Waiting on God can be the most stressful experience that anyone can go through ~ especially when it’s God you’re waiting for. Evil forces know the gift you are waiting upon God for, and that what God is going to bless you with is a righteous blessing that is going to weaken their evil intentions.
The Scriptures are very clear about this scenario. In the book of James, he writes, “But let patience have her perfect work, that you may be perfect and entire, lacking in nothing.” Patience is female, like a mother. A mother‘s purpose is to help a child to grow up to its full potential in life. In the same way patience is right beside you, just like your mother, helping you to receive your highest promotion. This metaphor works for a person, a family, a company, a church, and even a nation.
First, I want to talk about this metaphor and its largest application in the Bible. When God wanted to change a nation, many times He began His work in a simple house, rather than with the leaders of the nation. In the Bible, in the book of Acts, we see the beginning of God’s transformation of the Roman Empire.
Remember, Jesus said that if you clean the inside of the cup, the outside becomes clean of itself. He starts within then works outward. In the first hundred years of Rome, we never see a Christian emperor of the empire. Instead, the inner workings of the Roman empire were changing. The head of Rome was not purified yet because the inner workings within the nation were not completed enough for it to have godly leadership.
This is patience doing her perfect work, as she was preparing a whole system of government to receive godly leadership. So it is with the governments of today. God intends to bring godliness to every nation on earth. But for this to work, it must begin with the inner workings, or the families, of every person in the nation.
The Bible is the only book on earth which people are working to translate into every spoken tongue. The New Testament has been translated into over 1500 languages. (If you want to verify this and you have a smart phone with a Bible app, take a second and look at how many languages are offered.)
God has been bringing His gospel to the whole world. Every day, people come to the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and through the miracle of technology can upload the entire Bible onto their phone. There are now nearly 2,500,000,000 people that have access to the word of God on their phones alone! But it’s not only happening on the smart phone, it is also happening in the church world.
When I was a young man there were less congregations than there are now in America. Do you think that number has shrunk since then? No, it has grown exponentially and now there are close to 384,000 congregations in America alone. Why so many? Because God keeps calling more people into His invisible kingdom. Though a denomination is physical, it makes you aware that the invisible is increasing.
It is hard to see immediate results when you are part of a nation that God is changing. It also can also be difficult for us to see that God is changing our family, because we are part of the family. This is why these things are only truly seen through eyes of faith. Sometimes a family member can make a large mistake and it looks to us like they have fallen away from God. But in actuality, their condition has become so bad that they can now realize that they are at the bottom of the barrel and that the only way out is up. A person in this condition does not compromise but surrenders their all to Jesus. This is patience having its perfect work.
Sent in Love, Pastor Richard Gazowsky
A Place To Meet Jesus 