Patience 2 – Waiting to move until God moves - Joshua 3-6 – 5.25.08 Dennis Mullen

            Last week’s lesson was on patience as delayed gratification – waiting until later, until the time is right, for what you want now.  Or, as is often the case with our IMPATIENCE or foolish anger, patience is waiting till NEVER to say the angry things I shouldn’t say in the first place, or waiting until the anger has subsided so I can deal with it constructively.

            This week, let’s talk about patience in a more super-natural sense, the patience to wait upon the Lord, the patience to NOT move forward until he moves first.

            Again, we are following a similar lesson to the one taught to the K-5 kids in Jr. Church and on Sunday night, so their take home page is in the bulletin.  Did any of you actively talk to your kids about the lesson on patience last week?  Will you do it today or this week – on the ride home, around the table, in a family time Tuesday night?

            This is a difficult concept for us.  Most of the time, we think of our arrangement with God a bit differently.  Jesus once began a parable by saying  “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom the master puts in charge of his servants to give them their food allowance at the proper time? It will be good for that servant whom the master finds doing so when he returns” (Luke 12:42-43).  That’s how we sometimes think of our arrangement with the Lord.  He isn’t here right now, he’s away on a journey, and it’s up to us to figure out his will by reading the Bible and using our minds, and then do what he would do if he were here.  WWJD?

            Well that point of view works at one level.  There IS a sense in which Jesus is away.  He isn’t here in his fullness, as he one day SHALL be, and we are awaiting his return.  And yet the whole point of the Christian faith is that he ISN’T far away.  In fact, he lives within us in the Person we call the Holy Spirit.

            Sometime you should open your New Testament to John 14 and just begin reading to remind yourself of the relationship JESUS intends to establish with us.  The context is that he is in the Upper Room with his disciples, knowing that in a few hours he will be crucified, and he is telling them about what it will be like when he isn’t standing there in a human body anymore.  This is the passage where he talks about the Holy Spirit, the Counselor, and he says: 

14:26 But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.   AND…

16:13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. 14 He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you.  AND in between…

JN 15:5 "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.

            Nothing was further from his plan than an arrangement where Jesus left and said, “I’m leaving you in charge, and I’m taking a break.  Just read the book and do what it says, and I’ll check in with you later.”  On the contrary, he is here among us, and his Kingdom is within us, and when our relationship with Christ is as it should be, he is very closely involved with each one of us.

            All of that to get to this:  There are times when patience means more than simply waiting till the time is right, waiting till I have enough money saved up, waiting until I have cooled off, or waiting till marriage…sometimes patience means waiting to move until God actually moves first. 

            Now let me say that, in my experience, it is a somewhat rare occurrence where I have to wait for God to move first.  Two observations about this:  ONE, I don’t think God means to direct us in every trivial detail of our lives as if we were infants.  We need not wait for God to tell us when to go to lunch or where to save a nickel on gas (though buying gas isn’t such a trivial thing anymore!)  But TWO, it might be a sign of my immaturity that it is a somewhat rare occurrence where I feel I have to wait for God to move first.  Given the closeness of the relationship Jesus describes, I’m sure that growing into a deeper relationship with him might mean MORE interaction, MORE direction, and MORE waiting on the Lord. 

            Let me tell you about a couple of very clear examples of waiting on the Lord to move, from Joshua 3-6.  Now if you know the OT stories, you know that, all the way back to the time of Abraham, almost from the beginning of the Bible, God had promised that Israel would occupy a stretch of land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean as their own home land.  It was “the Promised Land”.  Well, as the book of Joshua begins, the deck has been cleared of many problems that were standing in the way, and now the people are ready to go in and take this land as their own.

            Now if I had been running the show, I would have said something like this:  “God’s will is clear.  We’re supposed to go take this land.  Let’s figure out how to do it.  Or, better yet, let’s just go do it, and since it IS God’s will, I guess God will cover for us if we mess it up.”  But this was most certainly NOT the time for that kind of thinking.

            It began with the officers of Israel instructing the people:  "When you see the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, and the priests…carrying it, you are to move out from your positions and follow it. 4 Then you will know which way to go, since you have never been this way before…5 Joshua told the people, "Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the LORD will do amazing things among you."

            This is a good week to talk about the ark of the covenant.  The new Indiana Jones movie opened Friday, and I’m sure you remember that the first one (from back in MY high school days) was called Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it told us all kinds of preposterous half-truths about the ark of the covenant.  The ark, to put it simply, was a gold-covered box that among other things, served as God’s throne among the people whenever the tabernacle was set up.  When the priests carried the ark, God wanted them to understand that they were carrying his very presence with them.  This was dangerous stuff, not to be trifled with, and one of the instructions as they moved out on this day was:  Stay back a thousand yards from the ark!  Follow…but stay back!

            So the idea was that no one would go anyplace until God went first.

            God’s purpose in this was two-fold:  ONE, to show the Israelites (once again) that HE was the one true God and that he had them covered as long as they stayed with him, and TWO, to lift up Joshua in their eyes, to show that he was indeed the new prophet:  JOS 3:7 And the LORD said to Joshua, "Today I will begin to exalt you in the eyes of all Israel, so they may know that I am with you as I was with Moses.  How did the people learn to trust God and trust Moses as his prophet?  Well you might argue that they never DID learn that, but to the extent that they did, it was when the saw God doing miracles through Moses – the biggest of which was the parting of the Red Sea when they left Egypt. 

            Now, 40 years later, they’re standing at another body of water, the Jordan River, at flood stage too.  So God tells Joshua and Joshua tells the priests with the ark:  “Walk out into the middle of the river and stand there.”  …as soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water's edge, 16 the water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance away, at a town called Adam in the vicinity of Zarethan, while the water flowing down to the Sea of the Arabah (the Salt Sea ) was completely cut off. So the people crossed over opposite Jericho. 17 The priests who carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD stood firm on dry ground in the middle of the Jordan, while all Israel passed by until the whole nation had completed the crossing on dry ground.

            Keep in mind that it was 40 years ago that this same thing had happened at the Red Sea.  In the meantime, Israel had been unfaithful to the Lord, and so for 40 years they wandered in the desert.  Some might have supposed that those days of miracles were long gone, that God wasn’t with them in the same way anymore.  That’s why he does it again.  But more importantly for our lesson, notice that NOBODY was to step into that river at flood stage before God.  Faithfulness at this moment meant nothing other than having the patience to wait until God moved first.

            This is a good passage for Memorial Day weekend because of what happens next.  God tells Joshua and Joshua tells the people to choose 12 men, one from each of the 12 tribes, to step out into the river where the priests stand with the ark, and each of them choose a stone and carry it out.  Then, at the place where they’ll camp tonight, they’ll set up those stones in a pile as a memorial to this event.  He said to the Israelites, "In the future when your descendants ask their fathers, `What do these stones mean?' 4:22 tell them, `Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground.' 23 For the LORD your God dried up the Jordan before you until you had crossed over. The LORD your God did to the Jordan just what he had done to the Red Sea when he dried it up before us until we had crossed over. 24 He did this so that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the LORD is powerful and so that you might always fear the LORD your God."  And when the priests came up out of the Jordan, the water returned immediately to flood stage, as before.

            Now that was a powerful indicator of God’s plans, but it was just the start.  The first battle, as we saw last week, was going to be for a city called Jericho.  As Joshua approached that city, one of my favorite encounters in all the Bible happens:  JOS 5:13 Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, "Are you for us or for our enemies?"

14 "Neither," he replied, "but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come." Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, "What message does my Lord have for his servant?"

            15 The commander of the LORD's army replied, "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy." And Joshua did so.  We talk about something being “a God thing” if it works out unusually well, but THIS was a God thing, and Joshua’s place (and the place of all of Israel with him) was to wait on the Lord, and move only in response to his moves.

            And the commander of the Lord’s armies wasn’t there just to watch.  This battle was going to be the Lord’s battle.  He would do the fighting.  You’ve heard the old song about how “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho,” but it isn’t true.  There was no battle for Joshua to fight because God took care of it.

            I’m going to quickly summarize what happened at Jericho because it’s the most familiar part of the story – or else it should be – and you can read it for yourself in Joshua 6.  Suffice it to say that God told Joshua in just a few verses how it would happen, and then it happened just like that.  God told him this:  JOS 6:2 … "See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men. 3 March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. 4 Have seven priests carry trumpets of rams' horns in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times, with the priests blowing the trumpets. 5 When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have all the people give a loud shout; then the wall of the city will collapse and the people will go up, every man straight in."  That isn’t a battle.  It’s a deliverance.  God was going to GIVE them Jericho.  They just had to wait for him to move, and then follow his lead. 

            One leftover detail from last week:  25 But Joshua spared Rahab the prostitute, with her family and all who belonged to her, because she hid the men Joshua had sent as spies to Jericho--and she lives among the Israelites to this day.  Not to THIS day, of course, but up till the time the book was written, and this indicates that it happened within the lifetime of some of the folks who lived it.

            Sometimes patience means waiting to move until God actually moves first. 

            This is a concept that modern-day American Christians really need to get a handle on:  The idea of waiting on the Lord, being patient enough to wait till God moves first.

            Let me say that I DON’T think that this is God’s every day way of dealing with us.  I don’t get out of bed in the morning and wait on God to pick out my clothes for me.  If we see that we’re out of milk and bread and cat food, I don’t feel like God wants we to wait on his direction before deciding whether to buy these or not. The need is there and if we have the money…   The relationship God invites us into is a healthy relationship, so even though he is the Lord, in a healthy relationship it isn’t necessary for him to pick and choose each detail of our daily experience. 

            But we KNOW that!  What we fail to get is this other concept, rare but necessary:  Wait on the Lord; waiting patiently for him to move and lead us where to go.

            Sometimes in our witness to others we need to wait on the Lord and see when he is moving in someone’s life.  If you have a brother or an uncle who has heard all about Jesus before, again and again, and that person practically says to you, “Look, I’m just not interested.  I GET it, you see, but I don’t believe it.  If we can’t talk about something else, I’d rather we just not talk”, that’s a pretty clear signal that it’s time to wait on God to move, to prepare the soil of that person’s heart, before there is any hope of a seed taking root.  Now I say this with some caution, because I know that our greater need sometimes is to be MORE bold, MORE willing to speak a word or two about God and how much he cares for us.  But not always.  Sometimes we have to be patient and wait on God to move first.

            Bob Russell tells a story about a preacher friend who had done his best to share the Gospel with this young couple, and they just weren’t open to it.  Then one night, this couple was in bed and the man was asleep and the woman thought she heard a burglar in the house.  She listened a bit more and heard another sound and then she KNEW that someone was in the house.  She didn’t wake her husband because she was too afraid to make a sound, but then two men entered the bedroom.  She moved.  Someone said:  “They’re awake!”  The woman screamed, the husband sat up in bed and the burglars fired three shots and fled.  No one was hurt.

            When the police came, the husband said:  “I guess they were shooting blanks to miss me at such close range!”  But the police showed him two slugs in the headboard and one in the mattress between his legs. 

            They went immediately to stay with relatives, who early the next morning called this preacher who had tried to witness to them, and said:  “I think that they might be ready to consider Jesus today.”  The preacher went over and found them to be the most pliable and receptive converts he’d ever met.  And it wasn’t just a short-term commitment either.  God moved in their hearts that day, and they were genuinely ready to receive the good news of Jesus Christ where, the day before, they weren’t.  God moved and THEN it was time again to share the Gospel with them personally.

            There’s a scene in Acts 16, during the missionary journeys of Paul, that illustrates this: 
AC 16:6 Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. (Wouldn’t you have expected it to say “Kept by the devil”?) 7 When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. (Again…?  So why…?  Because God was moving somewhere else.) 8 So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. 9 During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, "Come over to Macedonia and help us." 10 After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

            A dozen years ago, there was a popular book called Experiencing God by Henry Blackaby and Claude King, and the big idea behind that book (as I recall it) was:  Find where God is already moving, already at work, and join him there.  It’s good advice.  It may not cover every situation where we need to be faithful (not in the simplistic way I’ve stated it), but there is some important truth here.  Find where God is already moving, already at work, and join him there.  Have the patience to wait to move until you see where God is moving.

            Those of you who are new to MHCC don’t know how we learned this when we purchased the land for this new building.  In the late 90s, we had several failed attempts at launching a new building project, and this was frustrating to me because our church was growing and we needed the space, and we have a mandate from Christ to continue to reach out and to welcome new people in (rather than to say “There’s no room”).  I remember sitting with a good Christian friend, pouring out these frustrations, and him saying:  “But we have to wait on the Lord.  If we’re faithful, then this will happen when he says that the time is right”.  I remember challenging that and saying:  “But the need is here now, and we are supposed to be making disciples, and our old building is, quite frankly, getting in the way of that.  How much more clarity do we need?  Maybe this is the time for ACTION!”  But he persisted in saying what I’ve been saying this morning – sometimes we have to wait for God to move first.

            For many years, MHCC owned about 3 acres, much of it on steep hillsides, which isn’t much to grow on.  I came here in 1988, and by 1989 or 1990, we had started making inquiries into buying a few more acres adjacent to us.  We knew that a Knoxville developer owed 17 acres attached to our property, and we didn’t want much of it, just a few acres that he probably wouldn’t find useful.  But no matter how hard we tried to get this property, we could never get this developer to respond to us (or after his death, his heirs).  We sent registered letters just to make sure our requests were getting through, but nothing.

            Well, after many years of prayer and after a lot of work and research into the possibility of relocating and starting over from scratch, one of our members contacted the owners of this land again.  They almost immediately came back with a price that was right in line with the price of other land we had looked at.  Oh, and because we had been working toward this and praying and giving toward this, we had the money in the bank and we bought all 17 acres. 

            Now, if you’re an atheist, that’s a nice coincidence.  But I see it as an exercise on waiting patiently until God (in his perfect wisdom and timing) moves forward.

            Waiting on the Lord isn’t easy, not if it’s YOUR son who is in rebellion against him; not if it’s YOUR future on the line depending on what job you choose, or whether you decide to get serious about somebody; so, two things about waiting for the Lord:

            1.  Waiting doesn’t have to be passive because PRAYER is always active engagement and PRAYER is always allowed.  Not only that, but prayer has a way of bringing my mind into harmony with God’s will, and I am more able (and more likely) to discern his timing and his working when I pray.  I now believe that we got this property not just because God got ready, but because of the faithful prayers of our people.

            2.  While you wait, don’t forget to be faithful.  In the story about God and the Ark of the Covenant leading the way across the Jordan, there is this one little line:  JOS 3:5 Joshua told the people, "Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the LORD will do amazing things among you."  Consecrate yourselves.  It means:  Set yourselves apart from anything sinful or immoral, because God is coming here in person to lead us!  That was actually the people’s responsibility at all times, though they didn’t always do it.  Remember when Moses went up on Mt. Sinai to get the Law?  The people waited for the Lord then too, only they got tired of waiting, and made an idol for themselves, and got drunk and crazy around it – a very bad situation.  Remember that waiting on the Lord isn’t just letting time pass.  Waiting on the Lord is waiting faithfully, consecrating ourselves, continuing to serve and love him even when he seems slow or absent. 

            Waiting on the Lord is Paul in prison, wondering what happened to all his friends, but declaring that he’s going to bring glory to God whether he lives or dies.  Waiting on the Lord is Anna, and it’s Simeon, two very old prophets in Luke 2 about whom many would say their lives weren’t worth anything – but they waited and they lived faithfully, knowing the day would come when the Messiah himself would be brought to their temple as an infant ready to be dedicated.

            So just remember:  Patience sometimes means waiting for God to move ahead so we can follow.  And waiting isn’t passive if we continue to pray and to live faithfully in the meantime.

            I’d like to ask you to spend a moment in silent reflection, and then write one thing on your insert for which you’re waiting, for which you NEED to wait.  Then fold it up and take it with you and actively and joyfully wait for God to lead you into the next step.

Psalm 27:14 Wait for the LORD;
       be strong and take heart
       and wait for the LORD.     

Morrison Hill Christian Church
P.O. Box 59 - 1008 E. Race St.
Kingston, TN  37763   (865) 376-5205