NATIONAL COMMUNITY CHURCH



NATIONAL COMMUNITY CHURCH

February 22, 2015

Elements: The Power of Patience

Mark Batterson

Welcome to National Community Church! We are thrilled to have you. This weekend I want to say a special welcome to those of you who are part of our extended family who maybe are tuning into our podcast from 144 different countries! We welcome you!

We are in a series called ‘Elements’ and you can turn to James 5 and we will get there in just a moment.

A few years ago, Lora and I attended the Annual Benefit for International Justice Mission. We love IJM. The founder, Gary Haugen, shared a story that night about a 13 year old girl that they had rescued out of a brothel in the Philippians and he shared it in a unique way. He played a Sara Groves remix of the Peter Gabriel song, The Book of Love. The first line says this:

The book of love is long and boring.

That might seem like a negative, but the song just talks about a longer lasting kind of love and Gary leveraged that little phrase is such a unique way. He said that it took 50 long and boring trips to a courthouse that was 12 hours away from their IJM offices to make this happen. If my math is correct, that’s 600 hours of travel time. That’s the equivalent of five cross country back and forth trips from Miami to Seattle. Long and boring. Then he said that it took 6,100 hours of filing and refiling all of the paperwork. But that is how miracles happen! That is how 13 year old girls are rescued out of a brothel. It is long and boring.

Olympic athletes would probably tell you that they have some long and boring workouts. A PhD, some long and boring classes. Successful people in business will tell you that they have been part of some long and boring meetings. I have written a few books, long and boring! Anybody who has done anything will tell you that there is a process and often it is not long and exciting. It is long and boring but that’s how miracles happen and that is what we are going to talk about this weekend.

We’ve talked about love, joy and peace. This weekend it is patience. And I want to tell you something, patience is long and boring and there is no way around it. So I’m going to try to preach a sermon that is not long and boring!

James 5:7

Be patient then brothers and sisters until the Lords’ coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains. You too, be patient and stand firm because the Lord’s coming is near.

I think it is so easy for us to fall into what I would call the when/then trap. When I get a license, when I go to college, when I graduate from college, when I get a job, when I get a promotion, when I retire, when I get married, when we have kids, when, when, when. Then! Then life is going to be good. If you are not happy right here, right now, a trip to the Bahamas is not going to help. Well, it might a little bit! But not for long because that is just here/there, which is another version of when/then.

We always think when/then.

I had a little revelation my first year of pastoring and it was this. I was wrestling with discouragement because when you pour your heart into something and 25 people show up week in and week out and you can’t grow but you need to grow to survive. Isn’t it interesting that financial pressure is like a pinched nerve? That’s what we felt because we we’re self-supporting until the third year of our church’s existence. And I think that financial pressure coupled with the fact that we had this big dream but it wasn’t really reality so for several years, I had wrestling matches with discouragement all the time. It would often get me in a half Nelson and pin me to the ground. I’m going to tell you some of the things I learned.

One is that you need to zoom out. You have to zoom out. If you are discouraged or frustrated, it is probably because you are zooming in on a situation that is causing some negative emotions. Have you ever had one of those incidents where someone does something that ticks you off? Maybe they say or do something not to you but to your spouse or your kids. That is crossing the line! What happens is you get so mad, it leads to an altercation in your mind. In fact, in your mind, you hit them! And that is the moment you realize that you spent the last couple of minutes in an imaginary scenario that might just land you in jail if you actually acted on it. What happened is you zoomed in on something and blew it out of proportion and you lose all perspective. I know it is hard, that moment you break up with someone, it is hard to think about anything else. Someone cuts you off in traffic, in that moment you can get enraged no matter where you are going or what you are doing. What I have learned is that you have to zoom back out and see the big picture.

That’s what patience is. Patience is zooming out. It is zooming out and seeing the promises of God. It is zooming out and knowing that your eternal future is secure in Christ. You have to zoom out.

I had a moment that first year, I can show you the stop. It was in what used to be a school where we had services. Now it is a little gym. I could show you the spot, on a Sunday after church and I had just preached my heart out and I was frustrated and discouraged and I wondered if this thing was going to happen. The Lord spoke to me and I heard the still small voice of God and I will tell you what He said, “Enjoy the journey.” Enjoy pastoring 25 people where there are 25 people. Enjoy it. Be the best pastor you can be right here, right now. See, I thought that if we hit some magic number, it might flip a switch and then it would be a whole different game. But I felt like what the Lord was saying to me was to enjoy pastoring no matter how many people. Don’t fall into the when/then. You’ve got to enjoy the journey. And that’s where patience comes into play.

I know this, if God has given you a dream, it is probably going to take longer and it is going to be harder than what you imagine. So you have a choice to make. You can suffer through it or you can learn to enjoy the journey. This is one of the things you learn as a parent. You just have to enjoy every age and stage. Babies are so cute but you also have to change their diapers. Did you know diaper spelled backwards if repaid! But don’t be so anxious to get out of the diaper stage. And when they are finally potty-trained! Oh yeah! But then they hit some other stages, then you might think about the next stage after that. No! No! From baby to toddler to those elementary years then puberty and teenage years! You have to learn to enjoy every age and stage! Just enjoy the journey.

By the way, when God gives us a dream, He is less concerned about us accomplishing the dream and more concerned about who we become in the process. So it is not just about when and where, it is about learning the lessons, cultivating the character because everything that is happening in your life right now, God is doing something in your life to prepare you for what He wants to do 10, 20, 40 years from now. That is the way God works. But it takes patience to play that whole thing out. That is why it says over and over again, be patient. Be patient. Be patient.

Let’s move on.

See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains.

Dial in right now, I don’t know if this is going to be as fascinating to you as it was to me. I read something this week that says that if you live in a city with a population of more than a million people, like DC, that a pause will seem twice as long as it does to someone who lives in a small town. Now that is interesting. I think there is a level of truth to that. Sometimes the how/when/where we live in this first world deal, everything happens at the speed of light! I mean it is crazy what we are capable of. So we want whatever God is doing but we want it at the speed of light. That would be wonderful, we think, but in God’s kingdom it is really more about the speed of a seed planted in the ground that takes some time to take root and bear fruit.

This is one of my favorite stories. A Russian comedian, when he immigrated to the United States, he was asked by a reporter, ‘What do you love most about America?’ He said, ‘I love the grocery stores!’ He said, ‘I will never forget walking into a grocery store and walking down one of the aisles and I saw powdered milk, just add water and you get milk. Then I saw powdered orange juice, just add water and you get orange juice. Then I saw baby powder! I thought to myself what a country!’

We live in an instant gratification culture. We want it to happen yesterday. And what I’m doing is I’m pushing back just a little bit because that is what James is doing here. He is pushing back. You have to think like a farmer.

Let me zoom in on one word: yield. It is agricultural in origin but it is also financial. It is a financial word and it means return on investment. I won’t get into the nuances. Yield to maturity or yield curves, if you work in finances, that makes sense to you. That’s a little past my pay grade. In fact, this week, I spoke at a conference to 900 financial advisors and hers’ what’s so funny about that. In 22 years of marriage, I kept the checkbook one month and that was one month too long! The key to keeping your checkbook is checking it! So I just thought it was so funny, I mean I wasn’t talking about finances but I thought it was kind of humorous speaking to these financial advisors. But in the financial realm, you want high yield. You want a good return on investment. So let me make a little confession. It my 20s, I really wanted to get rich quick. Really it was good old-fashioned greed. So I made some greedy investments. For several years, I traded options. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is that I tripled our portfolio in one month and then lost it all the second month. Btu I thought I could get it back, so I road that roller-coaster for a couple of years until I finally made a decision not to trade options anymore because it wasn’t good for my heart. I also had this moment where I felt like for me, it was a form of gambling because I probably didn’t know enough to really be trading options. Let me tell you what else happened. There was a time when I got some inside information from a friend about a potential merger. So we bought as many shares as we could of that company and what I discovered is this, if you are an outsider who supposedly is getting inside information, that inside information might actually be bad information. We invested more of our life savings, which 18 years ago was not much! We lost it all. It wasn’t a merger but a bankruptcy that the company declared. Then one last one, we invested in a fund that had unbelievable monthly returns and that fund manager is now in prison. Once it went through the courts, we got a little bit of it back but not much. I learned some very valuable lessons. Let me put it like this, greed is financial impatience. Every once in a while we probably need a little check in the system to make sure that it is not greed getting the best of us, that we want that yield without playing the farmer. What does the farmer do? He plants and waters and it takes some time. You have to wait for the autumn rain and the spring rain. And then over time, you get something called compound interest.

Patience is compound interest. And that is what I’m after. It is not just a financial thing and we’ll talk more about that in a second. But in case you cared, if your grandparents had purchased one share of Coca-Cola stock in 1919, a $40 investment, and simply held it, by the year 2,000 it would have split into 4,608 shares and if you kept reinvesting the dividends, it would be worth 7 million dollars. If your great-great grandparents had purchased one share of the original Coca-Cola shares which were $100 dollars, those would be worth 7.34 billion. See that is the power of compound interest and that is the power of patience.

Patience is compound interest any way you look at it.

Lora and I have been happily married for 20 years. This year we will celebrate our 23 anniversary. It usually takes a second for people to do the math on that. We had a couple of tough years. But here’s what I have discovered. There is a compound interest to marriage. She is still my girlfriend but 22 years in, trust has compounded. There is a certain integrity to our relationship, in part because of the things we’ve been through, and there is a love that has not just stood the test of time, it has accrued interest. I don’t care if we are talking about marriage or your job. Some of you might be in a job that is not your dream job and that might take a little bit of patience and we don’t have much of that. We want what our parents worked 40 years for, we want it in 2 years.

But we need to understand that biblical patience is compound interest, financially, relationally and spiritually. When I pray, I don’t pray now the way I did 2 years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago. There is a compound interest. There is a faith that has compounded over the years. When I pick up the Bible and read it, I don’t read it the way I did 20 years ago. There is a compound interest because that Word has taken root in my heart and it is a whole different game.

Integrity compounds interest. Now, you can go bankrupt with one bad decision and then it is tough to get it back.

Trust compounds. And I would say that same thing about love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithful and self-control. There is a compound interest to those things and the key to all of them is patience.

The Bible talks a little bit about compound interest. Matthew 4:8, Jesus tells the parable of the sower and it says:

Other seed fell on good ground and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased and brought forth 30 fold, 60 fold and some 100 fold yield.

Don’t you want to yield like that? Can you imagine a 30 fold love? Or how about 60 fold joy? Can you imagine 60 times as much joy? Here’s the thing, I can’t promise that you will experience that tomorrow or next week or next year. But I can promise you this, if you keep doing the right thing day in and day out, the compound interest is going to take effect in your life.

We live in a culture that celebrates 15 minutes of fame. In God’s economy it is about a lifetime of faithfulness. I was on the phone with Jack Hayford, who, I don’t use this word very often but he would be on my short list of heroes. Jack, to me, is quintessential. A pastor, author, songwriter. We were on the phone and I think we are going to get him to speak at NCC in the fall, but he told me that he and Anna had just celebrated their 80th birthdays and their 60th anniversary! That’s what I’m talking about! I’m talking about long obedience in the same direction. Doing the right thing for a long, long time. I know that patience is long and boring, but I think it is something we need to celebrate and the net effect is a cumulative effect. When repeated actions have a greater effect than the sum of those individual actions.

So think like a farmer and you will get that yield.

Our Pastor of Prayer, Heidi Scanlon, had a moment 10 years ago that she shared with our staff and I think it is cool. The Lord spoke to her and said, ‘If you yield to Me, I will yield in you.’ I want to be high yield. I want God to get a good return on investment with the time, talent and treasure that He has given me.

So how do you get the high yield? You yield to God. That’s it. You surrender yourself to Him and the more you yield yourself to God, the more He is able to yield that bumper crop in your life. The more you will experience those blessings and the more you will experience the fruit of the Spirit and that is my prayer for you.

Let me take this opportunity to share something with you. Lora and I have had the privilege of leading this church now for 19 years and we love it and wouldn’t want to be any place else doing anything else. You know that we feel called to pastor one church for life. So you are stuck with us! We love it! And prayerfully, we have a lot of good years left to serve the Lord. But in this 20th year, we felt like maybe it might be good for us to practice this biblical concept called a sabbatical. So this year, we are going to take 3 months during the summer and we are going to Sabbath. There is a little part of me that thinks that’s crazy and it will be hard to do because we love what we get to do here. But I also think there are moments in life when you need to let the ground lie fallow. So no preaching, no writing. Part of it is that I’ve written a dozen books in the last 10 years and that has taken a toll. I think we are doing exactly what the Lord has called us to do but here’s what I’m getting at – we are in this thing for the long haul. I want to make sure that we finish well. Part of that is learning to pace yourself and we felt like it would be a moment where we could hit the pause button and just seek the Lord and go after God and see what He has for us. The Lord has done some great things over the last 20 years but we are just getting started! The best is yet to come! God is going to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine. I think these first 20 years have been about God just laying a foundation for what He wants to do next.

I want you to understand that it is not about us, it is about the next generation. What patience does is it allows you to think in longer time lines. This is not about what God wants to do right here, right now. We have to think about the third and fourth generation and that’s what I’m committed to. So I wanted to put that on the radar so that if at the end of May you wonder where I am, I want you to know where we are. We are letting the ground lie fallow for a few months so we can come back late August and hit the ground running.

Let me close with this. My undergraduate education began at the University of Chicago and I quickly discovered that you can’t go too far on campus without bumping into Amos Alonzo Stagg, who had died many years before I got there. But you bump into him everywhere. Buildings are named after him. His influence that is felt at that university. For four decades, he coached the U of C Maroons. It was Alonzo Stagg who led the Maroons to two national titles, 1905 and 1913. In case you care, his football legacy includes the Huddle, the Statue of Liberty play, the onside kick, the T-formation, the forward pass and I could throw out a dozen other ones. In other words, he practically invented the modern game of football. But here’s my point. When he accepted the invitation to coach at the University of Chicago, he gave the University President an acceptance speech of sorts. Listen to exactly what he said: “After much thought and prayer, I decided that my life can best be used for my Master’s service in the position that you have offered.”

Amos Alonzo Stagg coached until he was 98 years old. But that is not his legacy. I love this. After one of the most successful seasons, a reporter just off the cuff complimented Coach Stagg and told him it was a job well done, and this old football coach, who could have just received the compliment, but he decided to coach-up that young reporter and here is what he said, ‘I won’t know how good a job I did for 20 years because that’s when I’ll see how my boys turned out.’

See, we get so fixated on here and now, but it is not about right here and right now. What I care about is 20 years from now, have I run a good race? Are we living our lives in a way that we are setting up who is next?

Let’s enjoy the journey. Let’s zoom out and make sure we keep focus on the big picture. Why don’t we keep planting and watering so that we get that high yield, so that we experience the compound interest?

If you are discouraged, I get it! I’ve been there and I empathize with you. Zoom out! God has a plan and a purpose and if you keep doing the right things day in and day out, his purposes will prevail and He will do immeasurably more than all you can ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within you.

Let’s pray.

Father, help us to receive your Word and do it. God I pray that your Holy Spirit would come and help us in this moment. Those that are frustrated in a marriage, in a job, discouraged because a dream hasn’t come to pass, Lord, I pray that You would help us to embrace long and boring, that we would be a people committed to doing the right thing for the long haul, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Transcribed by:

Ministry Transcription

margaretsalyers@

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download