Psalm 40:1-2 "I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.” This episode is about patience and how important it is. Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The Chinese Bamboo Tree
Psalm 40:1-2 "I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.”
I have been doing a study on patience lately. When I heard this verse I thought it was a great one to remind us that when we wait patiently for the Lord He hears our cries. I thought the imagery in this verse was so good. Have you ever felt like you have been in a desolate pit? Maybe you feel like you are in one right now. I know when a friend of mine got Covid, that is exactly how she felt. She felt like she was all alone in a pit and she was never going to get out of it. It can be so easy to feel this way. Having patience and trusting the Lord is easier when you know how long you have to be patient for. For instance, being patient at the red light until the light turns green is easier because you know it won’t be long until it turns green. Being patient while you are pregnant is not easy, however, you know the pregnancy part will be over in 9 months. If you have an end date, being patient is easier. You can at least count down and you know how long you need to endure whatever you are going through.
What about when you don’t know. What about when you are in a situation that feels like you are stuck in a miry bog and you have no idea when you will get out of it. I honestly have no idea what a miry bog is, but when I picture it I picture being stuck in the mud. Has that ever happened to you? You are walking in the woods, or somewhere, and you step in mud and your foot gets stuck. Then every step you take requires a great deal of effort, especially if you want to keep your shoes on and not lose them in the mud. If you have never been in this situation I am sure you can still picture it. This type of situation would be easier to handle if you could see the end of the mud. If this mud was just a small puddle and the end was in sight. You could figure out in your head how many more steps until you are out of the mud. Being able to see the end of the mud doesn’t make your steps easier, but it does make it easier for you to keep taking steps.
When I am doing a workout, I do much better, push much harder if the person lets me know how much long I have to do. If we have been doing an exercise for awhile and it is difficult, sometimes I will take a break. I struggle with pushing my self with exercise at times. However, if the person leading says something like, “ok, just 8 more, or 10 more seconds,” then I will keep pushing because I know I can do it for that much longer. However, if they do not let me know then I am more likely to take a break. Is this you too? Do you find it easier to make it though difficult times if there is an end in sight, if you know how long you will be suffering for? Have you ever been going through something that seemed to be lasting forever with no end in sight? How did you handle it? Were you able to keep trusting in the Lord?
The reason I think this verse is a great reminder to us is because it says the Lord hears our cries. Even when we don’t think He is listening, He is. The Lord will pick you up out of that desolate pit and that miry bog and He will put you upon rock. He will make your steps secure. How many of you could use that right about now? How many of you would love to just feel like you were on solid ground, like you footing was secure. So much in this world seems unsteady right now. There is so much around us that is changing, so good and some bad. When a lot of things change all at once it can make us feel unsteady. We are creatures of habit, we don’t tend to like change very much. So, if there is so much in the world that feels unsteady right now, how do we continue to wait patiently for the Lord?
Patience is something that we need to continually work on. It is not something that you will wake up with one day. It would be great if we could go to bed one day not being a patient person at all and then wake up one more with the patience of a Saint. However, that is not how patience works. We have to work at patience, we have to practice being patient, we have to nurture this virtue and it will grow, slowly. Have you ever heard about the Chinese Bamboo tree? The following is an excerpt from my study on Peace, written by Robert Strand.
The Chinese plant the seed; water and fertilize it, but the first year nothing happens. The second year they water and fertilizer, and still nothing happens. No sign of life bursting through the earth. The third and fourth year they water and fertilize it… And sometime during the course of the fifth year in a period of about six weeks, this bamboo tree grows to a height of approximately 90 feet! The question is: did it grow 90 feet in six weeks or did it grow 90 feet in five years? The obvious answer is that it took all of the five years because without the nurture and care of the preceding period of time, there would be no tree.
Patience is like this Bamboo tree. It can seem like we are working hard to develop patience and we are getting no where and then one day we realize that someone cut us off in traffic and we didn’t yell at them, or our child broke something and we didn’t fly off the handle. If you have been trying to grow in patience for a long time and you have seen no growth I ask you, have you invited God into your process? Have you asked God to help you? We can’t do anything on our own and yet we always try. This is why I want to give you this friendly reminder that if you have been trying to increase your patience on your own, you should stop now and invite the Lord in. I know we hesitate to ask the Lord for help because we think we can do it all on our own. Or, maybe we didn’t ask because we think He is too busy to bother Him with such a small request. Whatever the reason for not inviting the Lord in, I urge you to reconsider. You will be trying in vain to grow in patience on your own. Why do we always want to take the long way around instead of stopping, asking God for help and letting Him show us the short cut?
Being patient is beneficial is so many ways. However, the best way is because it helps improve your relationships. Whether that relationship is with you and your family, your friends, your coworkers, or the cashier at the local coffee shop. All your relationships will improve as your ability to be patient improves. I have been told I have the patience of a Saint. I think some of those patience I came by naturally as my mother is the oldest of 10 children and she and my dad had 11 children of their own. She has passed some of her patience down to me. However, a lot of the patience I have was forged through years of struggling. I was not always this patient but life kept throwing me into circumstances where if I wasn’t patient the situation would have gotten so much worse. I was constantly being put into situations with people that were very impatient. If I was also impatient, we would have gotten no where. We would have never left the house. I had to learn to be patient out of a necessity and I did. I asked God for help because I know I can do nothing without Him. I am not telling you this to brag about my patience, I am telling you this because if I did it, you can too. Is it easy? No, but nothing worth having is ever easy. You can grow in patience. Just ask the Lord to help you and then take small, intentional steps in the right direction.
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you to bless everyone listening to this episode today. Lord, help us to grow in patience. Help us to wait patiently for you and your timing. We are grateful you hear our cry when we are struggling and you lift us out of our pit and put us back on steady ground. We can’t thank you enough Lord. Please help us to not tire of trying to grow in patience. Please encourage us to keep going when we want to give up. We love you Lord and we ask all of this in accordance with your will and in Jesus’ holy name, Amen.
Thank you so much for joining me in this journey to walk boldly with Jesus. Tomorrow’s guest speaker is Deborah G. She is going to witness about how God walked with her through the most difficult time of her life. She was in the perfect marriage, her kids had just left the house and her and her husband had just built there dream home together. Deborah thought everything was going great when she was blindsided by the news that her husband was having an emotional affair with someone else. She now knows God in a way she never did before. She feels so close to Him and although life is still really hard, she can see how He is with her every step of the way. Deborah gives a powerful example of how she felt the real presence of the Holy Spirit. You will not want to miss this witness. I look forward to sharing it with you tomorrow. Have a blessed day!