy crop take so long? Yet those questions circle around the here and now. God's perspective is much different. Like a good vineyard owner, he knows how to bring about fruitfulness better than I ever will. And he is patient with me, more patient than I am with myself … [Also], as we fulfill our callings … we must recognize that like the vintner's, our fruitfulness will not come overnight. The first harvest of our labors may not come for three or five years.

The Bible says of Jesus the Messiah, "A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out." To understand an idea like this, sometimes we need to see its opposite. What does Jesus not do?

In May of 2009, on the Haizhu bridge in Guangzhou, China, a disturbed man in deep financial debt was poised on the edge of the bridge contemplating suicide. Because of him police had closed the bridge, disrupting traffic for five hours. People stood watching at police cordons to see what he would do. Suddenly a 66-year-old man pushed his way through the police cordons and walked up to the man considering suicide. He reached out and shook the hand of the troubled man. Then he pushed him off the bridge.

Later he explained why: "I pushed him off because jumpers like [him] are very selfish. Their action violates a lot of public interest. They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities' attention to their appeals."

Fortunately, the police had spread an inflatable emergency cushion beneath the bridge, and as a result the suicidal man was injured but not killed.

Jesus does not push troubled people off bridges. A bruised reed he will not break. A smoldering wick he will not snuff out. He is patient and merciful.

Austin Carty, a former contestant on the television show Survivor, shares about a mission trip to Indonesia:

Spending a couple of days in this Indonesian environment was quite rewarding for me. The country is 99 percent Muslim, and just this past March, Time magazine deemed the small nation "the crossroads of the Muslim faith." Therefore, we were prohibited to talk about Jesus in the Indonesian villages… But not being able to speak about Jesus in the villages didn't mean he wasn't there.

On the final night of our stay in Indonesia, we met on the beach. A bonfire had been lit, and as it stood tall as a man, violently ripping with flames, it spoke of the refining process God had been doing on all of our hearts that week. That night I, along with one of the young boys from the school, played guitar and led a chorus of praise songs that lasted for nearly an hour…

And that's when a remarkable thing happened: a kid fell to his knees to give his life to Christ. And then another followed…and then a third. Ultimately, seven children dedicated their lives to Jesus that night. I would learn the next morning that the seven kids who gave their lives to Christ were, in fact, the seven very kids for whose salvation the staff had been praying for nearly a year.

On the first day teaching his class of 250 college freshmen, R. C. Sproul carefully explained the assignment of three term papers. Each paper was due on the last day of September, October, and November. Sproul clearly stated there would be no extensions (except for medical reasons). At the end of September, some 225 students dutifully turned in their papers, while 25 remorseful students quaked in fear. "We're so sorry," they said. "We didn't make the proper adjustments from high school to college, but we promise to do better next time." He bowed to their pleas for mercy, gave them an extension, but warned them not to be late next month.

The end of October rolled around, and about 200 students turned in their papers, while 50 students showed up empty-handed. "Oh, please," they begged, "it was homecoming weekend, and we ran out of time." Sproul relented once more but warned them, "This is it. No excuses next time. You will get an F."

The end of November came, and only 100 students turned in their papers. The rest told Sproul, "We'll get it in soon."

"Sorry," Sproul replied. "It's too late now. You get an F."

The students howled in protest, "That's not fair!"

"Okay," Sproul replied, "you want justice, do you? Here's what's just: you'll get an F for all three papers that were late. That was the rule, right?"

"The students had quickly taken my mercy for granted," Sproul later reflected. "They assumed it. When justice suddenly fell, they were unprepared for it. It came as a shock, and they were outraged."

Michael B. Brown writes in Men of Integrity:

A friend told me about a boy who was the apple of his parents' eyes. Tragically, in his mid-teens, the boy's life went awry. He dropped out of school and began associating with a bad crowd.

One night he staggered into his house at 3:00 a.m., completely drunk. His mother slipped out of bed and left her room. The father followed, assuming that his wife was in the kitchen, perhaps crying. Instead, he found her at her son's bedside, softly stroking his matted hair as he lay passed out drunk on the covers.

"What are you doing?" the father asked.

The mother answered, "He won't let me love him when he's awake."

The mother stepped into her son's darkness with a love that existed even though he did not yet love her back. So it is with God and us.

In Today's Christian Woman, Kimberly Shumate tells how she became a Christian after living as a witch. We pick up the story as she, after coming to the end of herself, walks into a church:

As I sat down, I silently shot up a desperate prayer: God, please give me someone in this crazy crowd I can relate to. If you don't give me someone, I'm walking out of here. At that moment, the pastor told the congregation to stand up and shake a few hands. I introduced myself to Lisa, whose dyed-red hair and nose ring suggested we might be at a similar place. My black-and-white hair and spiked belt told her the same. Lisa, a fellow spiritual seeker, and I became fast friends.

Looking back, I wonder how the church members stood having me in their midst for so long. I was angry and exasperated as I sat listening to their "good news." How could there be only one way to God? At the end of each message, I marched down the aisle to the pastor and began firing off an onslaught of questions. After three or four weeks of verbal sparring, he humbly offered the associate pastor's ear. I made my rounds from one elder to another, finally ending up at a Friday night Bible study looking for answers.

As I sat on the floor in the leader's living room, I felt a peace amidst this group of people who seemed to care about each other. After the study, Lisa sat beside me as Scott, the leader, patiently listened to my New-Age arguments. But one by one, the Scriptures I'd carefully prepared to punch holes in the gospel came back at me with hurricane force. Scott's words—but especially the Bible's words—confounded my cosmic view. After we'd sat there for an hour debating, I was exhausted. My hardened heart and argumentative nature finally had enough.

As Lisa drove me home, my mind ached as I replayed Scott's words. All the Old Testament and New Testament verses had one oddly familiar voice—one tone, one heart. I wondered, How could a book written by so many different people over the course of hundreds of years fit together perfectly as if one amazing storyteller had written the whole thing? The Holy Spirit began melting my vanity and arrogance with a power stronger than any hex, incantation, or spell I'd ever used. Suddenly, the blindfold I'd worn for almost 30 years was stripped away, and instantly I knew what I'd been searching for: Jesus! The same God I'd neglected, whose name I'd used as profanity, whom I'd flat-out rejected, was the one who'd sent his Son to suffer for me, to take the guilty verdict so I could be found innocent. My eyes filled with tears as I exchanged the darkness with which I'd grown so accustomed for the light of God's truth. It was such a personal moment between the Lord and me that even Lisa, sitting next to me in the car, had no idea what was going on.

I soon realized my life was filled with empty props, and it was time to clean house. My first act of obedience was to throw out all my books on witchcraft and the paranormal, as well as my Tarot cards. But the most important possession—and most difficult to discard—was my treasured crystal ball.

I called Lisa. She came right over, and we immediately drove to the Pacific Ocean. My heart pounded as if the demons themselves weren't far behind us. We stood at the end of Malibu Pier, our beaming faces reflecting the radiance of the setting sun. I unwrapped the crystal's black velvet cover, and light streamed out like rainbows as the thick crystal met the sun's fleeting rays. As I dropped the ball into the deep blue water, I knew my future was secure. Now I had a Savior who would be with me always. It still moves me to tears to think he waited through all those years of anger, disappointment, fear, and bad choices. All the mistakes I'd ever made were wiped clean.

In the movie, The Horse Whisperer, Tom Booker, played by actor Robert Redford, employs his special gift of "gentling" horses.

A tense, New York magazine editor can't believe her eyes as she witnesses the gradual transformation of her daughter's horse from traumatized to tamed. In one telling scene, the horse, frightened by the editor's ringing cell phone, gallops off into the far end of a large pasture. Booker walks into the pasture and sits down, where he waits for what appears to be hours. The horse, drawn by its curiosity, inches closer and closer. Finally, it cautiously approaches close enough to touch the "whisperer," and allows itself to be led back to the safety of its stall.

That's the way it is with God, as he "gentles" the untamed or traumatized people who run from him.