“Waiting Is Working Kingdom Timing in a World of Rush” Zack Morgan

Lesson Transcript

I want to open with Isaiah 40:30 and 31. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. 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. So, as you all know, I lived in Guatemala for a couple of years, and I did a lot of waiting when I was there.

The mission organization I worked with, they didn't really give you titles, and people would always ask me, "What's your title?" You know, in the world we live in, everybody has to have a title. And I would say I was a waiter, and I'd say I would wait at the airport for people to fly in. I waited on the ladies as they went fabric shopping, and I waited in traffic. So, but I did a lot of waiting there, and part of it being life is slower.

And I don't know if it's been a couple of years now I had a message on anxiety and my battle with anxiety while I was down there in Guatemala. Well, the truth is that I didn't—my struggle with anxiety did not begin in Guatemala, but it just manifested itself while I was down there. Before, I was able to ignore it. I was able to sweep it under the rug.

And there were enough things that were going on in my life before I moved down there that I was able to—yeah, I was just able to ignore, distract myself from this deep underlying problem. But after I moved down there, especially after I moved out of the city, Guatemala City, to a town a couple of hours away, I had more quiet time, and life slowed down. I wasn't able to ignore my problem anymore. I had to face it. I had to face it. And this is the reason why every time I preach, I have to bring up Guatemala.

And I know you've already all forgiven me already. If I was in the—I like to, especially when I was young, I like to predict what people were going to preach on and what people were going to talk about. And if any of you were a betting people, I'm sure you could bet on Guatemala being mentioned once in my messages. But the reason being, it was the most spiritually formative time of my life. Why was that? It's because I had time to look inward, and I was not distracted with busyness.

Half my term, I didn't have a smartphone. So half my time, I had this little guy. And still works. Half my term, I didn't have a smartphone. And my whole time, I had very restricted internet. I didn't have many books to read, but I read the Bible a lot. How many of you have long-term to-do lists at home? I'm just curious, like long-term, not like a daily, but how many people have lists that you have things that you want to get done? Raise your hand. Quite a few. Quite a few people here.

So for myself, I've had a to-do list long-term, and I have daily lists that I write down. But my long-term to-do list, I keep adding and crossing things off. It never really gets completed. It just is kind of like a living list. Like you just keep adding and taking things off. But what happens is that the easy and the fun things get done first. The things that are difficult, uncomfortable, or you really don't know how to proceed with get pushed to the bottom of the list. And why is that?

Is it because we're completely lazy? Is it because we get the fun things done and then we just say, "I don't want to do the hard things, so I'm going to just sit back and quit working"? No, the reason why we don't face the hard things, the reason why we never get—why we push the hard things off is because we keep adding to our to-do list, and we stay busy and distracted with other things. We don't get the difficult things done.

We don't stop working, but we don't get the difficult things done because we are distracted and we busy ourselves with other things. Time and slowing down is essential to spiritual formation. Busyness is our enemy. Taking the time to pray, taking the time to slow down and read the Word and fast, fast by not eating, is how Christians have always grown. So I would like you to slowly open your Bibles to Matthew 11, and we're going to read verses 28 through 30.

All right, Jesus says, "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, my yoke is kind, and my burden is light." So we know that the yoke of Christ are his teachings and his commandments, the way that Jesus wants us to live and the way that we should live, the best life.

You know, each rabbi in Jesus' day had a yoke in a sense, and Jesus referred to this as the—you know, the rabbis would bind heavy burdens that they themselves were not willing to bear. Their teachings that even they weren't willing to follow. But Jesus' teachings offer us rest and peace. Following the way of Jesus should bring us rest and peace. So when I read these verses, I always—just hearing these verses, always just—I feel like a burden's lifted. Jesus intends for us to be rested, happy, and at peace.

So the question is, what if we do not feel at peace? What if we do not feel at rest? What if we feel heavy laden? What if we feel like there's a big burden on our shoulders? I know that there's different times of our life where that may seem appropriate. That is appropriate to be burdened. But what if we constantly are burdened and do not feel at rest? If we feel this way, are we following the way of Jesus? Do we have the yoke of Christ? So I want to point out that following Jesus is walking after him.

It's not running, it's not jogging, but walking. Last year, I preached a message on the Lord's Prayer, and one of the things I brought up is that the seemingly small, insignificant things that we do on a regular basis will gain us much ground in the long, long term. If we want to grow and walk and talk like Jesus, we need to slowly and consistently follow him, and over time, we will become more and more like him. What happens so often is that we set big goals, we get burned out, and we give up. We are in a hurry.

We are not patient. We are not willing to work on God's time. We do not understand the timing of the kingdom. So many of you might recognize this rhetoric. John Mark Comer is a writer that has written two books or written numerous books, and I've listened to two of his books recently, Practicing the Way and The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. And many of these ideas I have borrowed from him. One of the things that he says is that the greatest enemy to spiritual formation is hurry.

We all have certain things that are holding us back. Then I say, we all have certain things that are holding us back from becoming like Christ. And in my life, I have found that hurry affects most of the areas where what I'm fighting against. All right, so Jesus moves on in Matthew into Matthew 12. So Jesus ends with Matthew 11 talking about, "Come to me, I will give you rest." This is what rest is like. It's coming to me and following my way and my teachings.

And then it's interesting that the following verses say, verse one, "At that time, Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and his disciples were hungry and began to pluck heads of grain and to eat.

And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, 'Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.' But he said to them, 'Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God and ate the showbread, which was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are blameless?

Yet I say to you that in this place there is one greater than the temple. But if you had known what this means, I desire mercy and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.' Now when he had departed from there, he went into their synagogue, and behold, there was a man who had a withered hand. And they asked him, saying, 'Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?' That they might accuse him.

Then he said to them, 'What man is there among you who has one sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out? How much more value then is a man than a sheep? Therefore, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.' Then he said to the man, 'Stretch out your hand.' And he stretched it out, and it was restored as whole as the other." So Jesus is setting the record straight. The Sabbath was intended to benefit mankind.

The Sabbath was not intended for mankind to serve it and to become in bondage to it. You know, and the concept of the Sabbath started at creation. To stop, enjoy the results of your work, and rest is so important that God himself did it. But Jesus is saying that this is—it's to do good, and it's for the healing of people, for the benefit of us, our benefit. Continue on in verse 14. Then the Pharisees went out and plotted against him how they might destroy him.

But when Jesus knew it, he withdrew from there, and great multitudes followed him, and he healed them all. Yet he warned them not to make him known, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying, "Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved in whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my spirit upon him, and he will declare justice to the Gentiles. He will not quarrel nor cry out, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.

A bruised reed he will not break, and smoking flax he will not quench till he sends forth justice to victory. And in his names the Gentiles will trust." You know, Jesus was not against getting things done. And it seems like throughout Jesus' ministry, he was constantly trying to pull people back and rein people in. People were always eager, or there were times where people were eager to tell about Jesus and what he had done. And he told the people not to make him known. You know, why is that?

You know, we might not understand all the reasons, but did Jesus want the king—didn't Jesus want the kingdom of God to grow? Why wasn't he proclaiming his divinity? Was Jesus just being humble, you know, and saying, "No, no, I'm good. Just don't acknowledge me. Don't acknowledge me as a king"? Was Jesus feigning humility? The reality is Jesus was the most intentional guy to walk this earth. Jesus was very calculated in everything he did.

Jesus would have never missed an opportunity to glorify the Father and grow the kingdom. But Jesus knew that his time was not yet. He was not in the streets proclaiming his divinity, letting everyone know that he was the Messiah, trying to bring about his kingship, to make it happen. Jesus knew he didn't need to glorify himself. Why? Because not yet, his time was still coming. Jesus was working on God's time. So there's this idea that I share as kingdom timing or the timing of the kingdom.

And I want to kind of piggyback on the concept, the same concept of kingdom economics, you know, the concept of the upside-down kingdom. So let's use kingdom economics, for example, is the idea that, okay, let me back up. So how the world views money, the world says, "The more money that I have, the more successful of a person I am." In kingdom economics, the more you give, the happier and the more successful of a person you are. So it's that upside-down concept, that upside-down kingdom.

And I think it's the same applies with time. The world says the faster you work, the sooner you can move on to the next project, the more you accomplish. In kingdom timing, the more time something takes, the better results you see. And I want to look at a few examples in the Bible where it took many years to prepare someone for the work God called them to do, many years to turn someone into the person they needed to be.

So number one, Joseph, he waited 13 years, approximately 13 years from the time he had his dream to the time that he was actually—his brothers came and bowed before him in Egypt. Moses spent 40 years in the wilderness becoming the person he needed to be for the great work of leading the children of Israel out of Egypt. David waited 15 years from the time that he was anointed king to when he actually became king and ascended the throne from running from Saul.

And the Apostle Paul spent around 14 years from the time he was converted to when he emerged as a key leader in the New Testament church. And Jesus waited 30 years before starting his ministry. Even as the Son of God, he waited 30 years to prepare him for his ministry. Time is one of our best strategies. And how does this apply to us? We live in a world of an accelerated pace. Life, we are distracted, and life is accelerated. We drive in our cars. We buy things at the grocery store, sometimes pre-made.

We have credit cards. We're driving around, getting things done, and then someone pulls out in front of us and drives 10 miles an hour slower than the speed limit. You know, and how can they have any self-worth driving that slow? You know, the concept of resting and slowing down instead of hurrying through our life has been really good for my wife and I. And one of the reasons I'm sharing this as a message, and this is going to be—this is in place of my testimony time, so it hurries things up.

But anyways, this is really what I've been growing the last six months. And so, I should say, my wife and I, we've been growing this. And you know, they say that opposites attract, but in the case of my wife and I, we both have a heavy dose of appreciation for efficiency. And the more children we have, the more we tend to operate our home like a machine rather than a home. You feel yourself losing time, and you want to make it up somewhere.

So like, for example, my wife and I, when we go grocery shopping, we've—it's taken us about two years to fine-tune the transition from the parking lot into Aldi's. And it goes, you know, I drop her off at the door. She has two quarters in her hands. She goes, grabs one cart. I go park the car. I start unstrapping the kids. She brings a quarter or the grocery cart to me. I unload the kids in the grocery cart.

She goes, grabs another grocery cart and starts shopping as I load the bags and the kids, and I catch up with her. And the nice thing about that is we get about 4% of our shopping done before I even get there. So, but what I've started to—what I've started to come to realize is what am I actually accomplishing? How much am I end up getting done? Are we creating by trying to implement all these systems and this mechanism to run our family to be more efficient? Are we creating stress? Are we creating frustration?

And what kind of home is my children going to grow up in? So what are the symptoms of hurry? And I really want to think about this. I know hurry seems insignificant, but I want to think about how it affects who we are in our Christian life. Are we easily distracted? Do we have a short attention span? Do we complain? Are we discontent? Are we always hoping to be somewhere else and not happy where we are at? Do we get easily frustrated by setbacks? Or do we take the time to listen to others with our full attention?

Are we content this very moment where I am? Do we endure setbacks with patience, knowing that someone pulling out in front of us will lose me about one minute, one to five minutes of this world's time? You know, we've—Kevin, a while back, talked, had a message on virtues, and it's been one of the elusive things to virtues is how do I actually become virtuous? How do I actually practice these things? How do I practice patience? How do I practice gratitude? How can I be proactive in these virtues?

How would Jesus live? Jesus was not in a hurry. Slow down. We can still get things done. Jesus isn't calling us to be sloths. He's not calling us to move slow. We can still move and act with intention. We should still work hard. But I think the key to this is that when people become the obstacles, we have crossed the line into hurry. Hurry pits us and our projects against others. And hurry destroys spiritual formation. So I want to leave you with one quote from the Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer.

And he says, "Have you ever seen someone who is in a hurry that was acting like Jesus?"