Worth the Wait (Friday Devotional)

“Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.”

- James 5:7-8

If there’s one thing Christmas teaches every year, it’s patience. As a child, you go to bed on Christmas Eve imagining the gifts you’ll receive the next morning, wishing you could open them now—but, your parents tell you, you have to wait. You have to be patient. As an adult, Christmas is a veritable parade of patience—patience in lines at the mall, patience in holiday traffic, patience with your family. For entirely different reasons than when you were a child, you can’t wait for Christmas Day to arrive. But you have to be patient.

So the Advent message is one that resonates through all the stress of the season: be patient. Every year we enter into the story of Jesus’s birth, imagining how we might have responded if we had been Mary or Joseph or a shepherd in the field. We try to empathize with the Jews of that day, eagerly anticipating the arrival of a Messiah and praying for him to come soon. And as we make our way through the story, excited to get to the glory of a Bethlehem night, we can almost hear the Spirit calling: be patient.

Alongside this remembrance of the birth of Christ, Advent calls us to anticipate the day when he will return. “The coming of the Lord is near,” James 5:8 says, and especially during this season of expectation and hope, our eyes should turn to that reality and our hearts should be strengthened because of it. But as we anxiously dream of that glorious day when Christ will come again, the Spirit offers counsel: be patient.

Waiting is hard, but as any child will tell you on Christmas morning, there is nothing quite like the moment when your patience is rewarded. So in this season of Advent, as you are trace Mary and Joseph’s steps toward Bethlehem and look ahead at the steps still to be taken before Christ’s return, may you follow Scripture’s command and wait with the patience that only the Holy Spirit can provide. Don’t worry—Jesus is worth the wait.