Hallelujah! Let us worship the God of the church triumphant, Olori ijo t’orun, let’s worship Him, let’s bless the God of the church triumphant, let’s honor Him, let’s glorify His name, with Him in the vessel there’s no problem, with Him in our vessel there’s no problem, let’s worship the God of all heavens, the wonderful God, the God of the church triumphant, let’s bless Him, let’s worship Him, let’s glorify Him, let’s magnify His name.
He’s worthy of worship, He’s worthy of honor, He’s worthy of adoration, let us magnify Him, let us bless His name in the mighty name of Jesus. Let us worship this God this morning, [Music].
Heavenly Father, the God of the church triumphant we worship You, we adore Your name this morning. Before You come, the church on earth will continue to sing Your praise oh Lord, we are the church on earth and we’ll continue to sing Your praise. As we go to Your word this morning, speak to us Lord, speak to us in a way that is clear and simple, the way we all will understand and let us benefit from what we are going to hear, and all the ears of Your children and all the lip that will speak Your word. Father, we promise that at the end of it all we’ll give glory back to Your name. Thank You eternal Father, blessed be Your name King of glory, in Jesus name we prayed. Praise the Lord!
I want to appreciate the Assistant Pastor in Charge of Region and our Pastor here in Province 20 for the opportunity to bring this message this morning; I want to appreciate the pastorate for giving me also this opportunity, may the Lord Almighty continue to prosper your ministry and bless every of our pastors in Jesus name.
Before we start the message, I would like us to take two prayer points quickly; the first one is from Genesis 25:29-34, the story we know very well, story about Esau and his brother Jacob, how he through impatience and discipline lost his birthright. Let’s rise this morning, let’s just say Father, do not let me do anything that will make me lose my God-given destiny through impatience. Pray this morning, I’m asking you to pray because you know the story of what Esau did; Lord, through impulsiveness, through impatience, let me not lose my God-given destiny. Help me Father Jehovah, let me not lose my God-given destiny through impatience, in Jesus name we prayed.
Second prayer point I take from 1st Samuel 13: 8- 14, a story also we know very well about Saul. Samuel was to come and give a sacrifice at Gilgal and he delayed his coming by seven days and Saul through impatience started to do the work of a prophet of what he was not supposed to do. We are going to pray this morning, we are going to say Father, let me not through impulsiveness begin to do Your duty, help me to just leave everything for Your – let’s pray this morning, you know what Saul did, he tried to play God, let me not play God, let me not through impulsiveness play God, let me not take the role that’s not meant for me. Help me Father, help me, King of glory, help me not to take the role not meant for me, let me stay in my lane, in Jesus name we prayed.
Let’s have our seat in God’s presence this morning; title of our short exhortation this morning is Patient Hope, and we’re taking our main texts from Romans 5: 1 – 5 and then Romans 8: 18-25. “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: 2By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
3And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; 4And patience, experience; and experience, hope. 5And hope make not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us”.
Romans 8:18- 25, “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. 19For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. 20For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope. 21Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
22For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. 23And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body. 24For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? 25But if we hope for what we see not, then do we with patience wait for it. Praise the Lord!
Topic again is Patient Hope; patience is a virtue God gives you, gives me when bad things remain unchanged. It is God’s medicine, God’s sedative for the troubled heart; it is the balm God drops into our aching muscles when it feels like we are being stretched to breaking limits. Patience is like the medicine God applies to our aching spiritual muscle; these are times when the pain lasts so long that only God can release the patience required, the sheer grace to get us through it, it is about learning to wait.
When you are up against a problem that seems too big for you or you feel like you are in over your head and you don’t know what to do or which way to go, we need to use the waiting strategy. That is what David the psalmist used in Psalm 40: 1- 4 (NKJ), it says, “I waited patiently for the Lord; and He inclined to me, and heard my cry. 2He also brought me up out of the horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my steps. 3He has put a new song in my mouth (I’m paraphrasing here now). Praise to our God. 4Blessed is that man who makes the Lord his trust. 6My ears You have opened.
Waiting is hard to do when you are anxious, and waiting patiently is even harder; there’s a difference between waiting and waiting patiently. Let me give you the scenario of maybe a first- time father waiting at the hospital, his wife is about to give birth that day; typical of young men waiting, he’s anxious, the wife is in the theater expecting to deliver, he’s pacing up and down the corridor of the hospital, that one is waiting but it’s not waiting patiently. There’s another father waiting also for the wife to deliver, sitting somewhere around that corridor waiting to hear from the doctor, that one is waiting patiently, so, there’s that difference, you can wait and you can wait patiently, so waiting is hard to do when you are anxious and waiting patiently is even harder.
Stop and think who you are waiting for, who are we waiting for most of the time? Is the Lord, He’s the Lord of every situation including that your situation, He’s the Lord over that situation you are waiting for, so what we need to do is to think of who are we waiting for to act. In the scenario I just gave now, the person waiting for the child wife to deliver, it is about waiting on God that the wife will deliver safely; so when you are waiting, think about the One you are waiting for. Praise God.
Waiting patiently can often lead to better outcomes; number one, it can help by disengaging and allowing ourselves time to think and meditate on God’s word. It gives us time to gather more information, seek guidance and view the situation from a different perspective, we have time to look at situation from a different perspective.
Number two, waiting patiently also reduces stress, which means we are able to think more clearly and make wiser choices rather than making hasty decision that might complicate decision further. Remember the case of Sarah and Abraham, they were stressed, they’ve been waiting for the fruit of the womb and they took hastens decision that we are all suffering from today. Praise God.
So waiting for God to work is a wise way, while you are waiting, God is working on our behalf, that’s what we need to remember. Praise God. The thing you think you can’t live without today, you may be glad to live without tomorrow, so many of us have missed certain things, you want to take a house, at the last minute they said, ‘no, somebody else has taken it’, and you later learned that that neighborhood was not good, so you’re happy, thank God I didn’t even take it, so the things we can’t live without today, we may be glad to live without tomorrow.
The Bible in Psalm 84:11 says no good thing will God withhold from those who walk uprightly; when God says wait, trust Him, what you want may either not be what you need at that time or He has something better in mind for you. So when God says wait, He either has something better in mind for you or that thing you want may not be what you really need, but we are bound to say but what am I going to do in the meantime when God says wait, what should I do?
The Bible has an answer for that and the answer is Psalm 27:14, it says, “Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart.” When God says ‘wait’, what shall I do? I’ll wait on the Lord and I will be of good cheer, so stop forcing, stop pushing, allow God to work and you’ll come out of this stronger and with better results. I don’t know who I’m talking to today that needs patience in that situation, God is saying stop pushing, you will come stronger with better results.
There are times in our lives that all we know about God doesn’t seem to help and get us the result we want; time of great confusion and loss of desire to move forward, time of despair when we have lost the will to live, we can fight in anger, we can fight even in envy, we can fight in wrath and malice but we cannot fight in despair. That is when men become suicidal, when you come to the situation of despair, you can’t fight again, you’ve lost the will to fight. May God not take you to that place of despair in Jesus name. I pray again for you, you will not get to the place of despair when you lose the urge to fight again in Jesus name.
And it’s this period that we learn about God’s silence; there’s a silence of God, whenever God does not say a word, He’s teaching us, even in stillness, He’s allowing us to grow by forcing us to think, study, and arrive at conclusions while He stands by as the loving Father that He is, waiting for us to think through the situation.
For those of us when we were in secondary school, in biology class we studied about metamorphosis, how butterfly is formed, I don’t know whether you remember, it goes through the cocoon stage to another stage, and it has to go through that stage, if it doesn’t go through that stage it will not become that beautiful butterfly we see; a lot of times we see it and we feel so sorry for that thing that’s struggling, you want to help it, you want to help it break the cocoon and get the butterfly to fly. Praise God.
But if you do that, the wing will not be strong, it will die within a few days because it has to go through that process to develop that wing and that’s what God does for us at times, He watches us like a loving parent He is. You’re struggling, you are fighting, you’re battling that health issue, you’re battling that issue within the family, He’s waiting, He’s watching you as a good Father that He is, allowing you to develop, to build your spiritual muscle. God will help us as we wait on Him in Jesus name.
So faith we know comes by hearing, it also comes by silence, God’s silence; we develop faith through the silence of God in our situation. Patience, as we’ve said earlier, is what God gives you when bad things remain unchanged, we learn to live with that situation.
There’s a lady called Joni Eareckson Tada, she’s a motivational speaker in America, 75 years old, she became a paralytic at 17 in a swimming accident, today, she’s a very strong motivational speaker. You can Google it or maybe for those of us who know about her, Joni Eareckson Tada, a big motivational speaker but she’s on wheelchair, she’s learned to live with her situation. If you don’t know Joni Eareckson Tada, I’m sure you know Stevie Wonder, blind but shining better than those who have sight, so at times you need to live with that situation, I’m not saying accept whatever the devil has thrown at you, I’m just saying that God is also speaking through your situation. Praise God.
That thorn in your flesh, that seeming impediment may be what God wants to use to lead you to your destiny, that’s what I’m saying in essence. It may be the leash, leash is like a like a rope you use for the dog when you are walking your dog, it may be the leash God is using to put you in control. You know if you don’t put a leash on your dog and you’re walking it, it will be roaming about, it might even bite people, that’s why we put a leash on our dogs when we are walking them in the neighborhood.
So, God might be using that leash on you to keep you in control because a lot of us like to run without boundaries, if God does not put a leash on our neck, a spiritual leash that men cannot see, we will just run out of our safety zone, so it may be the restraint God is using so that you don’t break out into your destruction, the fence that God put around us so that we don’t break the barrier. Some of us are without boundaries until we came to know Christ, we like roaming about, we don’t have boundaries, we just do things the way we like. Praise God.
Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 said God gave him an unnamed affliction to keep him in check so that he does not become too puffed up, and that’s a wonderful perspective that I have personally learned to appropriate for myself, it has kept me over the years from fighting with God, blaming God or doing any blaming game with anybody.
I always take it that if God refused to change the situation after a truly heartfelt devotion and prayer, then that must be His will, and I must say whether right or wrong, it has given me proper balance. I’m talking about personal experience now; jobs I did not get, promotions I did not receive, disappointments in various ways, I’ve come to look at them with God’s perspective maybe they’re not meant for me, maybe that’s not the way and has helped me give life a balance, it’s not everything that you want that God wants for you, that’s what I’m saying in effect.
A patient person is the one who has learned to wait on the Lord; fasting for example, is a good way of learning patience. When you can see food and you have appetite, I mean good food and you refuse to eat, that is discipline, great discipline. You are hungry, you are healthy to eat and the food is available and you refuse to take it, that is our part of learning patience. You can wait, you are not like a child that is boiling and crying for food, you know that it takes long to cook beans, you know babies, especially those of them that are still under two years, you are preparing the food and he’s crying, making noise and that’s a lot of babies. May God save us from the spirit of babies in Jesus name. Babies are wonderful people, but let us stop behaving like babies. Praise God.
The Bible in Proverbs 16:3 says, “Commit your works to the Lord, and your thoughts will be established.” To commit your works to the Lord is to roll unto Him all your plans and schemes, it means to come to the place where you are willing to trust yourself and your future to God’s keeping and His watchful care. Before you and I became believers in Christ, we learnt self preservation from the world system, we all know how to preserve ourselves under the world system; before conversion, we thought we had to depend upon the survival instinct based on human cleverness, natural ingenuity and natural wisdom.
To get from self-will to God’s will takes a bit of doing. The Bible in Proverbs 16:3 that I mentioned earlier is to help us make necessary adjustments to our attitude and actions; we can only rule our plans and activities unto the Lord when we are convinced that He’s more interested in our happiness and wellbeing than we are. God indeed is more interested in our wellbeing than even a lot of us are, but we need to be convinced that God is really interested in our wellbeing.
In the Amplified Bible, Proverbs 16:3 says, “He will cause your thoughts to become agreeable to His will, and so shall your plans be established and succeed”; our thoughts are the equivalent of our plans, aims, objectives, hopes, and desires. My admonition to you this morning is to turn your future over to the Lord completely and then you can know that your plans will succeed, it’s actually a paradox, hold on too tightly, you lose; release to the Lord and you win.
There are many causes of impatience and I’ll mention quickly four of them because of our limited time. Impatience can be a result of pride; pride can cause impatience. Why should he ask a whole me to wait? Maybe you went to see somebody, a top executive in a company who happened to be maybe your junior in school is now a top executive; you went to his office to see him and the way they normally do things, they ask you to wait to see him or maybe you want to go and see a senior pastor, they have to wait in the waiting room to see him and here you are 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, the man has not seen you, 1 hour, they’ve not called you in and you start getting impatient.
He was my junior in school, he’s my younger brother, what does he even think? Pride makes us impatient, meanwhile, maybe you didn’t even book an appointment to see him, you just jumped on him because he was your junior in school and you heard that he’s now the Provincial Pastor in Province 20 and just go up there and say I want to see Pastor Netufo, he was my junior in school and they asked you to wait because he’s attending to other people and you start getting impatient, how can he ask me to wait for 30 minutes, he was my boy in school. Your boy in school has grown up to become a big man now and you have to take your turn and wait. Praise God. So, pride can cause it.
It can be as a result of ignorance or lack of information; they told you he’s holding a meeting, you don’t believe it because maybe you saw the door open a bit and you saw he was the only one there, how can he be holding a meeting with himself? Maybe it’s a Zoom meeting, maybe he’s even preparing for a meeting later in the day and the secretary said he’s holding a meeting. I mean, yeah, he’s preparing for a meeting, very important meeting, more important than what you’ve come to do. So, ignorance or lack of information can cause it.
It could be bad habits. Some people out of bad habit cannot listen, they cannot listen well before they start talking, you just love talking, they suffer from what is called ‘verbal diarrhea or logorrhea’, it’s an English word. Logorrhea is an English word, you just love speaking, just speak and talk and talk as if you have verbal diarrhea. We do not listen to understand, we listen to reply, you’re just listening so that you can reply quickly, you’re not listening to understand, that can cause impatience – bad habits.
You don’t know how to listen, you know there’s a skill for listening, not everybody know how to listen, some of us are so impatient, you just want to reply; you want to give it back to the man, he’s talking, you are talking too, you’re not listening to know what the man is talking about. Praise God.
And lastly, because of limited education; some of us might not understand what they are even saying to us and so we get impatient. What are they even saying? What are they even doing in that place? They’re not doing anything. Limited education might affect us. Praise God. Is the Holy Spirit that can give us patience, is one of the fruits of the Spirit, we obtain it when the Holy Spirit comes into us, when the Holy Spitrit comes in, the human spirit that makes us impatient and irritable, we leave or is suppressed.
So, we need to call the Holy Spirit, we need to be filled with the Spirit of God so that we can at least become a bit more patient, but we must desire it and seek the virtue.
We talk about patient hope, what is hope? Hope is confident trust with the expectation of fulfillment. The Bible in Psalm 9:18 says the needy will not be forgotten forever. The hopes of the poor will not always be crushed. Bible also in Psalm 71:5 says, “Oh Lord, you alone are my hope. I have trusted you, oh Lord, from my youth.”
Apostle Paul in Philippians 1:20 says, “For I live in eager expectation and hope that I will never do anything that causes me shame, but that I will always be bold for Christ as I’ve been in the past and that my life will always honor Christ whether I live or I die.” Hopelessness is dangerous, it leads to lack of desire, so we need to continue to hold on to hope. Praise the Lord.
The parable of the farmers scattering seed, we know the parable very well, it has been subject of many sermons. In addition to the main lesson about what that thing teaches, it also teaches us about progression in our Christian life, how we make progress. There’s a 30fold, the 60fold, and the 100fold; the 30fold is like when we are babes in Christ, I call it phase one, it includes the blessings that accompany the new birth, we just come to Christ. 60fold in the parable is blessing of growth, expansion and enlargement into spiritual adulthood. The 100fold, phase three will mean the blessings that come with patience, faithfulness, consistency and endurance in our later years.
So when we talk about 100fold return which we all like to talk about when we are taking offering, it is not every time that you just get 100fold return, it may happen but the usual way of God is a gradual way – 30fold, then you move to 60fold, then you move to 100fold and with due respect to all the accountants, it is not a windfall profit we’re talking about, we should be talking about long-term capital gain as Christians – gradual movement, you don’t go from nursery school to the graduate school, there’s still secondary school, there’s still university before you get to graduate school.
You don’t just jump the gun like that, it’s not done; you don’t move from worker in training to become Provincial pastor, it’s not done that way, there’s a gradual process, let us stop being impatient. Praise the Lord. The good thing about progression is that it is ongoing, we move from one level of personal production potential to the other, God is preparing us for the next phase of our life in ministry and there’s a place they call transition period; there’s a time in our life where we have to wait for the order, our prayer to be answered.
We make an order to heaven, we pray to heaven, we are waiting for the order from heaven to be processed. Even in the fast food places we go to, it takes two to three minutes for our food to come out, they call it fast food, these days it even takes more than 5 minutes for the order to be processed. So there’s a period in our life when we are in the transition zone; a door has been locked but a new one has not been opened yet, we need patient hope to be able to wait in the transition zone.
We need the divine assurance that He who closes the old door will open a new one at the appropriate time; we need to have that trust in God, the One that closed that door will open a new one while we are waiting. In the meantime, we need to use the period of waiting effectively and productively. Continue to do the work of God, develop yourself spiritually and physically, we make it like a timeout.
In the basketball game, there’s something they call a timeout, you just call a time so that you can refresh, you can restrategize before you start the game again unlike football when is just half time, basketball you can call timeout, you can use 2 minutes to rest, the coach gives you more strategy and then you go back and play. So let us look at our transition time as a timeout, the time you are between that job, God wants to speak to you, He wants you to listen. Some of us are so busy with our schedules that God needs to take that job away from us for us to listen to Him.
Some of us are between jobs, it’s time to listen and hear from God, it’s time to serve better or begin to serve more effectively, some of us are learning not to be proud and haughty. Time will not permit me to talk about how God has dealt with me personally about pride, so patience is a virtue that needs to be cultivated and watered regularly, that’s why it’s called forbearance and longsuffering, is a virtue that needs to be cultivated and watered regularly.
As I begin to round up, the greatest lesson we can learn from life is that God is never in a hurry, He’s the most patient in the universe. We will save ourselves a good deal of personal pain and irritation when we learn to have patience with the patience of God.
What needless suffering and anxiety we carry within us because we fail to understand that although God dwells in eternity, He’s working out His purpose here on earth in accordance with time. You know eternity is timeless but God is working out His purpose on earth in accordance with time. He could bring about major changes in our lives in a single way just like that, and He often does from time to time, but His usual way is to take us painstakingly through dark and difficult situations, taking His time.
Impatience causes anger. Anger resides in the bosom of fools; the impatients are fools. May you not be a fool in Jesus name. May you not be unwise in Jesus name. Fools are unwise people, fool is not the way we just throw it about, they are unwise people.
God is never in a hurry, the promise that one day God will send someone to make right the wrongs of Adam and Eve was given to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:15. Several prophets spoke about the coming of the Messiah century after century, Isaiah, Jeremiah, they all spoke about coming in Messiah, nothing happened. The nation of Israel cried out, ‘give us Christ’ and there was still no Christ, but when it looked like God has forgotten the promise, the heavens responded. A word was spoken and the word became flesh and dwelt among us.
Was God late? Some will say yes, in bringing Christ, but the Bible says when the time had fully come, Galatians 4:4, God sent His Son, He came not too early, He came not too late, He came right on time. Bible says when [inaudible], trust in God, He is never too late; He brought Christ at the appropriate time, He will bring that solution that you need at the appropriate time in Jesus name.
Learn not to be too impulsive. Let’s bow our heads to pray this morning, let’s ask the Holy Spirit to give us forbearance, let’s ask Him to give us patience to push out every impulsiveness. I believe somebody needs to hear this word this morning, I don’t know what your situation is, it could be in your marriage, it could be at the job, it could be in the neighborhood, ask God to give you forbearance to push out every spirit of impulsiveness.
And while we are praying, I want to call also on those who are likely not be the long-suffering type. You need to know the Lord before you can have hope in His ability to provide, you need to have hope, know God before you can believe in His ability to meet your need. Do you know this God? Proverbs 16:3 that we mentioned earlier says, “Commit your works to the Lord”; only the saved, only those who have salvation can commit their works to God, God has brought you here this morning to save your soul.
Before you can commit your works to God, you need to be saved from sin, while others are praying that God will help them out of impulsiveness, out of taking precipitate action…
[Altar call]
Only the saved can commit their works to God, you need to commit your work to God today, you came here for that purpose, God brought you here for that purpose. Commit your way to Him, commit your works to His hand; if you don’t know Him, if you don’t have salvation, you cannot commit your way to God.
Impatience is an evil spirit; king Saul lost the throne as a result of impatience and disobedience. Ask for the spirit of patience today. The others, let’s ask for spirit of patience, let’s ask that God should make us more patience, deliver us from impulsiveness, from precipitate action.
Ask for grace this morning, ask for God to give you forbearance, give you patience, give you a long-suffering spirit to trust Him, to have hope in Him, to have confidence in Him. Psalm 31:15 says, “My times are in your hand.” Pray that God would take your time, my time; release that time to Him, release your worry, release that thing that is causing you impatience, release that thing that is causing you stress to God this morning. In Jesus name we prayed.
Heavenly Father we thank You, we give glory to Your name. We thank You for Your word that You’ve spoken to us today, we pray Lord that whatever it is that we heard today, they will not stand against us on the day of judgment. Help us to walk in forbearance, oh Lord; grace to be patient with those around us, to be patient with ourselves, and to be patient with the patience of God, grant to us, Lord, in Jesus name we prayed. Praise the Lord!
