We too often want convenience store holiness. We are impatient with our sins in the wrong way, meaning that we want and demand quick fixes for our problems. We want a holiness that will straighten out the pressing problems we have created for ourselves, and we want that holiness shrink-wrapped, hanging on a rack on the convenience store counter. We want to impulse buy our way into a better life. But our God dwells in eternity. A day is to Him as a thousand years, and a thousand years is to Him just a day. He is not fulfilling His purposes for us on a timer, and cannot be brought to a panic.
Picture a world where the oak trees are a thousand feet high, taking 30,000 years to grow. That is what holiness for redeemed creatures is like. And when the rain falls on such a tree, it does no good to bustle up thirty seconds later and ask, “Well, what good did that do?”
God nourishes His saints in this meal, but He is nourishing and preparing you for everlasting life with Him. He is not giving you an energy bar so that you have a little more hustle for pursuing your own impatient agenda.
As God is nourishing us, He is growing us up into His character, the fruit of His Holy Spirit. One of those characteristics is patience. It does no good to pray, “Lord, I want patience and I want it now!” You should have it now, and He is working His character into you now, but demanding it now means that you do not have what you demand—and as long as you think of it that way, you will not have it.
When you present yourself before the Lord here, week after week, He works in you every time. He nourishes every time. He confronts sin every time. He works the sin in your heart up toward the surface every time. The process is inexorable. And once we begin to feel what he is doing, we sometimes abandon our impatience, and try to resist the outworking of what His Spirit is doing. But whether we are patient, God is certainly patient. And He knows His purpose here.