Hanukkah: The Slowness of God
When the Empire Moves Fast and God Moves Slow
Slowness has a bad reputation. In a culture that prizes speed — where people walk fast to avoid getting in each other's way, where a normal pace can feel like an obstacle to someone with an overactive nervous system — patience reads as a defect. So when believers accuse God of being slow, Matthew Vander Els suggested, it can feel like something to defend him against, as if slowness were an insult. It isn't. It only becomes a problem when people want control, and someone else's timing gets in the way.
That tension sat at the center of this Hanukkah-season message: what do you do with a God who sometimes moves at a pace that feels unbearable?
The Speed of Empire, the Silence of Heaven
Vander Els returned to the story of Antiochus IV, the Greek king who desecrated the Jerusalem temple, outlawed Torah observance, and moved with shocking speed — all of it happening not over years, but within months in 168 BCE. He described it as a deliberate strategy, the same logic behind blitzkrieg or "shock and awe": move so fast that resistance can't organize, and civilian populations break before they can fight. Most Jews complied, not out of desire but survival — the empire made resistance cost not just one's own life but the lives of one's children.
Against that speed stood Mattathias and his sons, who fled to the hills and began a guerrilla resistance — without a prophet, an angel, or any word from heaven telling them what to do. "No prophet came. Just silence," Vander Els said. What followed was years of grinding, hidden work: ambushing patrols, losing friends, wondering if any of it mattered. Three years passed between the temple's desecration and its rededication. Every one of those days, he said, "felt like God was moving too slow."
Habakkuk's Honest Complaint
To frame the theology of waiting, Vander Els turned to the prophet Habakkuk, who lived some 400 years before the Maccabees but asked the identical question: "How long, Lord? How long must I call for help, but you do not listen?" He called this "honest faith" — the cry of someone who has prayed and prayed while injustice wins and the wicked prosper. God's answer, from Habakkuk 2:3, wasn't the comfort Habakkuk wanted: "For the revelation awaits an appointed time... Though it linger, wait for it. It will certainly come and not delay." Waiting, Vander Els emphasized, "isn't passive. Waiting is actively trusting in the slowness of God."
He offered several reasons God's timing runs slow rather than indifferent. First, transformation can't be microwaved — character, healing, and trees all take time, and the Maccabees' years in the wilderness, learning to fight and trust each other, weren't wasted time but preparation. Second, God's promises often span generations: Abraham waited 25 years for Isaac, but the real promise was a nation he'd never live to see, and the author of Hebrews notes that the heroes of faith died without receiving what was promised, only glimpsing it "from a distance." Third, painful patience creates space for real trust — "if God always moved fast, we wouldn't need that faith." He connected this to Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8-9, which reframe God's slowness not as delay but as patience, "not wanting anyone to perish."
Four Hundred Years of Silence
Zooming out, Vander Els noted that Malachi was the last Old Testament prophet before four centuries of prophetic silence — and it was 200 years into that silence that Antiochus's crisis hit, with no prophet appearing to explain or promise rescue. The Judeans had to decide whether to trust a God who'd been quiet for two centuries. Lacking new revelation, they leaned on old truth: the Torah, the memory of the Exodus, the story of conquest against impossible odds. Mattathias acted "not because he had new information, because he had old truth that was still true." Psalm 77:1-2 — "I will remember the deeds of the Lord... I will consider all your works" — became the model: remembering what God has already done as fuel for present faithfulness.
He also warned against the temptation bitterness poses during long waits — the pull to roll patience and trust into resentment toward God, believing his delay means he doesn't care. "Bitterness poisons you," he said, and can make a person "incapable of receiving the deliverance even when it finally comes." The Maccabees could have turned cynical; instead they stayed faithful and soft-hearted through the waiting.
As a closing aside, Vander Els noted that the dreidel game is a much later addition to Hanukkah tradition — not from the Maccabees at all, but borrowed roughly 1,600 years later from a medieval European gambling game called Totum, which Jewish communities relabeled with Hebrew letters and repurposed to teach faithfulness. He framed this as a model of contextualization: engaging culture rather than retreating from it, per Jeremiah 29's call to seek the welfare of the city.
Application
Vander Els closed by naming the specific weight some in the room were carrying — a marriage, a wayward child, a diagnosis, a job, a depression, a wound that hasn't healed — and insisted that waiting on these things is not passivity. He urged believers to "be active in your patience": keep praying, keep showing up, keep being faithful in small things even when the big breakthrough hasn't come. He pointed to Hebrews' charge not to "throw away your confidence," since it "will be richly rewarded," and reminded listeners that Abraham, Israel in Egypt, and the exiles in Babylon all waited far longer than felt fair — some never seeing the promise fulfilled in their lifetime. "Your waiting isn't wasted," he said. The charge for the season: light the next candle, take the next step, and trust that the small flame held today is part of a light meant to fill the whole house.
Read the transcript (5,901 words)
Automated transcript, lightly edited for readability. Scripture appears as spoken; the video is the authoritative teaching.
An Old Joke About Rapture
All right. Shabbat shalom everybody. Rapture. I know I say that joke all the time. It just never gets old for me. So you'll have to endure it. It is always amazing to me that I generally don't have a title or direction for the message until much later in the week. And Christy usually doesn't have a sense of direction for it when she curates the worship set for that week. And the Torah portion, same thing. And so I was nervous about this message because we're dealing with an attribute that is clearly shown in scripture, but it's one that we don't like. It's one that's negative to us. It's one that our culture teaches us is bad.
Slowness in Our Culture
Slowness. Slowness. Being slow. Now, if you're a considerate human being, you walk fast wherever you go. So you can let people not get in people's ways, right? That was a joke. People who have overactive nervous systems who pretend like they're being chased by a bear all the time walk at said speeds and then they get upset when someone's actually walking a normal pace. Something we can relate to. Slowness is not a positive thing in our culture. Peace is not a positive thing in our culture. Let's just be honest. And so when we accuse God of being slow, it can come across as, "Hey, better lay off my God." As if we need to defend. It's a negative. No, it's not. It's not. It's only a negative when we want to take control of things.
That's when someone else's slowness gets in our way. We want to take control. That's why we get upset. We're losing control. It's a nervous system response, right? Yeah, that's all it is. You're not going to die if you slow down. You're not going to die if you have to have patience or, I mean, depending on the scenario, but whatever.
Hanukkah: A Story of Waiting
And so I was really encouraged with the Torah portion and how once again, both Heather and Christy have allowed themselves to be a vessel for the Holy Spirit to speak. So thank you. Tomorrow night, Jewish families and Christians all over the world will gather to light the first candle of Hanukkah, this dedication festival. One candle on the first night, two on the second, building night by night until eight flames plus one, pushing back the darkest season of the year. But before we get there, I want to talk about light for a second. And I want to talk about, of course, waiting because Hanukkah isn't just a story of deliverance, right? It's a story about how long deliverance took.
We touched on this the last time we met—how the empire moved fast and how God moved slow, slower than I would have wanted if it were me. How people had to stay faithful in the gap between the promise and the fulfillment, that hard in-between place. And so if you've ever felt like God is taking too long in your life, like the rescue that you've been waiting for should have shown up maybe months or even years ago, the story of Hanukkah is for you.
The Speed of Empire
Two weeks ago we spoke about Antiochus IV, the Greek king who came in and desecrated the temple in Jerusalem, outlawed the Torah, tried to erase Judaism from all of existence. What I didn't tell you or really expound on is how fast it happened. 168 BCE—within months, it wasn't years that this took place. It was months. In months he had defiled the temple, outlawed circumcision and Sabbath observance. He executed families for keeping the covenant and he installed Greek officials in every village to enforce the new laws—like brown shirts, right?
The speed at which this took place was part of the strategy. It's blitzkrieg. You move so fast that shock and awe is what we call it in America. That's how, that's what we did to Iraq. And like every nation, empire has their strategy that is based on overwhelming firepower and speed. And the Greeks, they knew it down. They had it down. Move so fast that resistance doesn't have time to organize. Not only that, but the civilian population—you hit so hard that people break before they can fight back. And it worked. Worked great, but only for a while.
Most Jews complied, not because they wanted to, but because they wanted to survive. When the empire moves so fast with the violence that comes so immediately, when the cost of resistance isn't just your life but it's the lives of your kids, you begin to calculate, right? We can understand that children in an empire—the more children that a family has, the easier they are to control. Doesn't mean having kids is bad, but that's a strategy. That's what Hitler implemented. His whole thing in the 30s with Germany was to get women out of the education system, get them back at home, give them a solid role to be breeders of the empire under the guise of a household. You don't need to go to school. You don't need to form a career. And that is a standard strategy of empire building. That's why you see lots of nations focused on population.
A Few Who Resisted
Anyway, if this happened to you and me, as much as I want to be Rambo in my mind, as much as I want to be like Wolverines or Red Dawn, I got kids and I know myself, and I know that I would have to sit and think for just a little bit before I respond. And that's a hard thing to swallow, but it's honest. And that's what happened. But not all of them. There were a few. Matthias and his sons. They struck and they ran for the hills. They started a guerrilla resistance and they waited for God to do something.
Yes, leaders make a decision. But God didn't. No prophet ever showed up to give them the battle plan. No angel appeared with a military strategy. No voice from heaven said, "Hey, I'm with you." There are other stories in the Bible where that takes place. If you have the apocrypha, this story is not one of them. No prophet came. Just silence as we spoke about before, and then more silence, and then slow grinding work—hiding in caves, ambushing patrols, watching your friends fall in battle, and wondering if any of this even matters.
One year passed, and then two, and then three years. That's how long it took from the point of the desecration of the temple to the rededication of the temple. Every single one of those days felt like God was moving too slow. Because here's the thing about God's timeline, and this is probably going to break a lot of people: It's not yours. It never matches yours. It never matches mine. And sometimes I don't understand it. And sometimes I tell God I might be able to do a better job sometimes because I know when to do things at the right time. That's me being facetious. I'd mess everything up.
The Timing of God
We want rescue now, and God says in due time. We want clarity today—I want to know now. God says, "Walk by faith." I want the answer this week. Doing the fleece thing. I'm doing all the stuff. God says, "Wait for it."
Let me take you to a prophet who got this. Habakkuk. Now, Habakkuk lived about 400 years before the Maccabees. But he's asking the exact same question they were asking. God, why are you so slow? We know you're powerful. Why? And here's what he says. Oh wait, I didn't get my handy dandy.
How long, Lord? How long must I call for help, but you do not listen or cry out to you? violence, but you do not save. Why do you make me look at injustice every day? Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me. Their strife and conflict abounds. Therefore, the law is paralyzed. Injustice never prevails.
I love the Bible and I love all of the things that the Holy Spirit said needs to go into the Bible. "How long must I call for help?" That's not weak faith, by the way. That's honest faith. That's lived faith. That's the cry of someone who's been praying and praying and praying and nothing is moving. Nothing's changing. And this prophet sees injustice winning, and he sees violence going unpunished, and he sees the wicked prospering and the righteous suffering. And he's done pretending it's just fine. He wants to know, "God, where are you? And why are you taking so long?"
And God's answer: the revelation awaits an appointed time. It's such a God thing to say because it's not the answer we want, but it's the answer that we know is right. Yeah. "For the revelation waits in appointed time. It speaks of the end and will not prove false. Though it linger, wait for it. It will certainly come and not delay."
In other words, it's going to take longer than you think, but it's still coming. Wait. You've ordered the package. It's on its way. That's a hard answer because waiting isn't passive. Waiting is actively trusting in the slowness of God.
Why God Moves Slowly
Why does God move so slow though? I don't have a complete answer. I'd love the answer. I don't think anyone does because God's plan sometimes requires him to act swiftly, and other times he likes the slow game. I do have some thoughts though. First, I don't think God's slowness—it's not indifference. God's slowness is not indifference. It's the pace of deep transformation. You can microwave food in three minutes, but you can't microwave someone's character, right? Transformation, deeper transformation. Can't microwave a tree. Has to take time to grow. You can't microwave someone's healing.
And if you leave with nothing else today, I would ask you to leave with this: when you meet any other human being in this world, you can't microwave them to control them. Deep things take time. And the Maccabees spent years in the wilderness learning how to fight, learning how to trust each other, learning how to stay faithful. That wasn't wasted time. That was preparation.
Fruit trees take years to produce fruit and so do people. Two, God operates on timelines that span generations as we see all over the scriptures, not just individuals. Abraham was promised a son. He waited 25 years. But the promise wasn't about Isaac. It was about a nation that wouldn't exist for centuries. Abraham never saw that full fulfillment.
The Author of Hebrews comes in with this. All these people were still living by faith. Speaking about the heroes of faith when they died, they did not receive the things promised. They only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. Matt, we want an encouraging message. Not justifying how God likes to do things and we don't like it all the time. Oh, this is good. This is good because the moments in my life where I needed God right there are the times I'm so happy he was slow.
You can do everything right in this life and still not see the deliverance in your lifetime. But the story doesn't end with you. And that's the thing that we have to realize. Sometimes your faithfulness in the waiting is the setup for someone else's breakthrough. Sometimes you're not the main character in God's plan. That's a humbling thing to admit. Sometimes you're just a vessel that is used by God like the scriptures say.
God's Generational Timelines
Third, slowness. I've learned that in those times, painful patience creates space for faith. It creates space for me to actually let go. If God always moved fast, we wouldn't need that faith. You just respond to the obvious. But when God moves slow, that's when trust becomes trust. That's when you can pressure test it. The Maccabees couldn't see the victory coming. They just knew the covenant. They knew God was there. And they acted on that even though they couldn't see the future. That's faith. That's not certainty. That's faith. It's not clarity. It's faith. It's trust in the character of a slow-moving God.
Psalm chapter 90 verse 40 says, "A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has gone by or like a watch in the night." God doesn't experience time the same way we do. It's obvious. But we're stuck in it. We feel every minute. We observe the passage of time. Every hour of waiting feels like a week, a month, a year. But God, we know God's outside of time. We know God already has a story because he's already looking at the story. And the story is already done, outside of time. It's there. We're just observing it. And as weird as that sounds, Second Peter picks up on it.
Second Peter 3:8-9 says, "But do not forget this one thing, dear friends. With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. 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 come to repentance."
The slowness isn't a delay. It's patience. God is waiting on something that you can't see yet. That's really comforting in times when I need to utilize and pressure test my trust in God. Maybe, just maybe, God is waiting on something that I haven't seen coming yet. I know that's a convenient thing to say to someone who's going through a rough time, but I believe it's true.
Four Hundred Years of Silence
Let's zoom out. So Malachi in the Christian canon was the last prophet of the Old Testament. And then after him, it's silence. It's 400 years of silence, just ordinary people trying to stay faithful in the quiet. And right in the middle of that silence, 200 years in, that's when Antiochus, the evil king, shows up and the crisis comes. And there's still no prophet.
Now, the Jews in 168 B.C.E. didn't just have to deal with the persecution. They had to deal with the persecution in silence. God wasn't explaining himself. He wasn't promising any rescue. He was just quiet. That's what we spoke about when God hides last week. And they had to decide, do we trust a God who's been silent for 200 years? Do we believe the promises even when we can't hear his voice? That's the hardest faith. That's the hardest test of faith that I wonder if most of us have never experienced.
Not the kind of faith that says God spoke and I obeyed. No. The kind of faith that says, "God has been quiet for generations, and I'm still going to act like he's real." What do we do with a God that sometimes likes to go slow?
Remember Training
Practically, I don't know. What do you do when the empire moves fast and God moves slow? Well, you remember what you already know. Training. You go back to training. When you can't see what God is doing, remember what he's done.
The Judeans during this time, they didn't have a new word from God, but they did have his Torah. They had his word. They had the story of the Exodus, God delivering his people from an empire that seemed unstoppable. Oh, this is familiar. This is who we are. This is our story. They had the story of a conquest that God gave them the land against impossible odds. They remembered and they acted on the memory.
Psalm 77:1-2, it says, "I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago. I will consider all your works and meditate on all your mighty deeds."
What has God done in your past? You can write it out. I dare you. You'll have a longer list than you thought and you'll wonder why you forgot so many things. Metathias the Maccabee, the Judean warrior, he didn't wait for a prophet. He knew the Torah. He knew the covenant. He knew that the command to worship God alone was not negotiable. So he acted not based on new information but on old truth that was still true. You already have enough to move in your life. We already have enough to make a choice. You know who your God is. You know what he said. You know what is right. Act on it.
Wait Actively
Even if you feel heaven is being a bit too quiet, you need to wait actively. Habakkuk 2:3, though it linger, waiting isn't doing nothing. Waiting isn't like stopping everything and pausing. No, waiting is continuing to pray, continuing to show up, continuing to be faithful in the small things, the things that you know I can do this. Continuing to be faithful in the small things when the big thing hasn't happened yet.
Though the Maccabees waited three years, they didn't sit still. They trained and they fought and they organized and they kept moving even when the victory felt impossibly far away. Because let's be honest, the biggest temptation we have—if Satan has a big hold—is when we go through times when we think God is moving slow.
The Danger of Bitterness
Do you know what that is? It's when our mind begins rolling that patience and that waiting and that trust up into a big ball of bitterness. Am I speaking real now? Everyone's felt a bit of bitterness sometimes? Yeah. It's a hard one. When God is slow, it's easy. It tastes good to blame someone for the pain. We have a big target. A lot of people in the Bible blame God. So we turn to God. We become bitter. We start resenting him. We start believing that the delay means maybe he just doesn't care.
But bitterness poisons you. Bitterness makes you incapable of receiving the deliverance even when it finally comes. Ask me how I know: bitterness will thwart the promises of God entering into your life in very real ways. The Maccabees could have become bitter. They could have turned cynical. They could have decided that if God wasn't going to show up fast, then he wasn't going to show up at all. But they didn't. They stayed faithful. They kept their hearts soft. They kept trusting even when the waiting hurt.
Hebrews says, "So do not throw away your confidence. It will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised." Don't quit in the waiting. The reward is still coming.
Your Waiting Isn't Wasted
Some of you have been waiting for years. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's a marriage to be restored. Maybe it's a child to come home. Maybe it's a diagnosis to change. Maybe it's for that job, that job to come through. Maybe it's for this depression to finally lift off of me. Maybe it's the wound I wish would heal after all this time. Maybe it's a breakthrough that's been just around the corner for so long that maybe you've stopped believing that anything is actually coming. And you've prayed and you've believed and you've fasted and you've asked others to pray with you and you've done everything that you know to do and still nothing—or worse, things have gotten harder. The diagnosis got worse. The relationship deteriorated further. The job fell through. You're watching the empire around us move fast while God moves slow. And it feels unbearable. Sometimes, if you get in the right mindset, it feels like betrayal.
Here's what I want you to know today: that God's slowness, according to what his story tells us, is not abandonment. There's preparation that's happening. God is not sitting passively. There is preparation going on in your part of it. The Maccabees didn't know that three years in the wilderness was going to set them up for victory. They just knew that the waiting hurt. But when the deliverance came, when they retook Jerusalem and rededicated the temple, they were ready. They were ready. Not because the waiting was easy, but because the waiting had forged them into a people that could handle the victory.
You don't know what God is setting you up for right now. You can't see the whole story yet. But your waiting isn't wasted. That's what faith and slowness looks like. You light the next candle. You take the next step. You trust the small flame you're holding today is part of the light that will eventually fill the entire house.
And tomorrow night, that's what you'll do. We'll gather with our families and we'll light the first candle and maybe we'll play dreidel and eat some really oiled potato pancakes.
Okay, here's something most people don't know. I find it fascinating. So this is going to be my offramp for nerdy fact in case you're ever on Jeopardy. The dreidel didn't come from the Maccabees. Many of us know that, right? Lots of these traditions came into Judaism through European influences, right? Yeah. The dreidel didn't come from the Maccabees. It actually came from medieval Europe, about 1600 years after the events that we're celebrating tomorrow night. There was a gambling game called Totem that was wildly popular across Christian Europe at Christmas time. Yeah, it was a gambling game, and you'd have a spinning top with four sides, and on each side of the top you'd have marked a letter. And one was like, you win. You lose. You have coins that you play with. You spin it and whatever letter it was—that's what happens.
Stealing from Christmas
So Jewish communities living in Christian Europe saw their neighbors playing this game during Christmas celebrations and thought, "Oh, we can use that." And they put Hebrew letters on the sides: Alef, Gimmel, Hei, Shin. "A great miracle happened there," right? Like, it's beautiful. I love it. And they turned it into a way to teach their kids about God's faithfulness. So good. They just took it. Yeah. It's a game. It's a way that they saw to use it and integrated it into their traditions of celebrating the faithfulness of God.
You may have heard—and I say this because the tradition goes, or the story goes—that the dreidel game was invented because the Greeks would come in and you would act like you're playing dreidel to cover up the fact that you were really keeping Torah.
Beautiful Legends and Real History
Yeah, that's a beautiful legend. It is. It's not history. The dreidel came 1600 centuries later. And it came straight from a Christmas game. And I love that. I love this because the Jewish communities of faith looked at the culture around them and said, "You know what? We can baptize that." Oh, I'm serious. This is good. This is good. We can take something ordinary in the culture we live in and use it to teach our kids about God. We can point it to God and have a tool. That's what contextualization looks like.
By the way, this is what it means to live your faith in culture, not in opposition to it. And it's a very hard thing that requires a big W-word of wisdom. Especially when you're parents and you're raising these kids for the first time, and you know that you don't want them to be part of the world, but they need to be in it if they're ever going to reach it. And so the more that I exclude them from every aspect of the world, and I teach them that everyone out there is them, and this is "you versus them"—they're never going to be the witnesses that God wants them to be to a people that they have been trained by their parents to see as evil. Those are the bad guys. Stay away.
No, man. We have to know about our culture. Jeremiah 29: pray for them and the city and the infrastructure and your neighborhood. Be involved. Act out God's love any way possible. So yeah, if you need to steal a game from somebody—yeah, why not? We do it all the time. It's what traditions are for.
What Traditions Do
Traditions are meant to breed reverence. Now, you can steer them toward whatever kind of reverence you want. That's what they do. That's what they do. There's a tradition of salting your hollow bread on the table. People are like, "That's a dumb tradition. Why would you salt bread?"
When the temple was destroyed, we had a problem because our entire faith that surrounded a physical building had collapsed. How are we going to teach our kids? We're going to bring it into the home. And our table is now going to represent the altar of God. And that's how we're going to teach our kids about the days when the temple stood. And you know what they did to everything that was put on the altar of God? They put salt on it. We're going to have the two loaves of bread. We're going to put salt on it for the kids. And then when they ask why, we're going to tell them about the altar of God and the table of God that we used to sit at in Jerusalem. Love tradition. And they're powerful when you use them in the right way.
If you didn't know, that was a soapbox of mine. Traditions help us understand stories, and stories matter. The dreidel isn't ancient. Latkes aren't from the Bible. They're from Poland. The Maccabees didn't have the dreidel. They didn't have latkes. They didn't have all this stuff. They didn't have elaborate festivals and carefully constructed traditions to remind them.
What the Maccabees Had
No, what they had was their memory. They remembered who God was. They remembered what he had done. They acted on that memory even when heaven was silent. And that's what you're doing tomorrow night when you light the candle. Whether Hanukkah is brand new to you or whether you've celebrated it your whole life, you're not performing a ritual. You're remembering. You're remembering. You're telling the story about a God who was faithful when the empire moved fast, but he moves slow. Precision.
So tomorrow night, light the candle, spin the top, get the gold, eat the fried food, and tell your kids about the character of the Maccabees. And don't stress so much about doing it right. We're telling a story just like Passover, just like Yamu, just like Shavuot, just like Yom Kippur, just like Sukkot. What do the commands say? "So that you will remember, remember the story of who your God is and teach it to your children." Just remember: the light should have gone out but it didn't. And that's the story.
The Teacher at the Festival
So next week we'll put a cap on the Hanukkah series, and I'm going to hopefully show you something that changes everything about the story, because centuries after the Maccabees another Jewish teacher stood in the same temple again, during the same time of year, during a festival of dedication, and he made a pretty bold claim. When he stood there and looked at everybody, he said, "I'm—I am the light of the world," right? He said the one who follows me will never walk in darkness, ever again. He stood at the festival of dedication and declared that he was what the festival was pointing to all along.
So tonight we sit in the slowness once more, and tomorrow we light the first candle. Guys, I don't know where you're at today, but I just want to encourage you. Just like Habakkuk says in 2:3, it doesn't say deliverance will come quickly. It says, "Though it linger, linger, wait for it. It will certainly come and it will not delay."
Wait in Active Patience
It's going to take longer than you want. Longer than feels fair sometimes. It's going to feel longer than you can survive sometimes. But the promise says it's coming. The Maccabees waited. Abraham waited. Israel waited 400 years in Egypt. The exiles waited 70 years in Babylon. "Oh, I have plans for you, not to harm you, but to prosper you." That's a big promise that he gave to the Jews in Babylon, that not one of them saw. They all died before that promise came. And that's not the most encouraging thing, but gosh, it sure does give me peace knowing that God still has me in his hands. And I hope that's what you leave with today, in the darkest season of the year.
No matter where you're at, no matter how long you've been waiting, don't stay passive. Be active in your patience. You have a memory of who God is. Act in what you know, and the answers and the rest will come.
The Altar and the Prayer
Please stand as we conclude services. And during this time, we have some worship music that we play, and you can choose to worship. You can choose to pray. If you need prayer for anything, guys, we have prayer warriors on either side of the stage, and you are welcome to leave your seat and just walk up, and they will meet you where you're at.
We also have a type of altar here, and it is symbolic, but it's made for anyone who's been carrying something maybe a little bit too long—maybe you carried it in today—and maybe it's something you don't need or want to carry anymore. Man, what an appropriate time to make a decision, to say, "I'm going to set this down today." And symbolically, you can walk up and just kneel here and set it down and go home without it. That decision can be made.
Ava Menuo, our Father and our King. Father, we thank you for this opportunity to come before you today. And Father, I ask in the name of Yeshua that you would give us a spirit of peace in our hearts and that you would remind us to remember. You would remind us of the promise. You would remind us that you're still God, even when we think you're going too slow and we think we could do a better job. God, may the Holy Spirit that you say is within us, even now—the one with power and authority—may it activate us to remember so that we can wait patiently. We thank you, Father. In the name of Yeshua, we pray. Amen.
We thank you, Father. We want more of you, Father. The pure thing and the real thing. I don't just want the next [singing] thing. I want the pure thing. I don't just want the next thing. I want the real thing. I don't just [singing] want the next thing.
Only You Have the Words of Life
I want the pure thing. I want the real thing.
Where else can I go? Only you have the words of life. Only you have the words of life. It's real food for my soul. Only you have the words of life. Only you have the words of life. Oh, it's only you.
I don't just want the next—I want the pure thing. I don't just want the next—I want the real thing. I'm leaving behind all clinging to you alone. Singing to you alone. Where else? Where else can I go? Only you have the words of life. Only you have the words of life. It's real food for my soul. Only you have the words of life.
Where else can I go? Only you have the words of life. Only you have the words of life. It's real food for my soul. Only you have the words of life. Only you have the words of life.
And every word you speak gently wakes me from my sleep. I come alive again. I come alive again. Every word you speak gently awakes me from my sleep. I come alive again. I come alive again. Every word, every word you speak gently wakes me from my sleep. I come alive again.
Where else can I go? Only you have the words of life. Only you have the words of life. It's real food for my soul. Only you have the words of life. Only you have the words of life. Where else can I go? Only you have the words of life. Only you have the words of life. It's real food for my soul. Only you have the words of life.
When every word you speak gently awakes me from my sleep, I come alive again. I come alive again. Every word. I come alive again. I come alive again. And every word, every word you speak gently wakes me from my sleep. I come alive again. I come alive again. Oh, every word you speak gently wakes me from my sleep. I come alive again.
Oh, we're coming alive. Coming alive. I leave behind every other lover. Every other lover I leave behind. Every other lover. Every other lover I leave behind. Every other lover.
Every word you speak gently wakes me from my sleep. I come alive again. I come alive again. Every word you speak gently wakes me from my sleep. I come alive again.
Where else can I go? Only you have the words of life. Only you have the words of life. It's real food for my soul. Only you have the words of life.
Prayer of Thanksgiving and Intercession
Oh, we thank you, Father. Our hope and our confidence is in you. You are the only source of life. Thank you for your patience, your longsuffering. Thank you, Father, that you desire that no one would perish, but that all would come to an eternal understanding of who you are and who they are in you.
May we have the same patience with those around us. Father, help us. Help us. Help us to be quick to exude the fruit of the Spirit: abiding in love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and gentleness and faithfulness and self-control. That's the conduit right there. That's the conduit of your Spirit to a dying and hurting and broken world. And we each play a role, Father.
So I thank you, Father. That is the pure essence of the real thing. And I thank you—it's ours for the taking. It's ours for the access. We just access it through the power of your Spirit. Bless you for that, Yeshua. Thank you. Thank you for making the way. Thank you, Holy Spirit, for being the guide, for being the source. And thank you, thank you, thank you, Father, for making it all possible. We bless you in Yeshua's name. Amen. And amen.
Benediction
Shema Yisrael. Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai echad. Baruch shem kevod malkhuto le'olam va'ed.
O Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord is one. Blessed is the name of his glorious kingdom for all eternity.
May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up his countenance toward you and give you his shalom.
In the name of our Sar Shalom, our Prince of Peace, Yeshua Hamashiach, we pray. Amen. Amen.
Shabbat shalom, family.
