Advent: The Waiting, It’s Just Too Much (2 Peter 3)
The LORD is not slow about His Promise… 1 Peter 3:9
I live with a child whose ability to wait is non-existent. Even though he’s older now, still, the challenges of his differently-formed brain making waiting for just about anything unbearable. For everyone. The anticipation of Christmas is almost more than he can take. Any of us sometimes.
Frankly though, I don’t like waiting either. In the whole scheme of life, the waiting when things are uncertain can be a hard thing for most of us.
It was the same for the people who were trying to live as followers of Christ in the first century. Just like us in 2018, there was unrest in their world, governments dictating things that left them feeling uneasy, and infighting among families and faith gatherings. They, like us, were tired of waiting for God to keep His promise. They believed Jesus was God, and He had died to reconcile them to God. They believed that Jesus had risen and they could access the power of the resurrection in their own lives. They believed it in theory anyway.
And they also believed that Jesus had promised He was coming back for them, and why wasn’t He here already? Why was He waiting to come back? They had endured and “hey God, get here…we’re tired of being here in this chaos and uncertainty…can you just straighten things out and get here already?”
Peter makes it clear in 2 Peter 3:8-9 that as much as we’d like God to come get us out of the mess of life here, His Timing and our timing was not the same. Waiting seems unbearable to us, but to God, it’s like hardly a day has passed.
And anyway, Peter says, “the Lord is not slow to keep His promise”…
Uh what’s that Peter? You’ve been impatient about the Kingdom of God being established since almost the time Jesus plucked you from your fisher’s boat! And now you say “God’s not slow???”
Yes, the LORD is not slow to keep His promise as many of us think. In fact, have you ever considered that He’s waiting on us… He is the long-suffering Saviour waiting for us to finally #seeHim, and ask Him to take away our sins.
It’s not that He isn’t keeping His promise. He’s actually holding back the wrath we deserve from our unbelieving hearts. It feels slow to us, but have we even considered He’s waiting for His coming because He wants as many as possible to come to believe in Him, to follow Him? To worship Him?
“When they wait’s unbearable,” He says, “LIVE”. Live your life while you wait. Live the changed person you are because He took the burden of sin off your shoulder and gave you the power of the resurrection for your every day. Live a holy life, outwardly different from the world because you are reflecting the nature of God which is so, so, so different and upside down from what most of the world expects. Live a godly life, with sacred reverence as an inner response to the things that God has changed in you, because He came before.
And He will come again. Advent is a microcosm each year to remind us that we wait for the ultimate coming in The New Heaven and New Earth that God promised to those who believe in Him. So we wait in this #betweentime, and strive ~ persevere ~ to be found in Him AT PEACE, blameless, trusting that the waiting IS our salvation.
We wait ~ and my son must wait too ~ for Christmas. Because in the waiting, we learn to trust the Babe in the Manger as the Savior of our own hearts. He does keep His promises. He does. We just gotta wait for it.
I will move ahead, bold and confident I’ll be taking every step in obedience While I’m waiting I will serve You While I’m waiting I will worship While I’m waiting I will not faint
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