The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
2 Peter 3:9 (NIV)
He Is Patient With You
The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. People were telling Peter’s readers that everything had gone on exactly as it always had since the beginning and that nothing was coming. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
He was waiting for the people who got this letter. He wanted them to come to repentance rather than perish.
Two brothers ran a watch shop in a town small enough that the eleven years of silence about their father’s house were common knowledge. They worked six feet apart. One did the cases and the bracelets and the other did the movements, and a repair went from bench to bench and back without much said over it. Customers found them pleasant. In the winter the older one moved his brother’s tea onto the radiator when it started to go cold, and neither of them ever mentioned it.
What Peter describes costs God something. He’s not soft about the ending anywhere in this letter, and he describes a day that arrives like a thief and a sky that goes with a roar. The reason it hasn’t come yet is that God is waiting on the ones who haven’t turned around.
Fifteen years of praying about the same name, with nothing moving, looks from here like a God who isn’t listening. He is giving room in those fifteen years, and giving it at his own expense.
The younger brother will carry a movement over to the other bench in the morning and his brother will take it without looking up, and the eleven years will be twelve before either of them says the first word of it.
A Prayer to Remember
I’ve called you slow, God, and I meant it the way people mean it about a line that isn’t moving. Be patient with me at the same rate you’re being patient with the one I gave up on.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
