Patience: Part 5 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

This week we join John North to focus on the virtue of patience. It’s arguably one of the harder virtues to develop in our lives, but once mastered, benefits our relationship with The Lord and others greatly.

Finishing is better than starting.
    Patience is better than pride.

Ecclesiastes 7:8 (NLT)

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Transcript

Good day.

As we come into the last day of the working week, I trust you’ve had a great week and are headed into a great day. Whether or not that’s true, you can be sure that God will walk with you through your life if you will put Him first, if you will trust Him.

You know, that starts with establishing a living relationship with God.

Maybe you’ve grown up religious or maybe you’ve never been to church, but you think being religious just means doing the religious thing. Well, that may be being religious, but what I’m talking about is a living relationship with God.

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Being religious doesn’t really help you very much, but knowing God personally now that makes a massive difference in your life.

How do you have a relationship with God like that?

It starts with an acknowledgement that in my own life I cannot meet up to God’s expectations. I have broken so many of God’s moral laws and as a result I know that there are things wrong between me and God. Or do you know something? You cannot fix that problem. Trying to be good doesn’t erase what’s already happened in your life. And so there’s no way for us to get right with God on our own.

And that’s where Jesus comes in.

Jesus, God the Son, decided that he would take our place facing God’s right judgment on our moral failures.

And so Jesus Christ steps in the path of God’s judgment and takes it for us. That’s why He died on the cross. That’s why we can be forgiven. When you understand that and you turn to God in your heart and you pray and say, God, thank you so much for doing for me what I could never do for myself. I want to start this brand new living relationship with you.

That’s when religion changes into relationship, and you know, God says, whoever comes to me, I will never cast out. God will receive you if you turn to Him like that. Then when you’re in that relationship with Him, you’ve got to build the relationship through daily time with Him, and that’s what we do at this time each weekday spend some time with God, listening to what He has to say to us in the Bible, what we call God’s Word.

We’re talking all this week about this very practical topic of patience, something we all struggle with, don’t we? And we started off the week in Hebrews chapter 6, looking at Abraham when God gave him this incredible promise that he and his wife Sarah were going to have a son, and that would be the pathway of blessing for Abraham. They were already past the age of having kids. It seemed impossible, but they trusted God and waited another 25 years.

And it says in Hebrews chapter 6 verse 15, and thus having patiently waited Abraham obtained the promise.

You know, God is waiting to bless your life, but He wants you to trust Him. That’s why sometimes He makes us wait to test us and see if we really trust Him.

As someone has said, trusting God indeed is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control, isn’t that right?

We love to control our lives. We love to control our circumstances. We do everything we can to try and control our health and our financial situation and everything else. And sometimes God brings circumstances that are out of our control to remind us we need Him. We depend on Him, and to test us. Do I really trust God.

How is God testing you today?

Can you turn it back to him and say, God, I trust you. I’ll be patient and wait for you to bring the blessing.

I’m John North.

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