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Hey everyone, and welcome to the brand new Burnett Church podcast. My name is Tim, and I'm your host and the pastor of Burnett Church. Today's podcast uh is the audio from part one of our series called Reactions Speak Louder, in which we start to unpack how our reactions affect the world around us and also say something about our relationship to ourselves and to Jesus as well. Hope you enjoy the episode. You know, I've been doing this for a while now, and so most of the time I don't really feel nervous on stage anymore. I don't know if you're the kind of person, you know, the number one fear in the world is stage fright. I don't really suffer from that much anymore because I've been playing music or speaking in front of people for a long time. But today is different. It's Mother's Day, and I need to give a message to a room full of mothers of which I am not one. And I never have been, and I never will be. And so the last thing I want to do today is say something that makes being a mother harder. Because I know that mothering is difficult. And I know that some of you in here today are loving the journey of being a mom. And some of you today are carrying deep burdens. And we want you to know that we recognize that. I want you to know that I recognize that. By the way, my name's Tim, if you don't normally come here. I guess I haven't introduced myself yet today. I'm the lead pastor here. Uh my wife Melissa is on staff with me and a few others. She's down in the other room doing things for our kids right now. Um, so hopefully they're having a great time. If you haven't had a chance, we haven't had a chance to connect before, I would love to meet you after the service. I don't want to step on any toes. I don't want to get it wrong. I value what my mother gave me, I value what all you give your kids. So hopefully today I can avoid doing that. Fortunately, I kind of I think I've come up with uh with something I can tell you about myself, is we're gonna explore the topic of patience this morning. And I've got a story that hopefully illustrates that among those who are impatient, I might be the chief of sinners. Okay? Here's here's here's the story. I call it the chicken in the iPhone. Some of you have heard this before, but if you haven't, buckle up. One particular Sunday when we were living in Ontario, some full Sunday, some Sunday where I left church and my job low on energy, my wife asked me if I would go to the store to buy something for lunch. And I was very unhappy about this. This is not something I wanted to do in that moment. So my bad attitude started right there. I did, because I choose life more often than death, left the house in our car and went to the grocery store. At the grocery store, I bought what is one of our staple, simple, quick meals: a roasted chicken and Caesar salad. Right? We just that's an easy thing for us to win with in our house. So that's what I bought. You know what kind of chicken I'm talking about? It comes in the plastic thing and it's held together with the little paper handle, and you you take it out, and you know, I had a bag of salad. And this was in the early days of when they were asking us to pay for our bags, which by the way is just big corporate trickery, right? Anyway, uh they were asking us to pay for bags, and and my last name is Hereabout, and it has a lot of vowels in it, which tells you that I'm Dutch. And the other thing that that should tell you is that I'm cheap. So I don't want to pay for the bag. I have a bad attitude about paying for the bag. So here we go. Bad attitude, top, bad attitude. I do not pay for the bag. I walk out of the store with the bag of chicken, my iPhone, the bag of chicken, the roast chicken in the paper handle, the bag of salad, and my iPhone. I get into the car, put them all on the seat, and I drive home. A couple of people do a couple of annoying things in the car, bad attitude, bad attitude. My impatience is growing all the way through this trip. I get home and I grab the things off the seat and I go to get out of the car, and the flimsy paper handle on the roasted chicken disintegrates. And I'm wearing a fairly new pair of pants that I really enjoy. Or I should say I enjoyed, until they were covered in chicken grease. The chicken came out of the package, went all over my floor, all over my pants, and now I'm really impatient. So I get out of the car, paper flimsy handle in hand, big maple tree in the front yard right here, and it calls out to me. Take out your frustration on me. I can handle it. So I take the paper handle and I'm gonna throw it at the tree, just to take the pressure off the valve, right? Not realizing I also had my iPhone in that hand. So, right about here in my throwing, and I'm like, and I wanted you to know, like, I'm trying to hit this thing like a major league fastball pitcher. Like it's not a light frustration. I'm I'm trying to whip this thing at the tree. Right about here, my iPhone, because now my hands have chicken grease on it, goes in that direction, through the maple tree, out the other side, and lands on the street. Have you ever watched one of those slow motion videos about something breaking? I saw my iPhone screen disintegrate from a distance of about 80 yards, because it went for a ride. And then I really lost my patience in the front yard, said some words that your pastor's not supposed to say, absolutely lost my mind, turned around and realized my twin children, who are about five, are standing in the door watching me with their jaws. And when I motioned towards the door, they ran away. They were petrified, they went and hid in their bedrooms. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. And hopefully you realize everything that I'm about to say about patience is a sermon to me first, not just to anybody here. Over the last number of weeks, we've been talking about asking a question, what does our world need now? And we've been exploring a certain passage of the Bible, some writings of Paul to kind of flesh that out, but but we're we're we've suggested that, hey, what the world doesn't need from us is more religion. It doesn't need more conflict, it doesn't need more selfishness. What it really needs is more people who look like Jesus. Wouldn't it be amazing if everybody who went to church looked like Jesus? If you don't know this, that's kind of the goal, right? Is for all of us to be formed into the image of Jesus. That's why we come here every week to try to become, in a very real way, just better human beings. Because we believe Jesus charted a course for us to do that. We are supposed to be the ones who model a way of love in the world, the character of Jesus through our lives. And if everybody who said they were Christian lived like that, I think it would flip our world upside down. And so it starts with me and you. And it starts with us asking a really simple question. What does living like Jesus even look like in the real world? Well, the passage we've been exploring kind of fleshes that out. You know, the the the scriptures teach us what people believe about God and it's written down for us there is that God is love. And and we are supposed to be led by that spirit of love. This is what Paul says in Galatians chapter 5, verse 25. He wrote a letter to some friends of his. And he said, This, since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step by the Spirit. What he was saying is, since we believe that God put the breath of life in us, and his spirit lives in us, then let's keep in step with that way of life, right? Pay attention to when your better impulses nudge you, when your better convictions convict you, when your better promptings try to lead you to a better place, and then submit to those things and trust them. How will we know if we're keeping in step? Well, it looks like this the fruit of the Spirit, the keeping in step with the Spirit of God is love. But love is just one word. What does that mean? And so Paul goes on to basically give us a list of the things that love looks like when it's fleshed out in a human life: joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Love comes first because it's the umbrella virtue. It defines all those other things. Everything else flows out of love. And today we're gonna take some time, as I said, to look at patience. And we're gonna let Paul, this early follower of Jesus, be our guide. And I think together we're gonna discover that Paul actually has some real life experience that might help us. Here's what he said in another one of his letters. If you don't know this, like more than half of the New Testament was written by one guy, his name is Paul, and it comes to us in the form of letters that he wrote to his friends. He would go places, share the story of Jesus with them, people would start following Jesus. Paul would keep going because he was very entrepreneurial and self-motivated. He would go to someplace else, but he would be thinking about those friends that he made in another place. And so all of these letters that we have, like Ephesians and Philippians and Galatians and Thessalonians, is where we're going to be today, are all letters that Paul wrote back to his friends. And this is what he says to them. We, because he's with other people that he's doing work with, we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone. To really understand what Paul means, I think we need to do a little word study because you know sometimes when things get moved from ancient Greek to English, the translation can be complicated. And so sometimes we say it one way and we mean something else, and sometimes we have another way. In this particular instance, what you need to know is there's at least two different ways that the word patience is used in Paul's letters. The first one is like this: don't give up. Right? Be patient, don't give up. It carries the idea of waiting. So this is the kind of patience you exercise when you're in the line at the grocery store and somebody is taking an exceptionally long time. Right? Don't give up being patient. Just wait. Things will be fine. That's what the first kind of patience means. But in this particular case, what Paul means is more like don't blow up. Right? So the first kind of patience is the patience that you use when you're standing in line. The second kind of patience is the patience that you need to use when you get to the front so that you don't flip out and lose your mind on the poor girl who's just trying to do her job. Right? I don't know if you've ever been there or ever seen it happen in front of you. It's not a pretty sight. It's really the call to have a long fuse on your anger. When the Bible talks about patience here, when Paul uses that word, it isn't just talking about waiting. It's talking about people. Right? So the thing that you need to be patient with is not the line, not the delay, not the inconvenience, but the person on the other side of all that. The person on the other side of what's making you frustrated. Patience is about not what we're waiting on, but how you treat people while you are waiting. And honestly, some people test our patience, right? Paul was a very like forceful guy, and so he lists some of the people that make him impatient, you know, the idle and the disruptive, you know, the disheartened the weak. It actually doesn't make Paul sound very nice, to be totally honest. So let's just think about like, you know, for us, what what makes what makes us, what would you put in there? Be patient with these kinds of people. I don't know why Paul chose those ones. I maybe Paul is just being authentic and real with us here. You know, the list doesn't ultimately matter because he finishes it with this statement. Be patient with everyone. Oh, dang. Everyone? Not just everyone except, not everyone until, not everyone as long as. Everyone. And he keeps going in verse 15. Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always strive to do what is good for each other and for everyone else. So our response to those who do make us impatient, according to Paul, is to treat them better than we're naturally inclined to treat them. People who follow Jesus are supposed to help, encourage, give advice, will the good of, turn the other cheek, slow down and go at their pace. Which reminds me of something we talked about a number of months ago as we explored the topic of parenting. Right? I find this especially hard in my parenting. Maybe you can relate. Because when my kids do something that annoys me or frustrates me, I want to show them who's boss. I want to pay them back. I want them to know who's got the power in the room. Right? And so oftentimes I will parent them in a way that satisfies my impatience, but doesn't help them to grow. The advice that we explored together a number of months ago was this: make sure that you're parenting your children in the direction of restored relationships. It changes everything, right? The story that we explored was a father who came home and his wife told him that their early 20-something son had been especially rude to mom, and this was like a no-go in their house. One of the only rules that they had in their house is respect your mother. It's something that they had taught their family. And so the dad, like a genius, didn't go to the sun that night. He sat on it. He let his imagination run wild of all the ways that he could actually punish his son. And you know what he came up with? Instead of just like, you know, taking away his car keys or, you know, something that would be somewhat immediate and difficult, he went to his son the next day and he said, son, you've offended your mother and you need to make it right. So here's what you're gonna do: you're gonna take your mother on a date. You are gonna dress nicely, you are gonna drive there with your own gasoline, you are gonna pay for the meal, which by the way, cannot be at McDonald's, it must be at a nice sit-down restaurant. And you will spend time with your mother. So, so see what he had done. Like, I mean, this meal in today's economy was gonna, that's at least a $250 night. And if you remember what it was like to be in your early 20s, $250 might be a million dollars. You know, like it just feels like so much. The son was absolutely, he's like, no way, take my car away from me. He's like, no, no, no, that's too easy. Because here's what dad knew about that moment. He knew that if they went and they spent time together, that their relationship would heal. And that's exactly what happened. They ended up actually communicating, actually spending time together, actually talking about the incident. Mom had a chance to tell how her perspective was, and he had a chance to say, I'm sorry. If our goal is to form better human beings, human beings that look like Jesus, parents, if you're here and you're a Jesus follower, this is what you want for your kids, right? It's what you want for you, it's what you want for your kids, right? Human beings that that at some point figure out a way to not test the limits of your patience. We need to slow down. Put our emotional impatience aside and parent toward God's ultimate goal, which is the restoration of all things. Your relationship with other people, your relationship with yourself, your relationship with God. Right? And I think it's really important for us to recognize that patience is a choice. Have you ever noticed that? We because we all have some patience, that's why we talk about losing our patience. We can exercise it. But don't we tend to have selective and situational patience? Which means it's probably more about our preferences than our capacity. Like, aren't there just people you find it easier to be patient with? Aren't there people you've chosen to be more patient with? Parents? I know that you don't have a favorite kid. But I do. Not gonna tell you who it is. Don't you find it easier to be patient? Don't you have one that gets away with more than the others? Why is that? It's just a choice. Right? It's just a choice. There are stressful moments in which we have taught ourselves because of our affinity for other people, other places, other situations. We have taught ourselves to be patient during those moments. Things that would annoy us done by somebody else don't annoy us because why? Because we chose to let ourselves off the hook. The question isn't can we be patient? It's who have I decided deserves my patience? So if it's a choice, it must mean that we can make progress in it, right? It must mean that we can move forward in it. This is where Paul becomes a fascinating case study for us. We can ask ourselves, how did Paul have the gall to tell other people to be patient with everyone? Because if you don't know the story of Paul, just let me catch you up quite a bit. Paul's name actually changed at one point in his life. He started out as a man named Saul of Tarsus. And Saul of Tarsus was a mean and nasty guy. He spent the early part of his life, his adult life, chasing down followers of Jesus in his area of the world to beat them, imprison them, or kill them. Paul was not very patient with people who didn't see the world the way that he did until until he had a life-altering experience with Jesus. He meets Jesus on the way to go arrest some Christians. Saul of Tarsus has an experience with Jesus while he's on his journey, on the road to Damascus, that's where he was headed, and it changes his life. And all of a sudden, Saul becomes Paul. And Paul is a man who gave his life to helping other people grow in their connection to their Heavenly Father. Because of Paul's experience, he's able to write this. This is in 1 Timothy, another letter he wrote to a friend. I thank Jesus Christ our Lord, who has given me the strength, that he considered me trustworthy, appointed me to his service, even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man. Blasphemer, somebody who speaks against God, a persecutor, somebody who chases down others and a violent man. Paul says, even though I was completely undeserving, God still saw fit to make me a part of his plan. And I wonder, I wonder if anyone in here has ever felt like I am so far beyond what God would accept. I don't even want to walk into a church most of the time. I feel like if I do, I'm gonna get hit by lightning or something. I want you to know there is nobody beyond the mercy and love of God. Right? And it's not something that you have to change to get. You already have it. You already have it, you just don't recognize it yet. God already loves you. He loves you in the state that you are now. That's why around here we say so often come as you are. You do not need to change to participate in the life of a church. God does not require that of you. Now, the interesting thing is if you start participating, you're probably going to. Change. But you don't need to change to start participating. If Saul of Tarsus can beat, imprison, and kill followers of Jesus and still be accepted into the family of Jesus, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say none of you have done anything that bad yet. And if you have, he still loves you. Here's what he says in verse 14. The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. And because of all of that, because of my experience, here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance. Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Sinners is not a category of people. It's all of us. If you've heard that word before and it's kind of been used as a weapon against you, can I just help you understand what the Bible means by sinner? It means somebody who's not as perfect as God and who has at some point in their life done things that hurt themselves and the people around them. And because of that, because and we've all done it, right? We have all hurt ourselves, we have all done something that's not good for us, we have all done something to hurt somebody else. You come out of the womb. Naked, screaming little sinners. That's how you enter the world. Ask a one-year-old to share with their friend, see what they say. Ask them to do it without biting their friend. See what they say. We have to be grown into a different way of being. So it's not a weapon, it's just an admission that none of us are perfect. And I think that's really, really good news that even though none of us are perfect, all of us are invited to be a part of the family of God. Because if we're honest, yet we come out that way, but even as adults, we don't live up to the standards we have for ourselves. Right? All of us fall short of what we hope to become. The standards that we've created. Whether that's related to faith or not, it doesn't matter. None of us are perfect. None of us live up to the same standard that God has. And he loves us anyway. And that's where Paul's extraordinary patience comes from. Paul accepted his own flaws. He was open about them. He was transparent. He said, Hey, these people bug and annoy me, and I am the chief of sinners. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of which I am the worst. So Paul would say to me, in the middle of my epic meltdown, in my front yard in front of my children and everybody exercising at the YMCA across the street, as bad as that meltdown was, Tim, I've got you beat. And God loves you anyway. So God used Paul to teach all of us. Right? This is what he says. For that very reason, because I am the worst, for that very reason, I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Jesus Christ might display his immense patience as an example for those who would believe in him and receive eternal life. In summary, Paul says, if Jesus had patience for me, he has it for you. The sinless God is endlessly patient with sinful human beings like me. So what excuse do we have to respond to anyone with anything less than patience? When you start to understand the patience that God has for you and for me, it transforms the patience that you have for the people around you. Patience, patience is one of the highest expressions of love that we can display. Which is why it could change the world. And that's why when Paul wrote some of his most poetic and beautiful words, some of the words that, regardless of what your relationship with church is here, I bet you you've heard these words before. I bet you've been at a wedding and heard the guy get up who's doing the talking and start to read Bible verses and start by saying, Love is patient. Love is kind, etc. etc. He starts with patience. And we use that that scripture, that, that poem, in weddings all the time, but but I think sometimes we diminish what it means by only using it in a wedding. Because it's supposed to be a formula for the world to change. In other words, love has a long fuse. How can love be anything else? God is love and has been and continues to be and always will be endlessly patient with me. Love doesn't blow up, get even, get angry, give up, hurry up, or quit. Love learns to put our emotions aside and serve the people on the other side of the situation. Love is patient. Now, if you're like me and you have struggled with patience before, let me tell you three things that I think define having a long fuse. Three marks of a long fuse. The first thing is that love learns to pause instead of pounce. I'm gonna ask the musicians to come and get in place while I go over this. Love learns to pause instead of pounce. This I've I referenced this before, but like so often when my kids get my fuse short, I just want to pounce. You know what I've learned? I'm a better dad when I pause. I'm a better dad when I give it a beat and I think about no, no, no, I just don't I don't want to just take their devices away again so that they feel the impact of my power. When I pause, I have the chance to think about how I can actually help them. The second mark of a long fuse is that we learn to move at the pace of others. Right? The goal is not punishment, the goal is correction. Right? The goal is to help them grow. And you can't do that if you're just on to the next thing. You can't do that if you don't stop and sit down with them and have a conversation and try to get them to understand. If you just rush in, you don't have the chance to walk with them. The third thing is that we refuse to write anybody off. Because God didn't write off anyone in this room. He never will. And I think that patience, patience can be in near endless supply when we admit that God had every right, every excuse to write us off. And we start to live our life out of that. As I wrap up this morning, if I could just say one thing to all the moms in the room, I would say this. God sees you, He loves you, and He believes in you. He is your partner in the wild and crazy existence that you have right now. He is your partner in wisdom, and he is your partner in strength. You are doing a better job than you think you're doing on your worst day. You are imperfect, and so are the rest of us. And that's okay. And on your best days, guys. Proud of you, and on your worst days, he loves you, and he is there still patiently ready to help you grow, become more mature, become more like Jesus, and through you and your parenting, and through your children, change this world.