11.19.2023 - Patience and Persistence

Scripture: Matthew 25:1-13

Matthew 25:1–13 NIV

1 “At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. 2 Five of them were foolish and five were wise. 3 The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. 4 The wise ones, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps. 5 The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep. 6 “At midnight the cry rang out: ‘Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’ 7 “Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. 8 The foolish ones said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil; our lamps are going out.’ 9 “ ‘No,’ they replied, ‘there may not be enough for both us and you. Instead, go to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves.’ 10 “But while they were on their way to buy the oil, the bridegroom arrived. The virgins who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet. And the door was shut. 11 “Later the others also came. ‘Lord, Lord,’ they said, ‘open the door for us!’ 12 “But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I don’t know you.’ 13 “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.

11/19/2023

Order of Service:

Announcements

Kid’s Time

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Patience and Persistence

Anticipation

The Church year is nearly over. Advent is just around the corner, a season of anticipation. Sitting in that place of anticipation is sometimes difficult. It can be challenging to wait. We bounce between wanting to plan out our days, taking as much control over them as possible, and flying by the seat of our pants just living in the moment.

Being grateful means more than sitting back and clapping. This January will mark 14 years since Bekah agreed to marry me. It was a very special day down in Lexington, KY, and a fair amount of work and preparation went into it. As exciting as it was, it was just the beginning of a lot of work in the next 222 days leading up to our wedding. In that time, I went from no job to working two different jobs. I moved from between two homes plus two other temporary housing situations across three states. There were eight months of planning, wedding showers, invitations, thank you notes, wedding attendants and guests to contact, reservations to be made, and looking back, it all felt like it rushed by in about a week.

I was filled to the brim with anticipation, and honestly, I was not a lot of help in the planning and preparation. I focused on getting a job and a place to live in Kentucky, and after that, I was mostly along for the ride. Bekah had a very different experience in those 222 days, and it is one of the few times I wish I could go back in time and do things a little differently. There were some rough patches. If I knew then what I know today, I could have helped smooth that road out more. Despite a couple of instances when I wasn’t sure if we would make it, God brought us through and continues to carry us through each day.

I was grateful. I am grateful and work to share that gratitude in how I live each day. Today's passage is a parable about wedding preparation, and many passages in scripture compare our relationship with Christ to a wedding. We are the bride of Christ, waiting for Him to come and take us to our new home with Him forever. The gratitude, the waiting, and the work that goes along with it begin now while we are still engaged with Him. And being engaged does not mean we are away from Jesus. It just means that we are learning to be in a relationship with Him as we await the day our love is made perfect and the last trappings of sin, brokenness, and death fall away. In the meantime, we work to stay aware of His presence in our lives, and Staying aware of Him requires patience and persistence in gratitude.

📷

Patience

Genuine gratitude requires patience. We won’t always get what we want when we want it. We do not have that much control over our lives, which is probably for the best. Gratitude and control do not often go together. When we don’t have control over our lives, we require patience to stay grateful.

In this parable, Jesus is the bridegroom. The rest of us find ourselves between three kinds of people: Those who were not there at all, those who attended but were foolish, and those who attended and were wise. There is a broad category of those who were invited and decided to participate in this wedding party, and we heard a similar parable about those invitations last month. Everyone in this parable accepted the invitation and showed up for it.

Perhaps you’ve attended wedding parties where there was an hour or two between the ceremony and the reception, and you had to wait for the wedding party patiently. Maybe you had to wait longer than expected at the wedding ceremony. There are often many moving parts to weddings, meaning there is waiting involved whether you are family, friends, or even the bride or groom. We wait because we love those we wait upon and are grateful to be included. When we lose our patience, we lose our gratitude and leave.

Patience is like the wick in your lamp. Without patience, you don’t have any light. Without patience, you won’t see anything, and you will end up leaving early and joining the crowd of those who never accepted the invitation in the first place. With a little patience, you will have enough light to see Jesus when He comes near you.

📷

Persistence

All of the virgins had some patience. But patience is like a muscle. Some things require a lot of patience all at once, while others only take a little. For example, dealing with someone hitting your car in the parking lot takes more patience than waiting for a stoplight to turn green. But life often draws out those situations for us, so sometimes, we repeatedly require small amounts of patience. It takes persistence to maintain our patience.

The parable tells us that some of the virgins were wise and brought extra oil with them. The foolish ones did not. When the oil in the lamps was used up through the first watch of the night, they all fell asleep. The watchman woke them up at midnight when the bridegroom arrived. The wise virgins had extra oil to re-light their lamps, and they went out to meet Him and to welcome Him home.

If patience is like the wick in those lamps, persistence is like the oil that fills them. We often only need a little patience to be aware of God’s presence around us, but we can never have too much persistence. Patience may help us to see Him once, but persistence helps keep us aware of where He is all the time. Moreover, persistence takes a little bit of gratitude and continues to refill it each minute, hour, and day that passes. With patience, we can provide enough light to see God when He is right in front of us. With persistence and with the help of others, we can shine our light and gratitude a little further out into the dark.

As we grow from patient gratitude into persistent gratitude, we see more of God’s presence around us. Some of you have experienced this in your Emmaus Walk or another kind of retreat, where you started the retreat living in the moment, giving up that control, and focusing on following God. Meanwhile, others serving around you followed a very carefully scripted plan, minute by minute. By the end of the retreat, you were doing more than living in the moment. You were growing into the person God created you to be with new tools and a new plan in place. This is how we grow from experiencing God to serving God to leading others into growing relationships with God.

📷

Preparation

The foolish virgins tried to borrow some oil from the wise ones but were not given any. They were told to go back into town and buy some there. By the time they returned, the doors were closed, the party had begun, and they were not let back in. “Lord, Lord! Open up the door!” they cried. But Jesus left them out in the darkness, saying, “I don’t know you.”

We require Patience and Persistence to stay aware of God’s presence. But we have limits to both. Everyone, even the wise virgins, fell asleep when the night went on too long without the bridegroom’s return. What, then, does this parable ultimately teach us to do? It teaches us to prepare.

How do we prepare to be patient and persistent? That is precisely the point of this parable. We stock up beforehand on what we need when we go through the long nights ahead. Sometimes, that means packing your bible with you just in case you need it for guidance and comfort. Other times, it means reading and filling your mind with that comfort and guidance today so that you already have it in your mind when you get to those rough patches. It often means praying for yourself and others now and asking God for guidance on what to do and say when those opportunities to serve and witness arrive. It also means taking those opportunities to build those relationships around you so that you are more equipped to share God’s love with others, and they are more comfortable receiving it from you.

There are many excellent reasons to prepare and plan ahead in ministry and our relationship with Jesus. Today, I want to focus on one very specific, often overlooked one. Gratitude. Yes, let's go back to the reason for this season. We usually don’t say thank you until we see what God has done for us. That’s perfectly normal. But it should not be a surprise when it happens. In a loving relationship, we can expect good things from one another, which means we can plan to be grateful. Like Bekah and I in our 222 days of waiting, it wasn’t a total surprise when we stood at the altar and made our vows to each other. Not only were we expecting it, we were planning on it. When you prepare for gratitude, you can do bigger and better things.

Months of prayer and more than six weeks of meetings happened by a hard-working team so we could spend last Sunday morning sharing how grateful we are to God for His blessings.

Looking at your Advent Calendar, we have some incredible services ahead and opportunities for people to meet Jesus for the first time, find healing in brokenness, spend time listening to God in prayer, and celebrate by sharing their gifts, words, and acts in the worship of Jesus coming into our world and into our lives. How can we prepare ourselves today for those moments in God’s presence?

In the coming year, we will officially and unofficially welcome new people into our church family. Some of them we have not met yet. What can we do today to prepare for that beautiful celebration in gratitude to God?

Many are stepping into new ways of serving God in the next few months. How can you prepare today so that you can see God’s guidance and follow right in step in those significant opportunities ahead? How can all of us prepare today so that we can support those leaders and workers of our church in the days ahead? Will you pray for them? Will you encourage them? Will you offer your support to work alongside them?

Today, if you are trying to figure out how to get your lamp lit — to catch a small glimpse of Jesus, come and talk with us. We have all been there. We want to show you how to follow Jesus instead of constantly fumbling in the dark.

If you have been living six days a week in the dark and coming every Sunday morning to get your light, God wants you to take the altar home with you and find a time and place to meet Him every day.

Some of you have been following Christ for a while and know what it feels like to run low and see the darkness crowd in around you. How much do you need to have enough patience and persistence to see everything God is doing? How much preparation would it take for you to be prepared yourself and bring someone along with you so that they would not miss out on anything God had for them as well? What would we look like as a church family if we were always awake and aware of what God was doing in, around, and through us and shared our gratitude to Him and others for every blessing He brought our way?

Friends, that might be even better than pork chops. In fact, that might consecrate our worship, fellowship, and service and bring it all to a whole new level.

What do we need to do today to prepare and be ready for God to do that kind of work in us together?