Sermon preached at The Bridge Church- August 25, 2024
Intro
This past summer, our family did a road trip to southern Manitoba, which is where I’m originally from. We spent 6 days and only 4 days actually there. After doing the math later we realized that with all the gas money you spend, you don’t actually save that much driving out there. You sure spend a whole lot more time getting there though! It’s 4700 km total driving, which Google says should take 47.5 hours. I think we probably did it in less than 44 hours. All I’ll say about that is that the province of Saskatchewan liked our car so much they took a picture of it and sent it to us. It’s pretty hard to exercise patience when you’re driving past hundreds of kilometers of wheat fields. Our kids did a great job. They are amazing road-trippers and also amazing at patiently enduring long adult visits. We saw a lot of people on the prairies, mostly family but a few friends as well.
I’ll give you one guess as to what we’re talking about today: patience. So much of life requires it and we intuitively know that it’s a good thing. Most of us would say it’s a virtue. According to the biblical book of Galatians, it’s a fruit of the Holy Spirit. But it’s got to be one of the least fun virtues, right? I mean, patience is literally accepting the postponement of what you really want. It requires not getting your desires fulfilled at the moment. You could say that patience is inherently unenjoyable. That’s probably why our modern world works so hard to eliminate the need for patience. Almost every innovation is about making things more efficient, faster, more automated, more streamlined. AI represents the current peak of this trend. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thankful for many modern innovations. I grew up watching my Dad write sermons on an Osborne computer. I’m guessing my grandfather handwrote his sermons. I’m grateful to have the lightning quick access to information and resources that a modern laptop provides. Finding better ways to do things is not wrong. But what I want to look at today from James is how patience cultivates deep blessings in our lives. I want to look at a biblical vision for patience, which is so needed in a culture that is so deeply anti-patience. Today is our second last week in the book of James, which we’ve spent the summer with, and our text is James 5:7-12.
7 Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord’s coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains. 8 You too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lord’s coming is near. 9 Don’t grumble against one another, brothers and sisters, or you will be judged. The Judge is standing at the door!
10 Brothers and sisters, as an example of patience in the face of suffering, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. 11 As you know, we count as blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job’s perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.
12 Above all, my brothers and sisters, do not swear—not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. All you need to say is a simple “Yes” or “No.” Otherwise you will be condemned.
James 5:7-12
1. Consequences of Impatience
I want to start our examination of this passage by talking about the consequences of impatience. What are some of the results of the absence of patience? Let’s look at four of those. The first comes from a section we looked at a couple of weeks ago: fattened hearts.
Fattened hearts
In the first verses of James 5, the author blasts wealthy people who gain their wealth by hoarding possessions and denying workers their wages. They are fully complicit in economic injustice. It may have earned them a certain amount of status and power in the world, but it also awards them a tongue-lashing from James. Here’s how he rebukes them in verse 5: “you have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter.” You have lived in self-indulgence. I would say indulgence is a near synonym for impatience. You don’t want to wait for things, you want them now. You’re willing to cut corners, take advantage of others, and do things completely the wrong way in order to get what you want as soon as you can. James is certain that in doing this, you have fattened yourself. Literally, in the Greek language he wrote in, he says you have fattened your hearts.
I’m paying more attention to that phrase because in the section we read this morning, James refers to strengthening your hearts. Patience strengthens your heart, impatient indulgence fattens it. Think about someone who doesn’t want to spend any time or effort with food. They just eat whatever they feel like and whatever is most convenient. That means lots of fast food, lots of chips, lots of manufactured stuff. As I re-discovered on our Manitoba trip, that’s the road trip diet. A lot of McDonalds is involved. I mean, $1 iced coffees, loaded with as much cream as you want, how can you say no?
For some people, though, it’s not a road-trip diet. It’s how they live. They constantly indulge in unhealthy food because it’s what they want and it’s easy. The result is generally what James talks about here: it’s fattening. It’s a body that can’t respond well to stimuli. It’s a body that lacks energy for what’s truly life-giving, like being active, going on walks with friends, and so on. That’s the way it is spiritually when we live lives driven by impatience. We become spiritually sluggish, unable to respond to God’s voice or prodding, lacking any energy to do what He’s made us to do. We become unable to endure any kind of stress or testing, spiritually collapsing at the first sign of fatigue. The consequence of impatience is a spiritually fattened heart.
Grumbling
Another consequence of impatience James notes is grumbling against each other. Verse 9 might seem a bit random to us. James speaks about patience and then suddenly he’s warning us as brothers and sisters in Christ not to grumble against each other. Perhaps those don’t seem connected. I think they are, though. Again, 5:1-6 is all about these oppressive wealthy people of the world. James’ audience was likely primarily victims of that injustice. They were enduring crises because they were those workers who were being denied wages. But what often happens when we become fed up with a situation, especially one we feel powerless to change? What happens when we grow impatient but can’t do anything about what we’re impatient with? We take it out on the people closest to us.
I know you’ve experienced this yourself. A real life example for me is when I’ve had a tougher day in pastoral ministry. Maybe there were interactions or criticisms or situations I’m unhappy with. Maybe I’m unhappy with my own responses to those. I come home for dinner, I open the door, and I’m met with clutter everywhere. There are stuffed animals and magnetiles and lego everywhere my eyes settle, random rubber bands tying random things together, paper all over the table, dishes scattered on the counter, and I’ll tell you, I grumble. I came home the other day and my first words to Carolyn were literally, “ugh. This place looks disgusting.” How do you think that went over? Not good. The ensuing conversation wasn’t fun for anyone. If I was in a good place, maybe the mess wouldn’t bother me as much. Maybe I’d just happily help clean up. But I grumbled, I took it out on my own family, and made a far bigger mess in the process.
Again, the connection with impatience is that when we can’t fix something or fulfill some desire, we become frustrated. That frustration easily leads to critical words directed at whoever’s nearby, which in turn leads to broken and strained relationships. Impatience produces that.
Swearing
Another consequence of impatience also involves our tongue. In verse 12, James writes about not swearing. The connection here is even more difficult to figure out, especially because he says “above all.” That makes it sound like this is the most important thing he has to say, even though swearing oaths is not exactly a burning issue for most of us. It was likely a bigger deal in the first century. The first century Roman poet Martial even wrote that the Jews he knew did a lot of false and heedless swearing. To be clear, we’re not talking about profanity here. We’re talking about making statements like “I swear on my mother’s grave that I did not take that cookie” or “pinky swear that you won’t tell anyone that I like Nickelback.” Swearing oaths like this is a way of emphasizing that what I’m saying is really, really true.
Jesus spoke about this in the famous sermon on the mount. He said that we shouldn’t swear oaths at all, whether by heaven or earth or Jerusalem or even by our own heads. Instead, Jesus said, “all you need to say is simply ‘yes’ or ‘no’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one” (Matt. 5:37). That’s almost word for word what James says here. In Matthew 23, Jesus blasts the Pharisees for how they use the wording of oaths as a kind of escape clause. They teach that if you swear by the temple, it doesn’t count, but if you swear by the gold in the temple, it does. Ultimately, they’re using technicalities and loopholes in their oaths to justify dishonesty! For both Jesus and his servant James, the point is that for a follower of Jesus, you should always be speaking the truth. You shouldn’t need any kind of oath or swear to convince people of that and you shouldn’t use oaths as a way of getting out of that calling to honesty. You should be so known for integrity that people can simply trust what you say.
What does this have to do with impatience? I think it’s because our relationship with the truth is often tested at the same time as our patience is tested. We begin looking for shortcuts. We compromise our integrity. As a result, our tongues become loose. And as James wrote in a section Jaylene taught about last month, when our tongues become loose all hell breaks loose. A consequence of impatience is that we easily compromise our truthfulness and integrity in order to get what we want.
Condemnation
I’ve got one more consequence to look at and it’s the most serious of all: condemnation. In verse 9, James warns that our grumbling, our critical and judgmental words against others, will result in our own judgment. That’s nearly identical to something else Jesus said in the sermon on the mount: do not judge, or you will be judged. With the measure you use, it will be measured to you. I talked about that a couple of weeks ago. In verse 12, James says that if we rely on oaths to convince people of our truthfulness, we will be condemned. Apparently, the ultimate and terrifying outcome of a life devoted to impatience is literally hell. Why? I’ll come back to that later. Cliffhanger!
2. Consequences of patience
Good fruit
Those are the outcomes of impatience. They’re not great, right? What about the outcomes and consequences of patience? I’ve got four of those to show you too, and the first is simply that patience produces good fruit in our lives.
In verse 7, James uses the analogy of farmers. This is a bit more real to me. As I said, we drove past a lot of fields on our recent trip, including many that were being harvested as we passed by. I even had the chance to attend my childhood church in rural Manitoba. I hadn’t worshiped there since I was 13 years old, but the moment I walked through that door, a bunch of people instantly recognized me. One of my childhood best friends was there, now serving as a leader in the church. At one point in the announcements, a guy got up and said they were harvesting a field for the Canada Foodgrains Bank and he said if anyone wanted to watch, they could come to Frank and Betty’s field. No address. It’s not needed. Everybody knows where Frank’s field is.
Anyway, James says that farmers like the ones I grew up with have to exercise patience when it comes to harvesting their crops. That’s because there is a lot that is far beyond their control. Good crops require rain. In first century Palestinian agriculture, you needed the autumn rains to prepare the ground for seed and you needed the spring rains to bring the grain to its full growth. However, making sure you got that rain was above your farmer pay grade. Even today, with all our advancement, we still have weather patterns that we have no control over. Uncharacteristically, the Okanagan region had almost no peach and cherry harvest this summer because of an early cold snap.
A farmer also has to exercise patience because the process of bringing a crop to harvest takes time. There’s no fast forward option. You plant the seed but it takes months before you can do much with it. If you try to harvest a crop too early because you’re impatient for the profit or the food, you’ll end up with nothing. But the result of patience, of seeing the process through all the way, is a valuable harvest. This is true literally of farmers and it’s true spiritually. If you want your life to produce good fruit, you need to submit to God’s gracious work in your life and honor the long process of sanctification instead of looking for shortcuts.
By the way, the farming image is so good because it illustrates another dimension of patience: patience isn’t the same as passivity. Here’s what I would say is a definition of patience: it’s accepting that some desire you have will not be fulfilled at the moment. A farmer wants the harvest but must accept it won’t happen yet. However, a farmer works hard throughout the year. There’s a lot to do. Waiting doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means accepting that there are factors beyond your control and submitting to the process involved. It means doing what you can even while surrendering ultimate control to God.
Strengthened hearts
A second outcome of patience is strengthened hearts. That’s the phrase James literally uses in verse 8, which is translated in the NIV as “stand firm.” This is the flip side to the fattened hearts of impatience. Patience, like healthy eating and exercise, strengthens us and builds firmness in us. Patience enables us to endure hardship. It allows us to persevere through seasons of unfulfilled desire. It makes us sensitive to God’s voice and quick to respond to His leading. Patience makes us healthy and strong.
One more note on this in relation to exercise. For most people, exercise itself is not enjoyable, at least not at first. This is less true if you spend a bunch of money like we did on a rowing machine that tricks you into loving exercise because you’re playing video games by rowing. As I said earlier in this James series, that’s the Thiessen strategy. Generally, though, you have to have a pretty clear sense of the benefits exercise will bring you. When you keep your eyes on the goal- weight loss, muscle gain, overall fitness, whatever- that’s your motivation. You’ve got to keep your eyes on the end goal of patience. One of those, as we’ve said, is a spiritually strengthened heart, being strong in the face of trial and responsive to God’s leading. That’s desirable!
Blessing
A third consequence of patience is that it produces a state of blessing. In verse 11, James says we count as blessed those who patiently persevere. He specifically cites the prophets, as well as Job. These were Old Testament figures who lived anything but an easy life. I’m reading through Jeremiah right now, and I’m reminded that Jeremiah faced continual opposition and hostility. People from his own hometown threatened to kill him if he didn’t stop preaching God’s word. God even told him at the outset that this would happen to Jeremiah. God warned him, they’re not going to listen to you, the message I’m giving you is going to be rejected, but I want you to proclaim it anyway. If I was Jeremiah, I might reply, “thanks for this great job, God, you’re really setting me up for success here! No pay, no benefits, no chance of advancement, guaranteed hardship, sign me up!” However, James reminds us that we look at people like Jeremiah and we proclaim that he was blessed. We recognize that this was a giant of the faith who we should emulate. James writes that we intuitively see men like the prophets, who patiently endured suffering, as worthy examples to follow.
You see from this that biblical blessing does not mean having the emotion of happiness. It also doesn’t mean that you will be healthy and wealthy and that everything in life will go smoothly. I was having coffee with an old friend who worked in a church for years but left in a state of burn out. He was telling me that one of his biggest spiritual struggles has been understanding how he could sacrifice so much for ministry because of his love for Jesus, and yet why God allowed him to become so weary and discouraged. There aren’t easy simple answers to that. But from many biblical examples, dealing with experiences like that does not seem uncommon for God’s servants.
In that case, then, what does it mean to be blessed? One commentator said it’s not an emotion, it’s an objective state of affairs in our relationship with God. When we live with biblical patience, we live rightly with God. We honor Him and we please Him, which is to live in a blessed state. We are blessed with the assurance that we belong to Him and that salvation is ours. Seen this way, blessing also means our lives become worthy of imitation and emulation because we’re living with patience. It means that others will look at our lives and recognize the goodness of patient endurance, the goodness of waiting for the satisfaction of our desires.
The Lord’s work
There’s another dimension to that state of blessing, but we’ll treat it as a fourth outcome of patience. James specifically talks about Job. If you know the story of Job, he was a faithful man who experienced a series of devastating tragedies- tragedies brought on by Satan, by God’s permission. Most of the book of Job is a series of conversations between Job and his friends who definitely would have flunked out of a social work or psychiatry program. If you read the book, I’m not sure patience is the first thing that would strike you about Job. However, one thing he never does is give up his desire for God’s presence. He does not curse God and die as his lovely encouraging wife implores him to do. He waits for God’s presence.
I’m going to come back to that too, but what James reminds his readers of is the end that the Lord brought about. In Job, after God does make His awesome presence known to Job and puts Jobs in his place in the process, He restores all kinds of gifts to Job. The Bible even says that Job became more prosperous than he had been before losing it all. Now, there’s clearly no guarantee that things will play out exactly the same way for everyone. Plenty of faithful servants of God have died at the hands of persecution. But what is a guarantee is that patiently enduring suffering opens your life to God’s transformative work. When you stop trying to force the issue and make things happen in your own power, you give space for God to do what only God can do. You allow Him to work for transformation, for renewal, for restoration. One of the results of patience is that God is free to do the work of transformation He wants to do in our life.
3. What we’re patient for
All right, I’ve been talking for a while today about impatience and patience. Hopefully by now you see why patience is good and impatience is bad. If I haven’t convinced you of that, I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry for failing so spectacularly. But there’s a really big, important issue in all this that brings a few loose threads together. Here it is: what is it, exactly, that we’re to be patient for? As I’ve said a few times, patience involves the delayed fulfillment of our desires. The deeper the desire, the greater the need for patience. What is it, above all else, that we desire and need to exercise patience in because we don’t have it yet?
In verse 7, James says be patient, brothers and sisters, until. Right there, we see that patience is not a forever virtue. We will not always need patience. The need for it will come to an end. When? James says be patient until the Lord’s coming. Again, in verse 8, he says be patient and stand firm, strengthen your hearts, because the Lord’s coming is near. That word, “coming,” is an important one. It is used often in the New Testament to describe the second coming of Jesus. It was used more broadly in the ancient world to refer to the coming of a king to his city. When that happens, the citizens throw a party. They welcome the king. And it’s obvious that he’s the king. The king doesn’t slip in incognito, which is kind of what Jesus did in his first coming. His second coming will not be like that. He will come, clearly, as king.
Here’s the other note about that word for “coming”: the Greek word could just as easily be translated as “presence.” The coming of Jesus is all about the presence of Jesus. James says we are to exercise patience until the coming, tangible, overwhelming presence of King Jesus. He encourages us to be patient because that presence is near. In other words, our deepest desire, the goal that should be at the center of our patience, is for the presence of our king Jesus in a way we don’t yet experience it. As I alluded to with Job, you could say that an encounter with God was his deepest desire as well.
Remember our definition of patience. It is the acceptance of delayed satisfaction of your desires. One of the issues with impatience is that if your deepest unfulfilled longing in life is for anything other than God’s presence, there’s no guarantee that it will be fulfilled. It may not. It is that fact that drives people to despair and anger. In bits and pieces, I’ve been watching an ESPN documentary about the Vancouver riot in 2011 after the Canucks lost Game 7 in the Stanley Cup finals. In one interview and the next, people talk about how hopeful they were that finally, the Canucks would win the Stanley Cup. The streets of downtown were packed and joyful ahead of the game. And then, when it became clear that they would lose the game, people soured. Things became very, very dark. One thing led to another and by the end of the night, people were flipping over cars, setting them on fire, attacking each other, attacking police officers, smashing windows, and looting stores. Remember, this was because a group of men didn’t get a small rubber puck into a net as often as another group of men.
Look, I hate to break it to you, but if your deepest unfulfilled desire is for the Canucks to win the Stanley Cup, that may not happen. People actually do understand that, which I think helped fuel the destruction and rage in 2011. If your deepest unfulfilled desire is to marry and have kids, that may not happen. You know it might not, which may cause you to try all kinds of shortcuts, to grumble and criticize others, to grow angry and despairing. If your greatest unfulfilled desire is to buy a detached home in Greater Vancouver, that may not happen. You know it might not, and your impatience will once again spark the kinds of consequences that we talked about earlier.
This is why the fruit of impatience is condemnation and judgment: the language in the Bible is that God gives us over to the twisted desires of our hearts. He does not force us to love Him or serve Him. He allows us to chase after idols and to taste the fruit of our rejection of Him. He will not force His presence on you in eternity, so if your deepest unfulfilled desire is anything but His presence, He will allow you to chase that futility to the grave and beyond.
He allows you to do that, but it’s not what He wants. What He wants is for you to long for His presence above all else. And here’s the truth about His presence. It is the one desire that is guaranteed to be fulfilled. We taste His presence already now through the Holy Spirit, we glimpse it when we gather for worship like we do today. However, we long to see Him face to face, to have Him remove every stain, every sin, to know His love for us in all its fullness, to see creation restored to what He intended. It’s a currently unfulfilled desire but He promises to fulfill it.
That’s why, in a world wired for impatience, we as His people can be patient. If our deepest desire is for His coming, we can be people of patience because we know that desire will be fulfilled. We know it because He’s faithful. We know it because He’s powerful and is able to bring it about. And we know it because, as James writes in verse 11, the Lord is full of compassion and mercy. Can I geek out on you with one more Greek phrase? When James announces that He is full of compassion, the Greek word is poluspachnos. Spachnos is the word for compassion, and it’s this guttural word. You hear it in the pronunciation. It’s deep down, it’s the core of your insides, it’s what you feel more strongly than anything else. God’s splachnos is His guttural, deep compassion and love for us. Then you throw on the word “polu”- that means big or much. This is God’s super-splachnos, His mucho-splachnos, His uber-splachnos. The deep, guttural compassion He has for us is what led Jesus to the cross in our place. It’s what drove Him to remove the barrier of sin that existed between us and Him. It’s what raised Jesus from the dead and compelled Him to send the Holy Spirit to dwell in our hearts. And it is the basis for our confident assurance that Jesus will come again, that our King of Kings will make His presence known, that He will fulfill that deepest desire in our hearts for His presence. Because He is merciful and compassionate, we know He will come.
Be patient, my friends, in every circumstance. But let your patience start with the Lord’s presence. Let your deepest desire be for the presence of King Jesus because that desire alone is guaranteed to be fulfilled. It is the desire that enables patience, the desire that produces truly good fruit.