The late singer-songwriter Keith Green, who’s basically a sermon in a song, and particularly here, in “Make my Life a Prayer to You.”
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“I want to thank you now for being patient with me
O, it’s so hard to see when my eyes are on me”
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I rarely thank God for his patience.
I ask for forgiveness a lot, and that’s a prayer for mercy.
But I should follow that with a prayer of gratitude. For his patience.
He is merciful to forgive that first sin, and patience to forgive that same sin, over and over, and there’s a mercy to that patience, as well. The more patient, the more merciful.
And yet, it’s almost impossible to understand or believe God’s patience until we believe we’re his children.
Our children can do the same things, over and over, and it never changes the way we feel about them.
Is there anyone else in the world we afford the same loving patience?
We get mad at so many people, for so little, and yet nothing our children can do, no matter how much they do it, can shake our love for them.
In fact, the idea that our children could “sin their way out of our patience and love” is so grotesque that it’s hard to write or even think that thought.
And that’s why our faith and gratitude towards God’s patience is warranted — we are his children.
I never really came to understand the overwhelmingly implications of that until my dad passed away, soon after my first son was born.
Suddenly, this picture — the cover to Abba’s Child by Brennan Manning — was my life.
I was both the father, holding my helpless son through everything, and the son, being held by my Father, eternally, through everything. And I wasn’t really holding onto Jesus, was I? He was holding me.
And that’s the way it is for all of us.
Do you realize that — as a parent, you are both the strong in the picture and the weak and isn’t that wonderful?
And if you’re not a parent, well, you don’t even have to be strong. You’re just held. That’s wonderful, too.
In the same book, Manning writes of our sonship, “Jesus, the beloved Son, does not hoard this experience for himself.”
In other words, he’s not like a firstborn who wants to keep all the toys, all the parents’ affection, all the all of everything.
He can’t wait for us to share in his glory — Us. The ones who live our lives only because he forgives our lives, patiently, and only because he loves us, always.
And now Jesus is actually itching to share everything he, the firstborn, has with us. What a brother. And what a Father, to give us that brother, and to be that Father.
When we’re depressed, it’s easy to to forget that’s the reality of it all. It’s easy to doubt it. But this is all one bit of good news that isn’t too good to be true.
Here’s the song.
