Julius Caesar And Me

Dear Friends,

The Roman Emperor Julius Caesar once said, “It is easier to find men willing to die than it is to find men willing to be patient.” That is certainly how it has felt to me this week, as I've been challenged to be patient in almost every are of my life. While impatience may just feel like a natural response to many events we encounter in daily life, God specifically calls His children to live differently. In Ephesians 4:2 Paul says: “Be patient with one another, in love”. It sounds so easy - but as we all know, this particular calling is a challenging one to actually live out because there are so many things in life working against our ability to remain patient.

Fortunately, as I struggled with being impatient this week, God reminded me of Psalm 37:7, which says: “Be still in the presence of the Lord, and wait patiently for Him to act.” When we look at many of the stories in the Bible, it’s easy to see that God operates on a totally different schedule than we do. For example, 25 years passed from the time God promised Abraham a son to when he was born. Israel didn’t become a great nation until 900 years after God gave them that promise. And Jesus waited 30 years after His birth to begin His public ministry.

That list could go on, but hopefully we see the pattern: God’s timing is different than ours. So the psalmist wasn’t joking when he wrote that “a thousand years is like a day to God and a day is like a thousand years.” But do we think that God messed up in the biblical stories I just listed? Or do we believe that His perfect plan included His perfect timing, for the good of all involved?

The reason we need to keep this in mind is because, more often than not, the times when we struggle the most with impatience are the times when things aren’t happening as quickly as we would like them to happen. It can be from small things, like being stuck in a long line which isn’t moving as fast as we would like - to bigger things, like God not working out issues in our lives as quickly as we hoped He would. So all-too-often, our impatience is a result of the fact that God doesn’t work on our timeline.

However, what the Psalm 37 passage reminds us is that, when we remember God is in control, and that He has a plan for our lives that is better than ours, and then submit ourselves to His control and plan – we’ve taken the first step to actually becoming patient people.

So today, let's do that. Let’s give our plans and agendas over to God, and trust His timing on them. Let’s rest in the assurance that He hasn’t lost control of His world, and that His plan for us is a good one. Let's do all of this so that we can take the first steps to being the patient people God calls us to be.

Amen?

Daniel