What Is Taking Him So Long? - 2nd Peter 3:8-13



We are supposed to be patient people.  I mean, after all as we have learned on Wednesday nights, patience is one aspect of Jesus Fruit that we are all supposed to have if we are abiding in Christ as He abides in us.  I typically try to be a patient man, at least I think I do.  There are times where my children, Joshua, and Anita might have disagreed with that statement.  There are times where it is hard for me to be patient.  As a kid, like most kids, I had little patience for how long it took to make a trip or how long it took for my birthday or Christmas to arrive (and with both of them in December it made for a long year).  Like many men, if I take my wife clothes shopping, it is hard to be patient…especially an hour or two into the shopping trip and not even the first article of clothing has been purchased to show fruit for the time spent. 
However, this year has proved to be a new test of patience for me.  Most of you know that Joshua and I planted our very first raised fruit garden, full of pepper and tomato plants.  While Joshua’s cherry tomato and hot banana pepper plant took off quick and have been abundantly full of their choice fruits, my pepper and tomato plants did not.  There have been a lot of leaves and a lot of flowers, but for most of the summer there have been no tomatoes and no pepper pods.  Through the last two months I was growing rapidly impatient, ready to just pull all the plants up.  Anita kept saying, “it’s okay, this was just y’all’s first try, maybe next year will be better.”  One reason for my impatience was that I know from my previous experience with my Carolina Reaper plant that it takes a long time for the peppers to ripen once the pods form and I wanted to make sure that I had plenty to harvest before the nighttime temps drop too low this fall.  I decided to wait it out and I’m glad because while they haven’t ripened, the pods are starting to form on the hottest peppers, the tomatoes are popping out , and along with Joshua’s hot banana peppers, I’m already enjoying jalapeños.  Patience pays off…
Jesus had been crucified.  The stone had been rolled away.  The resurrected Jesus spent forty days with His disciples.  Then, as related to us in the first chapter of Acts, Jesus ascends to heaven.  His disciples, who were gathered there with him, just stood looking to the sky where Jesus had just departed.  We can probably capture a mental image of them standing there: some with their mouths hanging open, others tight-lipped with tears running down their cheeks, or still others with a dazed and confused stare.  As they are staring at the sky, “two men in white robes stood by them.  They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?  This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’”[i]
From that point forward, God’s people began watching the sky and everywhere else for Jesus’ return.  They had felt that it was imminent; I mean, after all, the last time he was only gone for three days. They thought Jesus would quickly make that return trip to gather up all of the faithful. And they waited, and they waited, and they waited.  Decades passed, and there was still no sign of Jesus’ return, no trumpet blast, no widespread resurrection of the dead, no Day of the Lord breaking in on a fallen earth wiping out all evil and forever establishing God’s Kingdom.
Folks were getting a little agitated.  Like the child on a trip asking, “are we there yet?” Or a husband, “have you found anything yet?” or me constantly checking the garden to see if anything was happening yet, God’s people were watching the sky to see if Jesus was coming back yet, and they had probably starting to do a little grumbling.  “When is God going to do something?  We’ve been waiting for his return for like forever.  He’s moving too slow.  He needs to come on back now.  Is there anyway we can light a fire under God and get Him going?”  You can imagine the talk.  If you have every waited on anyone or anything, you can imagine it.
Peter steps into this conversation, these grumblings, and addresses them: “The Lord is not slow about His promise, some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”[ii]
In this verse we have a clear indication that God is not sitting up in heaven just waiting to send some of us, or others in the world, to hell.  In fact, from Peter’s words we come to see that God doesn’t really want any of us to end up eternally separated from Him.  His desire is that everyone might come to embrace the salvation He offers, the gift of an Eternal Life spent with Him.  The God we gather to worship is a God of love and a God of mercy and a God of redemption who longs to have a relationship with each and every member of His created earth…He has promised since Isaiah that there will come a day that “every knee will bow, every tongue shall swear”[iii] that He is God.
What we find is that we have a God who is patient, who is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness….”[iv]  If you are like me, I hear the passage from 2nd Peter and I begin thinking about how wonderful it is that we have a God who is patient and is waiting for all those other folks out there to have a chance to repent and come into a relationship with Him.  God wants them all to become like us.  We want God to hurry up and come, but we are okay (or at least pretend to be) that He is waiting for everyone to come to the same place we are.  At least that is how I had always read it until a year or two ago when I read it once more for my morning devotional reflection.
I was probably doing what is called a lectio divina reading of the Scripture for my devotion that morning in which you take a verse and read it slowly, at least three times, listening or being attentive to God’s leading as you read it, seeking out what God is trying to convey that day.  It is an especially good way to read familiar passages. That particular morning as I read it, a phrase jumped out to me in a way it never had before: “The Lord is not slow about his promise as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.  But is patient with you.  But is patient with you.  God isn’t slow to act, but he is patient with me, with you.
Peter was not telling the church that God is not slow but is being patient with all those heathens outside the church. He was telling the Church that God was being patient with them…with us.  In this instance, Peter says, with all apologies to Rick Warren, it is not about them, it is about us.
What is God waiting on us for?  Why is God having to be patient with us?  Haven’t we repented?  Haven’t we knelt and proclaimed that Jesus is our Lord and Savior?  Aren’t we the ones who are already faithful?
Perhaps so, perhaps not.  Have we really come to terms with what it means to surrender our lives to Jesus as our Lord and Savior?  Have we truly surrendered all of our lives over to Him?  I know that we want to say, “yes,” but have we?  Before we declare that we have, remember the fate of Ananias and Sapphira in the early church who declared that they had sold all of their property and given it all to the Church (while in truthfulness, they had kept back part of it for themselves).  Are there parts of our lives that we have not truly surrendered to God?  Are there places and things that we are still holding on to?  Are there activities that we do not want to give up?  Are there those that we truly do not want to forgive?  Are there still people and places and things that we give more of our time and attention and resources to than we do God?  If so, perhaps God is waiting on us to completely surrender, to completely give our lives over to Him as our Lord, because He does not want us to perish in the same way that Ananias and Sapphira did.[v]  Maybe it is that God is patent with us because he wants us in His Kingdom, not forever separated from Him.
Maybe it is that God is being patient and waiting for us to fulfill the commission Jesus gave as He departed.  He told the disciples , which passes on to us, to begin in Jerusalem, go into Judea and Samaria, and then all the rest of the world, making disciples, baptizing them and teaching them everything that He had commanded.[vi]  That commission is to all who would call themselves disciples of Christ, and that commission is not complete until each and every person across the globe has had the opportunity to hear the Gospel message and through our acts experience the love and mercy of a God who would meet their needs and welcome them in loving fellowship.  Jesus did not tell the disciples to sit and let others do it, to show up on Sundays, worship him, and go about the rest of their business throughout the week, while someone else spreads the Gospel.  He told them all to go…He tells us all to go.  Perhaps God’s patience is that He’s waiting for us to do what He told us to do—like a parent waiting for their child to clean up their room or make the bed they were told to take care of.  So perhaps God is waiting on us to act.  Maybe He’s waiting on us to hasten that day when every “knee will bow…and…every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord”[vii] because he doesn’t want any to perish…and if we’re not already about this work, sharing the Gospel through our words and acts of compassion, that takes us pack to the first possibility, for if we are not doing what God has told us to do, it questions our surrender to His Lordship of our lives.
Yet, either way, we must remember…that God is not slow to act…He is going to act…we have that promise…we don’t know when it will be…it will come like a thief in the night…but He is being patient…with me…with you….  May we be faithful, so that when that Trumpet sounds and we stand before that Judgment Seat, God’s patience will have paid off as we will find ourselves entering the new heavens and new earth where righteousness is at home.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.


[i] Acts 1:10-11
[ii] 2nd Peter 3:9
[iii] Isaiah 45:23
[iv] Exodus 34:6
[v] Acts 5:1-11
[vi] Blend of Acts 1:8 and Matthew 28:19-20
[vii] Philippians 2:10-11

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