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Aug 18, 2019

Patience & Perseverance

Passage: Luke 13:6-9

Keywords: perseverance, patience, waiting, god's work, impatience, parable of the fruitless tree

Summary:

Ever wonder what God is up to in your life? Get frustrated with His seemingly slow schedule? This message is for you.

Detail:

Mosaic sermon, 8/18/19

“Patience and Perseverance”

THANK YOU. I interned here two summers ago and was really impacted by this community. I had the privilege of being involved every week with Changing Lives, and if you haven’t had a chance to go to a Saturday service, I highly recommend it.

It is such an honor to be here with you this morning and I’m excited for what God has in store for us this day. We’ve got so much crowding us out in our world, don’t we? News and information and deadlines and bills and families and work and so many things that demand our time and energy. In the midst of it all, there’s just no substitute for community—no substitute for authentic relationships with people who know and love us, and for whom we offer the same. So it is a gift to be together today, and may we never take that for granted.

Let’s pray.

I want to talk about two words this morning: patience and perseverance.

Let’s start with the former. I don’t know what comes to mind when you hear the word patience, but for me I just think, “dang, that’s hard.” It’s an alluring word to me and if I’m honest it often feels like an elusive one—like it’s out of my reach. Patience equates to gray hair and wrinkles and eyes that are creased with years of life in them. It seems like a virtue for old people, and I always admire it when I see it or sense it—but to really possess it, and embody it, sometimes seems impossible.

In our youth-obsessed, instant-gratification culture, patience is typically subject to the sidelines. I don’t think it’s a stretch for me to say that we live in rampantly impatient times. Consider these insightful statistics:

An MIT grad conducted a study to discover how long it took for viewers to abandon slow-loading YouTube videos. Any guesses? 2 SECONDS! 2 seconds people! After the time it takes to snap your fingers, people are out. And then every one-second delay after that results in a nearly 6% increase of people who give up, and after just 40 seconds one third of the audience is gone, onto the next online dopamine hit.

40% of mobile shoppers will abandon an eCommerce site that doesn’t load in three seconds.

More than half of Americans won’t wait in any line that takes more than 15 minutes.

The average person checks their phone 110 times a day! For millenials, it’s 150, and up to every 6 seconds in the evenings.

96% of Americans are so impatient that they will knowingly consume extremely hot food or drink that burns their mouth; 63% do so frequently.

Impatience can even be deemed a virtue or an asset in our culture—a sign of the success that busy, driven, intelligent go-getters share.

Companies are capitalizing on our impatience and making millions on it—next-day shipping or probably same-day shipping now, Uber Eats (where you pay someone else to go order food for you), self-checkout lines. We are victims of the fast-paced, attention-deficit lifestyle our culture perpetuates. So it’s no surprise that patience is hard-earned in a society steeped in haste.

The second word, perseverance, is equally hard-fought. Perseverance could be defined as patience in action—active patience. Persistence across time, the steadiness in which we keep on keeping on, what Eugene Peterson calls “a long obedience in the same direction.” This, obviously, is not easy. The easier choice is almost always to yield to the immediacy of our culture, the pleasures of the moment—but if we do, if we become hasty and distracted, over-stimulated and over-agitated, impatient or even indifferent, we miss out on something deeper and more true to God’s call on our lives.

This leads me to our text this morning. It’s a short parable in the gospel of Luke, chapter 13. Jesus is teaching his disciples and he says this…

In this little parable, the gardener intercedes as an advocate for the tree, making the more costly decision to allow for the possibility of the tree living and bearing fruit. It certainly would have been easier to cut the tree down and plant a new one. But this gardener believes in the potential of the tree, doing the work to dig down and fertilize it at the root—where repentance must take place.

Here’s my main point this morning: Through patience, God fertilizes our heart and soul, giving us the grace to repent and persevere. (We don’t often think of divine patience, but I want you to know this morning that God is patient.)

I want to unpack this with, you guessed it, three subpoints:

1) In our waiting, God is working.

I love fruit. I feel like it’s a pretty easy thing to love. I used to be pretty picky regarding fruit when I was younger—I didn’t like the skin on peaches or apples or kiwi, or even the seeds and fuzzy little hairs on raspberries. Thankfully, my palette has matured. How many of you love fruit? What are some of your favorite kinds of fruit?

You may not know this about Pastor John, but something feral and slightly manic comes over him when he encounters a thicket of huckleberry bushes—I’ve experienced it first hand. It’s like some insatiable appetite for the coveted berries overtakes him to the extent that if left unattended, he might continue picking until the sun goes down or fatigue forces him to stop, whichever may come first.

I, too, love huckleberries—and view them as a particular novelty being from Southern California. I’m constantly debating whether I prefer fresh huckleberries or fresh blueberries, and whether the pleasure of huckleberries comes in part from the work required to both find and pick them or from the flavor alone. Right now the jury is still out.

Think for a second about the flavor and texture of a delicious handful of fresh blueberries. Isn’t it amazing? Well, now think for a second about how long it takes for that moment of delight to actually happen.

Blueberry bushes are quite difficult to grow. Once all the hard work of maintenance and soil preparation is done, it takes about three years for a bush to start producing fruit, and four for a full harvest. And get this: in the first two years, you have to remove all the fruit buds so that the bush puts all of its energy into the roots to grow a solid foundation. For years of a healthy blueberry bush’s life, no fruit will be seen—but preparation for fruit to come is in process.

So too with us. When we can’t see it, God is working in our seemingly fruitless lives, fertilizing and incubating things we may have not even the faintest conception of yet. In our waiting to produce fruit—to land the job, get married, become physically healthy, understand our vocation, or whatever it may be that we seem to be futilely waiting on, take heart. God is at work, and he may be pruning you not out of judgment but actually out of grace, to make you more healthy so that you can produce more fruit in the days and years ahead.

Cross-pollination—blueberry plants don’t grow well alone. They need each other, just like we do.

2) Patience leads to true health, and healthy things grow.

But sometimes, to get healthy requires a course-correction. Like the fig tree in this parable, we need God to fertilize the soil of our hearts down to the roots. Earlier in Luke’s gospel, John the Baptist urges his followers to bear fruit in keeping with repentance.

Repentance might be a loaded word for you—it might evoke feelings of fear, judgment, anger, or other generally unpleasant emotions. All it really means is to turn. Just to turn towards God and let him fertilize our hearts, to let him prune us. Sometimes that really hurts, because when we let God in, he exposes some stuff in us that we don’t like very much, that we’d prefer to leave under the surface, and that frankly we might rather cling to.

All healthy plants need to be pruned. Pruning hurts, but it’s really an act of grace to allow us to become truly healthy and to produce fruit more abundantly. In John 15, Jesus says that every branch that bears fruit the Father prunes to make it bear more fruit. Sometimes that fruit takes a long time to produce, and sometimes we never see it. (perhaps story here?)

I want to be healthy, to be whole, because healthy things grow—we all want to bear fruit, and sometimes that means we’ve got to let God get us healthy first, to prune us as we grow more fully into the abundant life he has for us.

It’s significant that the landowner in the parable, upon finding no fruit on the fig tree, says it is wasting the soil. But there is no waste in the kingdom of God. God is so about the business of redemption and restoration that as we open ourselves to Him, there will be no part of our lives untouched by his transformative grace. Think of the end of the Joseph story, when his brothers fall before him professing to be his slaves. He says, “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good…” What we see as waste, God is working to redeem, so long as we let him.

I’m talking about long term health, not just quick fix. No more damage control. Patience requires the courage to face our shadow sides and let them be met by the light of Christ—and in so doing to be transformed by his grace.

3) Patience helps move our relationship with God from our heads down into our hearts.

It forces us to rely on God in ways we often don’t want to because we have to surrender our control—over ourselves, our situation, and others. We release our grip of security and self-preservation, and entrust ourselves to the gentle embrace of the gardener.

The late theologian John Webster puts it this way: “Patience is the virtue in which we allow our lives to run their allotted course in their allotted time. As we exercise patience, we let our lives and the lives of others follow the path which has been laid down for them, without railing against the constraints which that imposes on us. Patience is the virtue of waiting. It involves waiting for all things to reach their end—waiting for others, as well as for ourselves, to take the time they need, and above all waiting for God to fulfill his purposes in his own good time. Patience is the virtue which encounters frustration with a calm and steady frame, waiting steadfastly for time to be fulfilled.”

We know we have limits, but patience allows us to feel them. As Psalm 16 says, “the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a goodly heritage.” Paradoxically, it is recognition and acceptance of our limitations that leads to true freedom, allowing us to accept that we are who we are and where we are, and it’s precisely in those things we discover the purposes of God.

Webster goes on to say that patience “liberates us from the myth that we can flourish only if we are somehow set free from all constraints and all inhibitions—from all those people and situations and hindrances that press in upon us. Patience schools us to find in those limits the necessary form of our lives, and so the way in which we can be truly ourselves.”

Patience, as we know, does not come easily to us. It is a gift of God—that’s why it’s a fruit of the Holy Spirit. Patience forces us to pray, and that’s a really good thing. Prayer will lead us into greater intimacy with God as we become co-laborers for the Kingdom.

I want to pause for a few moments to reflect—where might God be calling you to patience in your life? Where do you need encouragement to persevere? Where do you need to let go of your agenda and surrender someone else to God’s timing?

A few thoughts on cultivating patience:

  • a little bit every day adds up to a whole lot.
  • The power of habits
  • Do things that require time and attention
  • Remember, God is patient. Love is patient.

Life has a way of beating us down. My encouragement this morning—take heart. Take heart. Through patience, let God fertilize your heart and soul, giving you the grace to repent and persevere.