God Cannot Be Hurried—2 Peter 3:8-9

Russ Ramsey

God cannot be hurried. This is a concept I am convinced every Christian has struggled with at some point.

I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately. We are people who have hearts that have been “wired” to desire—and to feel that absence, that hollow, when our desires are not met. The holidays are for many a season where desire is felt and the hollow is hard. This season that is intended to be filled with cheer, for many, serves to remind them of what they lack. Maybe it’s whole relationships, maybe it’s provision… For the believer in Christ, Christmas is a reflection on Jesus’ first coming with an eye toward His second. Imagine what the span of time was like for the faithful of God who lived out the days between the prophecies of the coming Messiah in Isaiah and the birth of Jesus in the Gospels. Hundreds of years—the promise of the Immanuel, “God with Us,” but the fulfillment coming so much later.

How desperately we desire God to move—to show up on the scene of our lives. And we feel the urgency of the moment… waiting for God. Dear Friend, He is not slow in keeping His promises as some understand slowness to be. And this holiday season, there is contained in the nativity a sealed promise, a guarantee. God is at work in His world responding perfectly in the fullness of time to every need, every wound and every desire as only One unencumbered by the restrictions of time can. It is foolishness to think that God has left the scene. No man who purchases a deed to a plot of land and draws up plans to build a house there and has all the materials necessary to build that house purchased and delivered to that site walks away from it. Neither has God walked away from the Kingdom He is building—the Kingdom He has purchased with the blood of His own Son—whose birth we celebrate this season. He is not slow in keeping His promises.