July 25 – Thoughts on Psalm 37-39 & Acts 26

A speaker was sharing about a conversation he had with a Millennial last year.  The Millennial was going to leave his job and find a new career.  “I’m just not finding my current job fulfilling,” he said.  When asked how long he’d felt this, he said it was since he began the job… three months earlier.

We can complain that “kids today” don’t understand that you have to stick to something for a while before deciding if it is worthwhile.  We can complain that they are terminally impatient and can’t keep their attention on one thing for more than 30 seconds.  But the reality is that we all have a problem with patience, with temporal perspective, and with waiting as long as we should.

The Psalmist today gives us hope that though the wicked seem to flourish in this life, their flourishing will be short-lived and then will fade to nothing.  Our persecution and lack of wealth will be equally short lived and then we will become all that God has in store for us.  But we have to be patient.

And patience is one of our weakest points.  We’ve been sick, or afraid, or hurt for a few days, a few weeks, even a month and we question God’s love, His power, and His nearness.  We see the corrupt grow in wealth and power for a year or two and we question God’s promise to bring justice to our lives.

But God calls us to see with His perspective.  He calls us to look with eternal eyes.  If we could see millennia as He does, we’d see that wealth and power are fleeting and don’t last, and that righteousness and love last forever.  But since we cannot, we have to trust Him, to live by faith, and know that He is acting justly, lovingly, graciously… but seldom as quickly as we’d like.