7 Therefore be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and latter rain. 8 You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.
9 Do not grumble against one another, brethren, lest you be condemned. Behold, the Judge is standing at the door! 10 My brethren, take the prophets, who spoke in the name of the Lord, as an example of suffering and patience. 11 Indeed we count them blessed who endure. You have heard of the perseverance of Job and seen the end intended by the Lord– that the Lord is very compassionate and merciful.
12 But above all, my brethren, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or with any other oath. But let your “Yes,” be “Yes,” and your “No,” “No,” lest you fall into judgment. (Jam 5:7-12)
A lot of your life in the 21st century is probably taken up with waiting. When you get on the road to work, depending on what time you leave and which way you go, you are going to hit some traffic, and spend a good amount of time waiting. Even if it flows freely, driving the same route to work can feel like waiting. At some point, you are queuing, waiting for the bus or train, waiting at the line behind the till, waiting at the bank, waiting at a government office, waiting at the doctor’s, waiting for our food at the restaurant, waiting for a flight. Sometimes we are waiting for someone to arrive at an appointment, or waiting on the phone while we have been put on hold.
This kind of waiting is mostly annoying – a feeling of do-nothing waste of time. This is why people switch on the car radio, or pull out the phone and start checking it, to fill the waits.
This kind of waiting feels to us mostly passive. There is nothing to do except allow the moments to pass, try to fill them with activity so they do not seem to drag.
So when you read in the Bible ‘wait on the Lord’, you might make the mistake of thinking that waiting for the Lord is like waiting in traffic, or waiting in the bank. You might make the mistake of thinking that waiting for the Lord is really just letting time pass until God does something.
But the biblical idea of waiting on God is very different. Waiting in the Bible is active, obedient, diligent, and deliberate. Waiting on God is not an inconvenience that happens to you, it is an action commanded of you.
Wait on the LORD; Be of good courage, And He shall strengthen your heart; Wait, I say, on the LORD! (Psa 27:14)
Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for Him; (Psa 37:7)
Wait on the LORD, And keep His way, And He shall exalt you to inherit the land; (Psa 37:34)
But those who wait on the LORD Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint. (Isa 40:31)
The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, To the soul who seeks Him. 26 It is good that one should hope and wait quietly For the salvation of the LORD. (Lam 3:25-26)
The reason the Bible teaches this action of waiting on the Lord is because the Bible does not teach ‘your best life now’. If you got your best life now, and enjoyed every pleasure now, and were rid of every adversity, every trial, every difficulty, you would not be waiting for anything.
But the cry of God’s people in His Word is captured by so many Psalms: “How long, O Lord” How long, O Lord, until you put an end to all the evil in the world, the murdering, the rape, the abuse, the genocide, the oppression, the greed, the fraud, the corruption? How long must this go on?
How long, O Lord, until you end the persecution of your people, attacked, vilified, arrested, tortured, slandered, harmed, for no other reason than they name you as their God?
How long O Lord, until you end the sad cycles of this fallen world, the curse of death, the sorrow of a fallen world with its calamities and catastrophes, its diseases and deformities, its sorrows and sicknesses? How long until you put an end to the curse of sin, death itself?
Whether it be the trials of persecution, or the trials of the sin of others, or the trial of the effects and consequences of sin on the world, believers see this world and this life as incomplete, deformed. Life doesn’t add up unless God does something in the future. The doctrine of future things is called in theology eschatology. It includes all the doctrines of life after death, resurrection, future judgement, the return of Christ, the kingdom, and Heaven and Hell.
See, if you are living a life where you don’t need the truths of eschatology, then you are either not a Christian or living a very lukewarm Christian life. The Christian life lived in submission to God has to have the truths of Christ’s return, future judgement, future resurrection, future new Heavens and New Earth to make life sensible and bearable right now. Five times in this passage we are pointed forward to meditate on something in the future.
- 7 Therefore be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord.
- 8 Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.
- 9 Behold, the Judge is standing at the door!
- 12c But let your “Yes,” be “Yes,” and your “No,” “No,” lest you fall into judgment.
God wants His children to lack certain things, lack certain answers, lack certain fulfillments so that they will wait on Him. A lot of the Jewish believers that James wrote to were experiencing some of this. Some of them were persecuted by the wicked wealthy we looked at last week. Some of them had experienced financial hardship as believers. And just as James repeated the Old Testament judgement on the wicked, he now repeats the Old testament comfort and commandment to believers – wait. Gladly, James is going to describe this waiting, both by example, and by instruction. We can divide his teaching on waiting into two categories: meditations and expressions. We wait on God with certain attitudes and expectations, and we also wait on God by our words, our expressions.
Let’s begin with the root, the heart of waiting on God.
I. Believers Wait on God By Changing Our Meditations
7 Therefore be patient, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and latter rain. 8 You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.
Therefore, in light of what James has said about the certainty of future judgement on the wicked, because of that, be patient until the future coming of the Lord. This is commanded, and the command is repeated in verse 8 – you also be patient.
This is a word in the Greek, makrothumia. Makro, we recognise in the English derivative – macro – large, great. Thumos meant anger, or temper. We speak about someone who has a short fuse, or a quick temper, and we mean someone who goes from benign to ballistic far too quickly. There is no space in him. The idea in makrothumia is that there is a long fuse, a large buffer, a lot of flexibility. Whereas the verb in verse 11 suggests patience with circumstances, this has the idea of patience with people. It’s sometimes translated longsuffering. You absorb the pain, the perplexities, the injustices, the sadnesses, the heartaches, because there is something in the future you are looking for.
You are going to endure and live with sinful people in a sinful world doing sinful things. It vexes you, it grieves you, it causes groaning in your soul, but you are not going to give in to despondency, hopelessness, cynicism, anger, despair, vengeance, grumbling. Impatient people eventually become desperate people, and desperate people are not people filled with hope, or faith, or love.
So how do we wait? Look at verse 8. James tells us what has to change in us. “Establish your hearts”. Hearts refers to our inner man that knows and loves, that thinks and feels. He says, strengthen, or steady your heart. Stabilise your inner man with certain thoughts. The first way we wait on the Lord is by changing our meditations, thinking differently.
What must we meditate on? We’ve already said that the focus is future, the focus is on what God will bring with Christ’s return, with judgement, with reward, with Heaven. James is going to give us three illustrations, three pictures of waiting, and each of them tells us something of the Lord’s future coming that should establish our hearts.
Look at the first in verse 7: See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, waiting patiently for it until it receives the early and latter rain.
Here the first way we wait on God. We meditate on the truth that
- a) Lord is going to return and reward.
The farmer, when he has been diligent, can do nothing more except wait. When the harvest finally comes, it brightens his eyes, it fills him with joy. All that hard work has paid off. His reward has come.
In fact, for the Hebrew farmer, there was an unusual kind of waiting. God providentially set up the climate of Israel so that you needed two separate rainy times of the year for there to be harvest. The first was in around October, where the rain would loosen up the ground for planting. Then, to produce growth, a second rain was needed in the later winter through to early spring. If either of those rains failed, the crop would fail. So you picture the farmer earnestly waiting for the first rain so he can plant, and then praying, waiting for the second rain, so that what he had planted would germinate. And when those waits were over, he waited for the final reward of the harvest. God placed Israel in a land difficult to farm and agriculturally complex. It should have forced the farmers to be dependent and humbled before God.
James says to believers suffering or seeing suffering, know that when the Lord comes back, whether He comes for you in death, or whether He comes back to the Earth when you are still alive, when He does, then what you laboured for, and what you sacrificed for, and what you deprived yourself of, and what you endured, and what you received for the name of Christ will be worth it all.
“And behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to give to every one according to his work.” (Rev 22:12)
Gal 6:9 And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.
At school, the only race I could run half-decently was the 400 metres. It’s sometimes called the killer-event, because it is not a distance event, it is a sprint, but it’s a sprint beyond the human body’s ability to run at 100%. After around 26 seconds of sprinting, the body begins producing lactic acid, making the limbs feel like lead. And you could often see the people who’d never run the 400 before, because they’d go out full blast, and around 250 metres you could see them shifting down to fourth gear, then to third, by 300 metres they were down to second, and then first, and some them you needed to get out and push by the time they were close to the finish line. But the one thing about the 400 metres was this: as you came around the last bend, and everything was stiffening and slowing and burning, you would see the finish line, and the stands where everyone was cheering. There was no sense in stopping or slowing, because the reward of a medal was now in sight.
Don’t slow down, don’t give up. Establish your heart in your suffering. He will come, and His reward is with Him.
Look at the second illustration.
10 My brethren, take the prophets, who spoke in the name of the Lord, as an example of suffering and patience.
- b) Lord is going to return and judge.
Here is another example of waiting and patience. The prophets who spoke in the name of the LORD. These are examples of both suffering and longsuffering – of being in a trial, and waiting on God patiently through it. The prophets are synonymous with persecution. The prophets were raised up to confront and denounce a wayward people, to give messages of judgement and repentance.
2Ch 36:16 But they mocked the messengers of God, despised His words, and scoffed at His prophets, until the wrath of the LORD arose against His people, till there was no remedy.
But what was the hope of the prophets? Their hope was that God would fulfill His Word through them and so vindicate them. All that persecution would turn into reward for them, and judgement upon those that harmed them.
Mat 5:11 “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake.
Mat 5:12 “Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
6 since it is a righteous thing with God to repay with tribulation those who trouble you, 7 and to give you who are troubled rest with us when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, (2Th 1:6-7)
It’s easier to endure the school bully if from behind him you can see the teacher approaching. And so with the corrupt politician, the corrupt lawyer, the corrupt policeman, the abusive relative, the violent criminal, the oppressor, the adulterer, the slanderer, the persecutor.
When you know that in God’s universe, no one gets away with anything, you can wait. The Lord will come. In fact, the Psalmist tells us this:
34 Wait on the LORD, And keep His way, And He shall exalt you to inherit the land; When the wicked are cut off, you shall see it.
35 I have seen the wicked in great power, And spreading himself like a native green tree.
36 Yet he passed away, and behold, he was no more; Indeed I sought him, but he could not be found. (Psa 37:34-36)
But here is the third image for us to meditate on and establish our hearts:
11 Indeed we count them blessed who endure. You have heard of the perseverance of Job and seen the end intended by the Lord– that the Lord is very compassionate and merciful.
- c) Lord is going to return and resolve.
Job, as you remember, experienced calamity. He lost all his possessions, all his children, all his position in society, all his good health and decent appearance. Satan left him with one thing – a contentious wife.
And though Job did become testy with God as his trial dragged on, and as his three ‘friends’ actually intensified the trial, Job did exhibit patience and endurance.
Job 1:21 And he said: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, And naked shall I return there. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; Blessed be the name of the LORD.”
Job 13:15 Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.
Job 23:10 But He knows the way that I take; When He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold.
But James points out that the lesson from Job is the end intended by the Lord. God resolved Job’s situation, he restored Job’s losses, and even gave him twice as much as he had before. But more importantly, God transformed Job’s understanding of who God is, and grew him from a simplistic, almost superstitious faith, to a deep, robust view of the sovereign God. And we who read the book of Job see how God resolved a trial into a gracious revelation of Himself, and a blessing for the whole world, in that we now have the book of Job. We learn from how He resolved this that He is compassionate and merciful.
Now if you knew how God was going to resolve your particular trial, it might be easier to endure. But God seldom gives us that information. Usually, He simply wants us to know that He is going to resolve it for His glory. And He is going to resolve it as someone who abounds in kindness, who overflows in sympathy, who is full of kindness to those who have not earned it. He loves to bless, to show mercy. He loves to work together for good all things for those who are the called.
It is easier to wait, to not react, or become agitated or hopeless or angry, or despondent, when you know that He will sort out what seems to be impossible to sort out. He can resolve those relationships that just do not seem to be reconcilable. He can resolve who was right and wrong. He can resolve those situations that seemed so complicated by sin and bad choices, and the fallenness of the world.
Those who endure are blessed, Remember 1:12? Remember 1:2? Endure, because it is shaping you, and endure by remembering He will come to reward, to judge, and to resolve.
So when will He do this? Look at verse 8: for the coming of the Lord is at hand.
At hand means approaching, drawing closer. You cannot tell when it will be, so you know that every day is one more day he has given you before His return, and one less.
How could it be imminent if this was written so long ago?
8 But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
9 The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. (2Pe 3:8-9)
Robert Murray M’Cheyne, the Scottish pastor and preacher was once hosting a few ministers in his home. At one point, the conversation quietened down, and M’Cheyne asked them, “Do you think the Lord Jesus will come tonight?” Around the table, each of them said, “No, I do not think so.” As M’Cheyne went around to each one, and each one said no, he then looked at all of them, and solemnly repeated, “Therefore, be ye also ready, for in such an hour as ye think not, the Son of Man cometh.”
Waiting patiently means changing your thinking. Establish your heart by meditating on the imminent return of Christ, where He will reward, and judge, and resolve.
But now in the middle of this, James moves from thinking to speaking, from the mind to the mouth.
II. Believers Wait on God By Changing Our Expressions
9 Do not grumble against one another, brethren, lest you be condemned. Behold, the Judge is standing at the door!
Why is James doing this? Well remember, he taught us back in chapter 1:
26 If anyone among you thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this one’s religion is useless. (Jam 1:26)
In chapter 3 we learnt that the tongue is the revealer of the heart. So what we say is a good indicator of whether we are waiting on the Lord or not. So here in verse 9 is the first prohibition.
Don’t grumble against each other. This is the idea of complaining, about one another, moaning about one another, sighing. It is regarding another believer with heaviness, and weariness, and complaining about them.
Israel murmured when they lost faith in the promises of God to sustain and deliver. And their murmuring usually found a target in Moses or Aaron.
Now when you are most likely to start venting your frustration on others, blaming them and criticising them for their failures and incompetencies and shortcomings? The chances are, when you are in a trial, and your makrothumia has turned into microthumia. It’s when frustration is building up, and we have lost hope, that our impatience turns into grumbling.
But James warns us that we will be judged for this, and this same Judge is as if he was standing outside the door of the room where you are venting your displeasure on another.
Paul warns that we must not complain, as some of them also complained, and were destroyed by the destroyer. (1Co 10:10)
Philippians 2:14 Do all things without complaining and disputing, (Phi 2:14)
Try to imagine a very patient person, who is always complaining. If you are having trouble imagining that, that’s because it’s really impossible. Very patient people complain very little. Highly impatient people complain much.
And here is a second way that our tongues can reveal our impatience.
12 But above all, my brethren, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or with any other oath. But let your “Yes,” be “Yes,” and your “No,” “No,” lest you fall into judgment.
Exaggerated language, and frivolous oaths, are the language of the impatient. Impatient people, in an effort to make their points, and seem more persuasive, use language that invokes God’s name, or God’s dwelling place, or God’s creation to make a point. Now James is not forbidding the taking of civil oaths for legal purposes. He is warning against frivolously saying “I swear to God it’s true!” or by extension using God, Jesus, Heaven, Hell, Damnation to spice up your language and make it stronger. By extension, this would be all foul language. All swear words, profanity, blasphemy, and all the substitute swear words that have been developed to stand in as a PG version of the original, all say one thing – you are not a patient person. You are not willing to let your Yes be Yes, and your No be No, and remain trusting and submitted to God to reward, to judge and to resolve.
Exaggerated language, frivolous oaths, blasphemy, foul language, this is all the language of the impatient, of those who at the time of their utterance are not waiting on the Lord. When you speak like this, no unbeliever would detect that your hope is in God. You have the same frustration and anxiety he does.
But when your mouth lacks grumbling, and lacks this kind of exaggeration, it says, there is a meek and quiet spirit within. This person is waiting for someone else.
Spurgeon said, “We shall not grow weary of waiting upon God if we remember how long and how graciously He once waited upon us.”
“So being a himself a waiting God, he loves a waiting people”. May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acts of patient waiting in the sight of our Lord our strength and our Redeemer.