Battling Unbelief | John Piper

John Piper. Battling Unbelief: Defeating Sin with Superior Pleasure. Multnomah, 2007. 176 pp.

Battling Impatience

In God’s Place, At God’s Pace, By Future Grace

Impatience is a form of unbelief. It’s what we begin to feel when we start to doubt the wisdom of God’s timing or the goodness of God’s guidance. It springs up in our hearts when our plan is interrupted or shattered. It may be prompted by a long wait in a checkout line or a sudden blow that knocks out half our dreams. The opposite of impatience is not a glib denial of loss. It’s a deepening, ripening, peaceful willingness to wait for God in the unplanned place of obedience, and to walk with God at the unplanned pace of obedience—to wait in his place, and go at his pace. And the key is faith in future grace. . . .

The Inner Strength of Patience

Strength is the right word. The apostle Paul prayed for the church at Colossae, that they would be “strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience” (Colossians 1:11). Patience is the evidence of an inner strength. Impatient people are weak, and therefore dependent on external supports—like schedules that go just right and circumstances that support their fragile hearts. Their outbursts of oaths and threats and harsh criticisms of the culprits who crossed their plans do not sound weak. But that noise is all a camouflage of weakness. Patience demands tremendous inner strength.

For the Christian, this strength comes from God. That is why Paul is praying for the Colossians. He is asking God to empower them for the patient endurance that the Christian life requires. But when he says that the strength of patience is “according to [God’s] glorious might” he doesn’t just mean that it takes divine power to make a person patient. He means that faith in this glorious might is the channel through which the power for patience comes. Patience is indeed a fruit of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22) but the Holy Spirit empowers (with all his fruit) through “hearing with faith” (Galatians 3:5). Therefore, Paul is praying that God would connect us with the “glorious might” that empowers patience. And that connection is faith.

Trusting God to Make All Barriers Blessings

Specifically the glorious might of God that we need to see and trust is the power of God to turn all our detours and obstacles into glorious outcomes.

If we believed that our hold-up at the long red light was God’s keeping us back from an accident about to happen, we would be patient and happy. If we believed that our broken leg was God’s way of revealing early cancer in the x-ray so that we would survive, we would not murmur at the inconvenience. If we believed that the middle-of-the-night phone call was God’s way of waking us to smell smoke in the basement, we would not grumble at the loss of sleep. The key to patience is faith in the future grace of God’s “glorious might” to transform all our interruptions into rewards.

In other words, the strength of patience hangs on our capacity to believe that God is up to something good for us in all our delays and detours. This requires great faith in future grace, because the evidence is seldom evident. . . .

Key to Patience: “God Meant It for Good”

For example, the story of Joseph in Genesis 37-50 is a great lesson in why we should have faith in the sovereign future grace of God. Joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers, which must have tested his patience tremendously. But he is given a good job in Potiphar’s household. Then, when he is acting uprightly in the unplanned place of obedience, Potiphar’s wife lies about his integrity and has him thrown into prison—another great trial to his patience. But again things turn for the better and the prison-keeper gives him responsibility and respect. But just when he thinks he is about to get a reprieve from the Pharaoh’s cupbearer, whose dream he interpreted, the cupbearer forgets him for two more years. Finally, the meaning of all these detours and delays becomes clear. Joseph says to his long-estranged brothers, “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. . . . As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Genesis 45:7; 50:20).

What would have been the key to patience for Joseph during all those long years of exile and abuse? The answer is: faith in future grace—the sovereign grace of God to turn the unplanned place and the unplanned pace into the happiest ending imaginable. . . .

The Lord Is Compassionate and Merciful

We have stressed that this grace is “sovereign.” We also need to stress that it is grace. It is merciful and full of good will toward us. This is what James stresses about Job’s experience of suffering, and his struggle with impatience. James commands us to be patient and gives us the key . . . (James 5:7-11).

James wants us to see the purpose of Job’s suffering. The word for “purpose” is telos and means “goal.” It was God’s goal in all his dealings with Job to be merciful, and fit him for a greater blessing. This is what Job had missed and why he repented from his murmuring the way he did: “Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). The power of patience flows from faith in this truth: In all his dealings with us his goal “is compassionate and merciful.” Faith in future grace is faith in grace that is sovereign, and sovereignty that is gracious.

Through Faith and Patience We Inherit the Promises

Patience is sustained by faith in the promise of future grace. In every unplanned frustration on the path of obedience God’s Word holds true: “I will not turn away from doing good to them. . . . I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul” (Jeremiah 32:40-41). He is pursuing us with goodness and mercy all our days (Psalm 23:6). Impatient complaining is therefore a form of unbelief.

Which is why the command to be patient takes on such immense significance. Jesus said, “By your [patient] endurance you will gain your lives” (Luke 21:19). And the writer to the Hebrews said, “[Be] imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises” (Hebrews 6:12). We come into our inheritance on the path of patience, not because patience is a work of the flesh that earns salvation, but because patience is a fruit of faith in future grace.

We need to constantly remind ourselves that we are saved for good works, not by good works. “By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:8-10). Faith alone unites us to Christ who is our perfect righteousness before God. In this righteous standing, which we have by faith alone, we are given the Holy Spirit to help us endure to the end in growing likeness to Christ. This endurance in patient and imperfect obedience is necessary (since fruit proves the reality of faith and union with Christ), but it is not the ground of our right standing with God. Christ is. Because of this confidence and all it implies for our future, we endure through hard times.

Excerpted from Battling Unbelief © 2007 by John Piper. Used by permission of Multnomah Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpt may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of Multnomah Publishers.

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