“The Lord’s Timing!”

“But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” (2 Peter 4:8-9 ESV)

Waiting for the Lord’s timing is one of the hardest things for believers to do. Especially if you are used to “fixing” problems when they arise and do not wait for someone else to fix them. So often, we get confused about God’s timing. We think that God is slow to answer just because he has not answered the same prayer we have been praying for a day, a week, a month, or a year. That, my friend, is not true. As we mature in our faith in following our Savior, we start to catch a glimpse of how faithful our God is. Peter says in verse 9, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” (emphasis mine).

Peter is explicitly talking about the judgment of our righteous God in an unrighteous world and the second coming of the Lord Jesus in this passage, but this truth of “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness” is a general Biblical truth as well. Did you notice in verse 8 that Peter says, “that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day.” This is a spiritual truth that we as humans find very hard to comprehend, but once we do grasp the importance of this truth, it changes everything for us.

Once we understand that the Lord’s timing is on His timetable and not ours, it frees us to stop demanding “immediate” resolutions to our prayer requests. We can stop counting how many days, weeks, or years we have been praying for God’s intervention. We are free to pray as often as we wish for God’s will and not our own, and now we are free to pray for God’s timing and not our timing.

So many “teachers” today, as they look at our culture here in the US, are talking about the imminent return of Jesus because “It just can’t get any worse.” That is also not true; it can and probably will get a lot worse with this ungodly world that we live in. But remember that church teachers for the past two thousand years have been saying that the time for Jesus’ return is now, yet the Lord has not returned.

I believe the Biblical truth they are forgetting is “… that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” If we can calibrate our human timeline to this Biblical truth, Jesus has only been gone for “two days.”

The next time you start getting anxious about “how long, Oh Lord,” when you do not see the immediate resolution to your prayers, remember you have not even been praying for “a day” yet. God has plenty of time to answer your prayer in a timely manner. As believers, we need to get rid of our “Prayer Watch/Calander” and continue praying for God’s will and timing. He is not slow to fulfill His promise; He is right on time, His time.

"Living in Grace is not about what I can do, but about what Jesus has already done!"