In patience or Impatience

So I was listening to a sermon by Matt Chandler and he was talking about how God had prophets speak to His people about the coming promise of Immanuel. The child who will have the government upon His shoulders. And till this point Judah and Israel had been overran and conquered by the Assyrians which they eventually got their freedom back only to lose it again to the Romans. So when they hear that the government will be on the shoulders of this messiah then it seems that they would get excited. And then what happens? It does not happen for hundreds of years later and even on top of that God decides to stop speaking to His people for four hundred years. 400 YEARS!!! How impatient must they have been waiting for the Messiah. I feel like I am in a waiting time myself and yet I get so impatient with all of it. It gets so frustating not knowing what I am going to do right now or in the near future. Yet I must learn and not only learn but allow the Holy Spirit to develop the patience that He has and cultivate it in my life. So please pray for this patience in my life and in the church's life because I see the same thing happening to many brothers and sisters in Christ. God bless all of you with this patience and that He blesses you with a spirit of revelation and understanding.

Understood?

So I was talking with a brother of mine and we were talking about understanding. Understanding in the sense that God works in everyone of His children and it is vital to understand, at least to some measure, what He is doing within us. Now I was skeptical at first because I felt like that a child does not need to know what is going on. Sure it is nice to know what is happening, but I did not deem it necessary. Yet as we talked I started to understand why we need to understand. And as I am reading the The Cost of Discipleship it speaks about the necessity to understand in some part. Bonhoeffer speaks about Luther and how he said that we are saved by grace alone. So Luther's followers took this and repeated it, yet they neglected the discipleship. See, Luther recognized how costly the grace of God is and this grace led him into a life of discipleship. Or perhaps you could say that his life of discipleship led him to that recognition. Whichever, recognizing this grace, he claims that grace alone can save, which is true, yet his followers do not understand that this grace because they do not live in that discipleship to Jesus. So Bonhoeffer claims that because of their lack of understanding it caused people to believe this grace covers all sin without the need to seriously follow after Christ therefore ending the very reformation that God has started through Luther. Of course we cannot expect to fully understand what endless and mysterious things our great God does. But we must desire to have an understanding of our King, for He desires understanding in us and wants to give us revelation. Let that understanding compliment and edify the work that He is doing inside of you and the body.