Few things are less understood and acknowledged than God’s incredible patience, and there’s no better time to discuss the patience of God than when we are beginning to wrap up the story of Abraham, Sarah, Ishmael, and Hagar. Impatience wrecked their family peace while God’s patience leads to Jesus! And Jesus shows us God’s patience in how He dealt with His very annoying disciples.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
The Bible has a lot to say about patience, but I think we can learn a lot more about patience by what the Bible shows without even mentioning that word. Have you ever stopped to think about what patience looks like in a baby, a toddler, a preschooler, a ten-year-old, a high schooler, a young adult, a parent, a teacher, someone who is middle-aged, or a grandparent? Did you have different things in mind for each of those? Did anyone expect the baby to have any patience at all? Only folks who have never been around one before! Everyone knows that we aren’t born with patience—the ability to wait for what we want—and that we have to learn it and grow in it. And as you will get older, you will find out that patience can’t ever grow unless we don’t always get what we want right when we want it.
In the book of Galatians, written by Paul, he told the believers in Galatia who were being treated unfairly by people who wanted them to have surgery before they could be accepted at the cool kids’ table at lunch—he told them not to give in to peer pressure at all but to prove that they belonged to the people of God through being like Jesus. And one of the big ways was by becoming more and more patient, which was really hard when people were rejecting them for not being Jewish. You see, the very first believers in Jesus were all Jews, and so when the boys were babies, they had surgery to remove some skin from the end of their penises. But when people who weren’t Jews came to follow Jesus, some of the Jews (not all of them) weren’t willing to eat at the same table with them unless they had the same surgery as adults and became Jewish. Paul was angry because they were saying that surgery was more important than following Jesus. And the Galatian believers who weren’t Jewish were having to be very patient while they got it all figured out. Acts 15 tells the story of how the brother of Jesus decided that it wasn’t fair to do that to them. Some of the Jewish believers had been making the non-Jewish believers do something they had never had to do, which is very painful as an adult, just to be able to eat at the same table with them. The Galatians had a choice—to be patient and to listen to Paul telling them that they had to trust Jesus and follow Him while things were getting figured out, or to give in to the bullies and get the surgery so they could be part of the in-crowd.
And patience has been a big problem up to now in the story of Abraham and Sarah—kinda. On one hand, Abraham kept following God for eleven years even though he never got the son he needed for God’s promises to be true. I mean, that’s a long time to wait on a promise, right? He could have gotten himself another wife, and gotten rid of Sarah because the laws in those days said that was perfectly fine to get rid of a wife who couldn’t have babies even though God wouldn’t ever say something like that is okay. God said that the only reason He was okay with men getting rid of their wives was if their wives had a boyfriend—which isn’t ever okay. But men were getting rid of their wives for all sorts of terrible reasons, like finding someone prettier! That was a big problem in Jesus’s time among the Pharisees. But Abraham didn’t do that, which was pretty cool. But when Sarah couldn’t wait any longer, she gave Abraham her slave woman, Hagar, and told them to have a baby so that she could be a mom. And Abraham went along with it. And he was very happy when Ishmael was born and loved him. But because of their impatience, and especially Sarah’s, things weren’t ever the same in their family again. Sarah hated Hagar and Hagar hated Sarah and Sarah also hated Ishmael, who hadn’t asked for any of this drama, right? Sarah was angry at Abraham too. Abraham was happy to be a dad and probably wished everyone could just be as happy as he was. Because they didn’t wait and trust God, everything was a total mess.
But Ishmael was thirteen before Abraham figured out what a terrible mistake they had made in God’s eyes. Does that surprise you? That God was so patient that He didn’t immediately yell at them for the mess or give up on them and choose someone else? Sometimes we think that God is okay with what we are doing just because He doesn’t jump down our throats about it but God often waits a long time before telling us that He isn’t a fan of our way of doing things. And especially if we didn’t ask him before doing something so drastic. God did say he would bless Ishmael and make him a great nation of people but God let Abraham in on a secret—this wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. God had plans from the beginning to make a miracle baby through a ninety-year-old woman as a sign that this new people He was creating was all on Him and all His idea, and no humans had anything to do with making it happen on their own. Abraham’s heart was broken because he loved Ishmael and wanted him to be God’s choice. But he had to learn that when we take shortcuts to get what we want or what we believe God wants for us, that God doesn’t have to change His plans and go with ours instead. And when that happens, sometimes it really hurts us and others so it’s a good idea to just keep waiting. Believe me, when it’s time and God wants you to do something, He can make sure you know about it!
Abraham and Sarah’s punishment for being impatient wasn’t from anything that God did. What they did just naturally led to bad consequences for absolutely everyone. Even when Sarah becomes a mom, which we will talk about next week, she’s still going to be upset and angry about Hagar and Ishmael—even though it was totally her idea. Being impatient can wreck the lives of a lot of people so we need to learn how to wait for what we want, no matter how bad we want it. And I totally know how it feels to want a baby when you can’t have one. It took a while and a lot of trust and patience but God finally gave us twin boys to adopt, His way, and not the way I wanted any of it to go. But I am glad that it turned out this way because they are grownups now and I am so proud of them both. If I had been able to have kids right away, I wouldn’t have learned anything about trusting God and I probably wouldn’t have been able to deal with how difficult it was to adopt them. And if one of my kids wasn’t special needs then I wouldn’t have ever been able to learn how to teach and explain things the way I do to you. God has things all figured out so we don’t need to figure it out for Him—what we have to do is learn to become as much like Jesus as possible so that when it’s time, we will be able to handle it better. You will notice as you grow up that a lot of people who say they follow Jesus don’t really act like it. Being like Jesus isn’t about going to church, it’s about becoming like Him on the inside and the outside. Church can help, but if you go without becoming more and more like Jesus then it’s more like just learning history in school and then just forgetting about it once you get home.
We can be patient because God is so patient and this is why I talked earlier about what that Bible says about patience even when it doesn’t mention the word at all. Sometimes, when people only know a few parts of the Bible, they focus on the parts when something terrible happens to the children of Israel. They don’t think about the fact that it doesn’t happen very often and how much God tries to prevent terrible things from happening to His people because He loves them so much. God didn’t create humans because He needed someone around to hate and pick on. I mean, what would be the point? Humans are really annoying and if you haven’t figured that out yet, you definitely will. We are always up to a lot of nonsense and God is not killing us like I probably would if I was Him. I get irritated when people don’t use their turn signals—you don’t even want to know what I would do to people who actually do evil things. I couldn’t be trusted with the power that God has. It’s scary to even think of what I might be capable of.
But God was willing to save Sodom if only ten good people were found in it. Wow. God is going to give warnings to Pharaoh and the people of Egypt before each and every plague, and a lot of the Egyptians are going to listen to Him—and they will be saved from the bad things happening. God is going to tell His people how to live wisely and more lovingly than all the nations around them and He is going to warn them about what will happen if they don’t—that other nations are going to be able to come in and treat them like everyone else gets treated. God will send them judges and prophets to warn them and rescue them time and time again because He doesn’t want bad things to happen to them. God’s goal is to make Jesus happen, and so He started out with two people from Babylon and is patiently leading them around and slowly changing them because He knows what they can and can’t deal with and understand. He’s the same way with us—He isn’t unfair when we really don’t know any better. And generation after generation, God kept moving His people more and more toward Jesus coming. He had to be very patient and wait until just the right time. Sometimes Abraham’s descendants were doing a really good job and sometimes they were even worse than the nations around them but God never gave up and He never wanted them to fail. It took almost two thousand years for God to make Jesus happen after He chose Abraham. God never gave up and He never stopped loving Abraham even with how badly Abraham messed up along the way.
And throughout the Bible, we see examples of people being patient and waiting on God to work things out and people who aren’t. David was very patient before He was king. Saul was trying to kill him and David had some chances to kill Saul so he could become king quicker but he decided to wait and let God take care of it instead. David knew he would be king exactly when God wanted him to be king and didn’t do anything to make it happen earlier. When the Bible says that David was a man after God’s own heart, it doesn’t mean that David couldn’t do some really evil things because his heart was perfect like God’s. It means that God chose David out of everyone. David was the sort of king God wanted His people to have. Saul, on the other hand, was the sort of king the people wanted—very tall. Saul wasn’t patient at all, and he was always doing the wrong thing at the wrong time because he wanted things his way and didn’t trust God to work things out. Many years later when David started to act more like Saul, God patiently waited for him to come to his senses and do what was right but when he never did, God sent a prophet to him to warn him and only then did God punish David because what he did was so terrible that he couldn’t be allowed to just get away with it. But it took a lot for God to decide to punish David because He is so patient.
Has anyone ever told you that God is like some mean cop just waiting for you to do something wrong so He can send a lightning bolt at your butt? Well, there are humans like that but if God was like that there would be no humans left anywhere. That’s one of the things the Bible teaches us when it shows us how badly His people can mess up without being destroyed. God can wait hundreds of years before taking matters into His own hands. The whole reason the Bible has prophets mentioned so often is because they were speaking for God to His people and their number one message was to try to get them to turn around and do what is right. The priests were supposed to teach the people what God wanted because almost no one could read but they weren’t always doing a good job and sometimes they were even part of the problem because they were worshiping false gods too. It was the job of the prophets to speak for God to the people and to speak to God to ask for mercy for His people. Do you remember what Abraham did? Abraham begged God to spare innocent people in Sodom and then he prayed to God to heal Abimelech and his family. God sends prophets to warn His people because He loves them and is very patient but if God waits forever then His people won’t be any different from the pagan nations around them at all and then there would be no Jesus.
When we read the Gospels, about Jesus, and we see the nonsense His disciples are up to—and especially Peter, James, and John—we realize that Jesus is what God’s patience looks like. Whenever Jesus says something like, “How long am I going to have to put up with you guys?” he is talking about being patient. When Jesus is teaching and healing in the synagogues, He is being patient with the people there who don’t understand who He is. When Jesus allowed the chief priests and their guards to take Him prisoner, He was being patient. And when they were lying about Him and smacking Him around, He was patiently putting up with it. And when the Romans tortured and crucified Him, He was being patient. He was being more patient than any other person has been, ever. Yes, Jesus is the logos of God, His very thoughts and intentions, but He also had a human body that was hurting and human emotions. It isn’t just that Jesus was patient with our evil and didn’t fight back. We have to know what Jesus could have done, with all the power of God, to save Himself and take revenge. But not only didn’t He do that, but He didn’t take revenge after He came alive again either. That’s amazing. Jesus is patient with our evil world because He has lived in it—He even called us sheep without a shepherd, which isn’t a good thing. He is patient with us because He has felt everything we have felt inside and outside and He has mercy on us. He understands how confusing and hurtful and unfair this world can be and He wants to rescue us, not destroy us. Sometimes, the nastiest people we know can become the most wonderful once Jesus gets through to them. Anyone can become like Jesus, absolutely anyone, and that’s amazing. That’s the only real proof we need of God’s patience. He wants us to be like Jesus right now, which is the same thing as being like God, but He also knows how to wait.
So, if He can wait for us then we should learn to wait for each other. But I want you guys to know what we should and shouldn’t wait for and how to wait. If someone is beating you up, I don’t want you to wait for them to decide to be nice; that ain’t happening anytime soon. And especially if the person who is hurting you is a grownup. It isn’t your job to wait for them to be more like Jesus—your job is to get somewhere safe and get help, okay? You can show your patience with them by not getting revenge and by praying for them. By revenge, I mean doing something even worse to them when you get the chance. If God treated us that way we’d be in huge trouble. But sometimes we have a friend who is going through a hard time or is disagreeing with us and maybe we just want to give up on them because they aren’t fun anymore. Patience tells us that we stick with our friends even when there are troubles that can make our time less fun. Maybe you are popular and your friend isn’t—maybe they don’t even know how to be or they are just so different that other people think they are strange and want to pick on them. It wouldn’t be kind or patient to ditch them. You aren’t perfect either and you would want your friends to stick with you anyway, right?
When I was a kid, I had a best friend named Tessa (not her real name) and I just loved her, but when we got into High School, Tessa became a cheerleader and I was a total nerd. I was one of those kids who got bullied and picked on a lot. I have never known how to fit in. I don’t want to go to parties. I love reading and history and science. I am not good at sports. In fact, nothing I was good at was ever going to get me on the good side of the popular kids and they really made my life miserable. But what really hurt was that Tessa started to act like we hadn’t ever been friends. She was really mean to me when the others would pick on me. She stopped being patient with me being different from everyone else. I got a letter from her about ten years ago telling me that she wished we could have been friends in High School, and it made me really mad and sad because it was her choice not to be friends anymore. That’s what happens when we aren’t patient with the people in our lives who aren’t totally like us. Instead of continuing to love them, we just get irritated and get rid of them. It hurts very badly when it happens to us and so we shouldn’t ever do it to others. Sometimes people who have been friends kinda go in other directions and that’s normal, but when it’s because we’re not loving them and being patient, that’s always a sad thing.
I don’t know about you but God has been very patient with me. I can be a total gooberhead and sometimes when I am sad I push Him away and ignore Him. Or when I am hurting, I do things I know aren’t good because I just don’t care enough to do what is right. I have even done things on purpose to try to make Him mad if I am angry at Him. In our lives we are going to go through all kinds of things and feel all sorts of feelings and I want you to know that you can be honest with God because He knows already what’s going on in your life. He understands why you are hurt, sad and angry and knows that when people are confused, they do all kinds of stuff that just isn’t good. And He’s patient with us while we work through the bad stuff, and when we let Him, He helps us deal with it. Having bad stuff happen is pretty normal. Learning to deal with those things gives us something called endurance—like not giving up when running a very long race. Going through bad things means we need to be patient. Sometimes the bad stuff won’t be made okay until Jesus comes back and we have our perfect bodies and we see the people we love again.
Bad times are much worse when we aren’t patient. They can seem like the end of the world, like nothing is ever going to be better. But as we get older, we understand that no matter how bad something is, bad stuff doesn’t last forever. The things that hurt me when I was a kid or embarrassed me or made me feel like I wanted to be dead aren’t even important to me anymore. Even though I thought I wouldn’t ever be able to forget those bad things, sometimes I go for years without remembering something and I can forget about it again just as quickly. It’s amazing how different our lives can be when we learn to wait for better things in the future and when we understand that being patient now makes the bad stuff a whole lot less bad than when we think that nothing will ever change.
Jesus’s disciples weren’t ever patient about much of anything before Jesus died. They wanted to kill the Samaritans for locking them out of their city when they found out that Jesus was going to Jerusalem for the Passover instead of spending it with them. But Jesus saw another day in the future when many Samaritans would understand and accept Him as the Messiah, the King. Killing them right then might have made James and John feel better—but they were just being impatient because the Samaritans weren’t getting it right that minute. When Paul first began to preach the Gospel, he was very impatient and instead of waiting for God to tell him what to do, he began going to all the synagogues and preaching about Jesus and it almost got him killed. But after that, he went and spent years alone with God at Mt Sinai, and when he returned he went out to the Gentiles all over Asia Minor and introduced many thousands of people to Jesus. Many years later, because he had been impatient before, some powerful people wanted him dead.
The disciples even pushed and prodded at Jesus to do this or that and especially to become king as soon as possible. They wanted to be important and powerful men—they did not want to die or be poor or rejected. They wanted what they wanted but Jesus was telling them to be patient and that things in this world would be very different than what will happen when Jesus returns and lives here as our King and we all have perfect resurrection bodies. When Jesus returns, everything wrong will be made right. Everything that is unfair will be fair. When we really believe that it is easier to be patient right now. It doesn’t mean that we stop trying to make things right but it does mean that we never give up.
I love you. I am praying for you. I want you to talk with your family about being patient and ways that you can practice being patient with each other. If you have younger brothers or sisters or cousins, you could practice by being patient with them. If you are the younger brother, sister, or cousin, you can practice being patient about the things that they can do but you can’t yet. They had to wait too. It’s not fun but it’s important.