Rockfest Day 4 - If You're Not Five Minutes Early, You're Late

I have a dear friend who, Lord love her, I think will be late to her own funeral. She is late for most everything. Parties, meetings, airline flights, movies, hair appointments, dinners. If it has a start time requirement she will, try as she might to make it on time, be late. And I’m not talking about a mere five or ten minutes late. I talking the twenty to thirty minute variety. That kind of waiting is frustrating. Being her friend requires patience. (Being my friend requires patience too but for wholly different frustrating reasons.)

Promptness. In theory it is easy. In reality it is much harder to achieve. For all the frustrating minutes that I have waited for my friend I realize there are things that get in the way of being on time. Life happens. Things slow us down, put us behind schedule. Promptness is hard to achieve because it’s so hard to define.

We live in a world that seems to have sped up overnight. Everything happens in seconds or milliseconds and if we don’t respond in like time we are slowing things down and gumming up the works. Mail used to take weeks or months to get to a person when sent via pony express. Now we call regular mail “snail mail” because 24 to 48 hours for a letter is a lifetime. And we are even watching the demise of email. It is too slow and plodding, replaced by instant messages and the ever horrifying “status updates” which are instant communications to no one in particular but to all my “friends” at the same time.

Patience has gone the way of the pony express it seems. We demand the same type of behavior and instant gratification from each other as we do from our smart phone. I want what I want and I want it – now.

And we demand the same type of instant behavior from God. We demand that God keep pace with our time table. We demand that God fix our problems when we want them fixed. God promised to help, so where’s the help? And when God does not bend to our will? Then God either doesn’t really exist or He no longer cares about us.

Back in the day, Moses day, people understood things didn’t always happen overnight. Circumstances of life impressed that upon them. To get anywhere Moses and his people wanted to go they had to walk. No cars or trains or planes to get them there in a hurry. It may take them months to get all those thousands of people from one place to the other.

So when Moses and his people asked God for something if it took a while they had the built in patience to handle the waiting. I’m not saying Moses liked waiting any more than you or I do. He probably didn’t but his patience muscle was better exercised for the inevitable waiting.

God will make us wait. We will wait for our breakthrough, for our healing, for whatever it is we are praying and believing God for. And He will deliver our answer. God has perfect timing. He will never be early, but God will never be late.

Think of all the times God has come through for you. Right on time, right on schedule – His schedule. Perhaps you think He could have done things differently or earlier to save you the wear and tear of stress? Perhaps the wear and tear of the stress was meant to bring you closer to Him and to bring Him honor and glory.

Jesus was once asked to come save His dear friend Lazarus who was dying. He told Mary and Martha that He would heal Lazarus but that He’d be there in a few days. A few days? Lazarus will be dead by then. Sure enough, two days later when Jesus finally arrived Lazarus was good and dead. With Lazarus’ family mourning Jesus went into the tomb where Lazarus was laid, prayed over him and Lazarus was brought back from death. (John 11: 1-44).

Lazarus did indeed get healed but Jesus timing was so that God could be glorified. (John 11:4). Jesus could have healed Lazarus days before, while he was still alive but it would not have had the same effect on others. It would not have brought such glory to the Lord. Jesus promptly healed Lazarus right on time.

Promptness – there is no one more prompt than God – we just have to adjust our definition and exercise that patience muscle.

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