God Is Slow
Texts: Genesis 15:1-6, Romans 4:15-25
Pastor Phil Hughes, American Fork Presbyterian Church, Utah
January 29, 2023
Back in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic hit life kind of slowed down. As things shut down it forced us all to live at a different pace than before. There wasn’t as much to do. We were having to do a lot of waiting to get back to what we wanted to do. There were days I was getting somewhat bored. It was like being a kid in the backseat on a long car trip who asks, “Are we there yet?”
Before this life was moving rather fast. We live in an incredibly fast world that is speeding up all the time. Over the past century technological advances have made everything we do go faster.
Think of it: right now you and I can speed in a car to the airport, while picking up a meal which is fully prepared in a matter of seconds. At the airport we
can purchase a ticket in a matter of minutes and get on a plane that jets us to another continent in another time zone, thousands of miles away, while we receive and read hundreds of messages delivered to us electronically, which we can respond to because we can speedily type out the words, and they are returned in nano-seconds. We can do all of this in a matter of hours.
There was a day that someone would write a message on an animal skin or parchment, would have it delivered by a carrier and it would take perhaps months. When it showed up in two months instead of three the receiver would say, “Wow, you brought that fast.”
We take a pill which quickly puts us asleep so that we can either make the flight go faster or so we can manufacture sleep we will need for moving our bodies beyond their natural rhythms.
We move fast, talk fast, eat fast, work fast, worship fast, and pray fast.
The billboards on the highway tell us how much waiting time in the emergency room or clinic. When we are put on hold a recording tells us estimated waiting time. So much of the quality of our life is now measured by “waiting time”.
We want our kids to grow up fast so we make sure they can play Beethoven, be good at soccer, and be able to read all before they are 3.
We live in the day of Instagram, Turbo Tax and Jiffy Lube. Phones are now judged on which is the fastest. Companies sell themselves on the speed of their service and how quickly they can meet our needs.
And we have taken the new speed of life and tried to apply it to God. We want to move fast. Waiting times need to be decreasing. So God had better fit into this.
The problem is that is not what God is like. Can I just tell you this morning: God is slow. God is love, he is good, he is grace, powerful, majestic and other things. But, American Fork Presbyterian Church I am here to tell you this morning that God can also be slow.
So incredibly slow.
Abraham, the great patriarch from the Old Testament, would testify to this. The Lord promised Abraham, back when his name was still Abram, that from him will come a great nation. The thing is that Abraham and his wife, Sarah, had no children and they were now eligible for the senior discount just about everywhere.
After a number of years, when nothing seemed to be happening and no children came, Abraham took up the promise again with the Lord. “Lord, do you remember when you promised to me a child? You are still on this, aren’t you?” For Abraham, things were moving really slow. He pointed out to the Lord that he and Sarah remained childless.
Abraham had a son named Eliezer by a different woman named Hagar, which was a result of Sarah’s impatience, (more on that in a moment) and Abraham wondered if Eliezer was God’s plan for Abraham’s line to continue. Eliezer was a servant who was the only one around to inherit Abraham’s estate.
But the Lord told Abram that Eliezer would not be his heir, but that a son from he and Sarah would be his heir just as the Lord promised. Then he told Abram to look at the stars and promised that Abram’s offspring will be as many as the stars that he saw.
We are told that Abram believed the Lord and it was credited to him as righteousness. In other words, he was set right with God. That’s exactly where the Lord wanted him to be.
But the Lord asked for a lot of patience from Abraham and Sarah. And one of the things we learn about God is that he tends to take his own sweet time.
The faith to which Abraham and Sarah were called is not easy or peaceful. It is a faith that is “hard-fought.”[1] Abraham and Sarah were called to live their lives in deep faith in God, and faith can often involve waiting. And waiting involves trust.
It took twenty-five years for Sarah to conceive. God just kept stretching and stretching and stretching Abraham and Sarah’s trust. Weariness in waiting set in, which is why Abram has to ask God, “when are you going to make good on your promise?”
One time a man told me how he couldn’t figure out why he was so tired after just sitting around in a hospital days after his wife had her heart surgery. He hadn’t been doing anything.
He was just sitting with her as she recovered. It is because waiting wears us out. It happens slowly, quietly, and rather subconsciously, but it wears on us.
We wait for recovery. We wait for the test results. We wait for the news about the job. We wait for that son or daughter to come around. We wait for someone to die. We wait for grief to pass.
Waiting can wear us down, particularly in a world where speed is raising the stakes.
Abraham and Sarah grew so impatient that they tried to force the issue of having a child when Sarah concocted a plan for Abraham to have a son through Sarah’s Egyptian slave woman, Hagar. Sarah couldn’t wait on the Lord anymore.
We are tempted and sometimes we do take matters into our own hands. We like to do it our way, massage the situation, manipulate the circumstances to get things moving in our direction. Read the story in Genesis and you’ll see that trying to force God along doesn’t go well for Abraham, Sarah, Hagar or anyone else.
Is our trust in God too small to wait upon him for the deliverance, guidance or provision we seek? I confess, sometimes mine is. But neither you nor I can force God. We have to learn to live by the pace of grace. We have to live by the pace of God.
A.W. Tozer said, “The faith of Christ offers no button to push for quick service.”
As I search through the entire Bible I am struck by the slowness of God. After the fall of creation God waited through generations of human rebellion and wickedness before calling Abraham. It took twenty-five years for his promise to Abraham and Sarah to come to fruition.
It took 400 years before God hears the cries of the Hebrews and delivers them from Egypt. God wandered with the Israelites in the desert for forty years.
God patiently waited through the reign of many a rebellious king who turned against the Lord.[2] He allowed his people to be exiled for seventy years. It took centuries for God’s promised Messiah to appear. Israel heard the promises of God that came through the prophets, and they waited. And they waited. And they waited.
The word in the Old Testament for “wait” also means “trust”, and it also means “hope”. When we wait we are trusting that what we hope for will come.
God promised he would send one who was anointed by him to deliver his people. Many of those promises were spoken by the prophet Isaiah. Well, five hundred years later…Jesus Christ, the Messiah, came. God promised a Messiah and he brought him. In between there were ups and downs, but God delivered.[3] And then people got on Jesus for not acting fast enough to bring the kingdom of God.
God seems to work so slow. But he works!
I looked up in a dictionary how “slow” is defined in our culture: Mentally dull. Lacking in readiness, promptness or willingness. Having qualities that hinder progress. Dawdling.
Then I looked up how “fast” is defined: effective, agile of mind, quick to learn.
Speed is credited as intelligence in our society. How fast can we learn? How fast can we do something? We want our phones, internet, and food service to be fast. There is a place for fast: Emergency rooms. Fixing plumbing problems. The end of a political campaign season.
But as the pace of our lives and world increases the impatience also increases. We even want our sermons to be fast.
When it comes to living by faith in God speed and impatience are a detriment. It doesn’t work. It is why so many people have dropped out of the race in living for God, or they leave a church, or quit on sacred relationships. They don’t pray. They don’t get into the Bible. They don’t live by faith. Whatever they think God should be doing isn’t happening on their timeline.
I know this: God is not going to change. “Oh, I’m not moving fast enough for you, Phil? I’m sorry. Here let me make it all work better for you at your schedule.” The Lord isn’t going to quicken the pace so that the world, let alone my little life, is better accommodated.
Faith is essential in our walk with God, in our times of suffering, in our daily lifestyle, in our prayer lives, in the life of a church, and in relationships. Who knows how God is working? There are stories that are still being lived out. There are stories that may not have an ending until we are long gone.
A man named Frederick Faber, who was a hymn writer and theologian in the 19th century, said that: “In the spiritual life God chooses to try our patience first of all by His slowness.” We move fast and God moves slow because our time in life is temporary, but God has been for eternity.
Frederick Faber said we should let God’s slowness “overshadow our souls” and not upset us. We have to wait for God in the wind and the rain, in the thunder and the lightning, in the cold and the dark. And when he comes go with him, at his pace, “for He is God.”
I think of a popular African-American gospel song, “He may not be in a hurry, but he’s always right on time.”
God did come through for Abraham and Sarah as they had a son named Isaac. And Abraham’s line continued and grew, and became Israel, from whom came Jesus, from whom came the church, who is the body of Christ for this world.
Paul, in his letter to the Romans uses Abraham as the prime example of living by faith. He says that Abraham did not waver in unbelief regarding the promise of God. I have to tell you, sometimes Paul’s interpretation of Scripture raises questions for me. Abraham seemed to waver plenty, although you could argue he never let go of the promise. In that way he never had unbelief. But he certainly wondered how God was operating.
Paul says that Abraham was strengthened in his faith. Maybe it was in the waiting, the trusting, the praying, the hoping that Abraham’s faith became stronger. He went slowly with God.
Maybe that is how our faith becomes sturdier, more robust and resilient. It is in our trusting and patiently waiting on the Lord that our faith becomes rock solid.
Often we see the circumstances and we lose hope. Paul says that Abraham saw his circumstances and they did not look favorable. But Abraham saw his circumstances in faith, which is to say he saw them in view of God. Faith can be a fierce struggle. The hardest thing in life is to believe God when the circumstances are not favorable.[4]
One thing that happens as we walk in faith with the God who can be so slow - our roots in God grow deeper.
I come from California and we have some incredible Redwood trees. Redwood trees can grow to be two-hundred-fifty to three-hundred feet, which is 25 to 30 stories of a building. They are among the most impressive parts of creation. But it takes a long time for redwood trees to become the size they are. It doesn’t happen right away. In fact, the extensive root structure is the first thing to develop, and that takes many years.
You want to have “redwood tree” faith? It’s gonna take time.
God is slow and we need to be patient in our life with him. He is working in this world. He is working in his church. He is working in your own heart. He is. It is sometimes hard to understand. It is sometimes hard to live with. I believe God also knows this.
And we will become what he intends us to become as we accept his slowness and live on his schedule.
And as we do, we live in right relationship with God. As Paul writes, the words that Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness, were written for us as well, for us who believe that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead.
Let me throw out another name to you: Pierre Tielhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit priest, who was also a paleontologist and geologist. That’s quite a combination. He didn’t seem to have any problems putting together faith and science.
He wrote a small poem which I want to end with this morning:
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown,
something new.
Yet it is the law of all progress that it is made
by passing through some stages of instability
and that may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.
Do not try to force them on
as though you could be today what time
-- that is to say, grace --
and circumstances
acting on your own good will
will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new Spirit
gradually forming in you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God,
our loving vine-dresser.
Amen.
Prayer: Good and gracious God, we need the faith to go at your pace. And when that isn’t fast enough, give us the grace to wait, to trust, and to keep looking for you. We believe you are working even when we can’t feel or see it. Thank you for holding us in your faithful hands in the meantime. Through Jesus Christ, your Son, we pra
[1] Walter Brueggemann, Commentary on Genesis in the Interpretation Series, p.141
[2] Slow Church, C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison, pp.24-25
[3] Dale Bruner, Commentary on Matthew vol. 1, The Christbook, p.12
[4] James Edwards, Commentary on Romans, pp.126-27