Expect God's Patience
Advent 2018 What To Expect When You're Expecting • Sermon • Submitted
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On this Second Sunday of Advent, we continue our series, What to Expect when you’re expecting. Last week, we looked at the word advent, how it means coming, and how Israel longed for the coming of the messiah and how Christians are longing for the return of Christ. In this, we need to expect God’s patience.
2014-12-07 Expect God’s Patience
On this Second Sunday of Advent, we continue our series, What to Expect when you’re expecting. Last week, we looked at the word advent, how it means coming, and how Israel longed for the coming of the messiah and how Christians are longing for the return of Christ. In this, we need to expect God’s patience.
In our passage, Peter explains why Christ didn’t return right away and why he hasn’t returned yet. Interestingly, he first begins by telling his readers, telling us, that he writes to stimulate us to “wholesome thinking.”
I find that phrase rather interesting. When I graduated from High School, I moved with my parents to Westbank, B.C. My next-door neighbour was my age, and he was a Christian. I started to hang out with him and his friends. I was dumbfounded. After spending 7 years living near Vancouver, I was pretty “worldly wise.” You can imagine my surprise when they spoke with clean language. They refused to watch certain things on television and they were careful about how they talked and acted toward others. At first, I thought they were a bunch of prudes. But then, as I got to know them, I found out that they were just trying to live out this verse.
By the way they lived, my friends tried to maintain wholesome thinking. That meant that they refused unwholesome stimulants to enter their brains. They were living as wholesomely as they could. Peter’s reason for stimulating his readers to wholesome thinking is a practical one. He understood what was going to happen. He understood that God’s timing is very different from ours. He understood the reality of what would happen to the church in the future. He understood that God would allow much time to pass before returning. It would be easy to allow discouragement to corrupt our thinking. Also, as he goes on to explain, we will face scoffers.
Scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, ‘where is this coming he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.’ The scoffers are saying two things by their words. First, they are denying the truth of Christ. They want to cause Christians to have doubts and to turn away from the faith. Second, they are claiming that the reason Christ hasn’t returned is that God never came in the first place. They claim that God never intervenes in His creation.
Peter counters this argument by reminding his readers of the flood. That is why Peter says, they deliberately forget! When scoffers come to argue against what we believe, we must keep in mind that they will deliberately “forget” some of the facts of God. As to the flood, the OT is not the only record we have of a flood. The Babylonian creation myth contains a flood story too, and there are others.
Additionally, Peter could have mentioned the Exodus. The plagues, the safe crossing of the Red Sea, the drowning of the Egyptian army, if those are not enough examples of God intervening in history, then nothing will make us believe in the greatest intervention of all: the incarnation.
This is Advent. It is the season where we reflect and wonder at the reality of God becoming man. How God sent His Son Jesus to be born of a woman, to live on this earth, to experience humility. It is almost incomprehensible. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. How many of you have stood beside a jumbo jet? I used to work at an aircraft maintenance company. A Boeing Advanced 727-200 has a maximum take-off weight of 209,500lbs! When I stood beside the Jet, I wondered how something so heavy could get off the ground. But sure enough, as soon as the repairs were complete, off it went down the runway, and into the sky!
Just because something is hard to believe or imagine, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Just because it is hard for us to imagine that God came to earth as a baby, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. In fact, we have the history of the church, we have written documents from outside the church, which tell us that it did indeed happen. We also have years and years of Christmas celebrations that have taken place as reminders that Christ really did come to earth to show us the way.
Now, about the scoffers Peter mentioned. There are scoffers today. There are people whose aim is to disprove anything. They deliberately avoid the facts in order to make their point. But Peter wants us to know something about these kinds of people. They do it not out of a higher sense of responsibility, but out of selfishness. They want to trick us into following them, so that they can manipulate us. The devil wants us to obey him, not God. Unless we prepare ourselves for the devil’s onslaught, his many forms of deception, we will be in danger. That is why Peter stimulates us to wholesome thinking. This phrase echoes Paul’s phrase, “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” When our minds are set on things above, then things below won’t affect them. That is what my friends were trying to do. By setting their minds on wholesome thinking, they defended themselves against unwholesome thinking. Unless we set our minds on Christ, seated at the right hand of the Father, unless we anchor ourselves in heaven, we will be at the mercy of every wind and wave that scoffers and doubters send our way.
Peter goes on to instruct us not to forget this one thing, “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day.” Peter is not giving us a key to understanding the six days of creation. Peter is telling us, through hyperbole, that God exists outside of time. From God’s perspective, time is something he created. Existing in eternity, a thousand years seems no longer than a day, and a day seems no shorter than a thousand years. But God steps into our time. He did it through the incarnation. He knows what it is like for us. God is patiently involved in every day of creation.
Born into time, we can’t escape it. We can’t even begin to imagine eternity. We have enough time just learning to wait! Children can’t wait for Christmas, to open presents. Young adults can’t wait to get married. Mothers can’t wait to see their children grown up. When we are young, time seems to move too slowly, but as we get older, each day, though it contains the same number of minutes as the days of our youth, each day seems to go at a faster and faster rate!
Peter pastorally tells us not to worry about the amount of time that has passed. If his parishioners were worried that Christ hadn’t returned yet, what is it like for us? It seems like at least once a year, the tabloids declare the coming of Christ. Or some new book comes out claiming that Christ will return on such and such a day! It has been nearly 2000 years. Will Christ really come? When babies are overdue, parents begin to wonder if the child will ever come! Waiting is hard!
But we are to be patient with God because he is being patient with us! He does not want anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. What a merciful and loving God we serve! The same God that grew tired and angry with the wicked people of Noah’s day, who destroyed them, and the world with a flood, now waits patiently for us, not wanting anyone to perish! What is the difference? God sees not our sinfulness. God sees not our wickedness. God sees Christ. Christ has conferred his righteousness upon us, and has made us clean.
That is what we celebrate in the Lord’s Supper. The new covenant in Christ’s blood is really the old covenant that God made with Abraham. The newness of the covenant is that it is completed. Christ paid the sacrifice demanded by the law of the covenant. The blood of the Lamb of God has washed away the sins of the earth. When we take, eat, remember, and believe, we set our minds to wholesome thinking. Indeed, our very souls ascend into heaven, to experience the truth of God.
We do not know the exact date and time Mark and Sarah Hanemaayer’s baby will be born. It is as unknown as what Peter describes in verse 10. “The day of the Lord will come like a thief. We know with all certainty that a child will be born into their family. We do not know when. That’s the certainty we have that Christ will come again! Just because we don’t know when their child will be born, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to happen. Just because we don’t know when Christ will return, doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
Peter tells us that the end of the age is coming. How are we to live? Even though God is patient, even though we must not go crazy trying explain all the signs of the end of the age, we must not become complacent. Yes, the world as we know it will come to an end.
Verse 11—since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? Does Peter tell us to live and do whatever we want? Does he say, “don’t worry about keeping the covenant or keeping the commandments”? Have fun! Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow, everything burns anyway! No, that is not what kind of people we ought to be! Peter says we should live holy and godly lives as we look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. We are to live as God called us to live, right from the beginning, in the Garden of Eden. We are to be holy, as He is Holy.
Let us not become too attached to the things of this world. They are gifts from God, yes, but they are nothing compared to what we have in eternity. Recently I finished reading “King Solomon’s Mines.” In this fictitious work, Alan Quartermain and his friends find themselves trapped in the mine. As the time passes, after they almost run out of food and water, they realise they would gladly trade all the ivory, gold and diamonds just to see the light of day one more time. Quartermain reflects that when it comes down to it, none of this stuff of earth matters much. Life itself, and everlasting life particularly is what really matters.
We live holy and Godly lives when we view the world in proper perspective. We do our best to raise our children in the Lord, by teaching them all we can. We do our best to be faithful to God’s commandments. We do our best to avoid the temptations of the world, to keep our minds on things above. “So then, since you are looking forward to this new heaven and new earth, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with God, bearing in mind that God’s patience means salvation.”
We’ve already received salvation when we put our hope and trust in Jesus’ promises. God’s patience means salvation for our friends, family, neighbours who need to hear what Christ has freely given. We don’t know when Christ will return, it could be at any moment. We don’t know when our own time will be up. Life is fragile. Let us make most of the time we have, sharing the good news, living wholesome lives, for the glory of God. Amen.