I always get a chuckle when I watch a football game with my kids and they ask me to skip the ads.
They’ve yet to grasp that live TV is not YouTube, and therefore not all ads become skippable. They really wouldn’t be able to get their minds around the fact that skippable ads did not even exist when I was a kid. We just sat there helpless for the entire, agonizing three minute break.
Of course, skippable ads on streams are just one of countless ways life has gotten faster and more convenient. All cooking used to be done at home, and then there were restaurants, and then there was fast food and microwave dinners from the store, and now there is DoorDash and UberEats (for anyone who likes paying $20 extra for mushy food, that is).
You could see movies at the theater or when they were played on TV, and then there was Blockbuster, then mailed Netflix DVDs, and now there are a dozen streaming services.
Believe it or not, all of this development hasn’t exactly made us more patient. That creates a rather big problem:
When something important can’t be done instantly, a lot of people want to throw their hands in the air and quit.
We know the nation is struggling, so we want to cast the one vote for the one person who can fix it in one term. And if that doesn’t happen, we’re ready to give up on the whole thing.
Many people’s marriage and household are not where they want them to be. They sometimes hope a couple of sessions with a therapist can turn things around, or that a vacation might get things back on track. When the painful work of changing their ways takes center stage, it’s easier to just give up or get complacent.
And, I talk a lot about how the church can be improved (thus the ‘Church Reset’ name). Because of this, I get to chat with a lot of people who agree that changes must be made. But, this often just creates discontentment. We don’t like how things are, and the path to making things better is unclear, so it’s easier to just be unhappy.
Things don’t get bad overnight. Why would we expect them to be fixed overnight?
The nation has been subverted for decades by people who put in the time to take positions in the press, the education system, and the entertainment system to push their views. They worked patiently. Why would we think we don’t have to work patiently to match them?
The home’s struggles often come from generations of bad habits and ways of speaking. That’s not something that changes easily.
The church’s decline can be attributed to a number of factors. Recreating leadership pipelines and getting people to rethink what we do to help the youth stay faithful isn’t the kind of thing that gets fixed in a weekend.
All of these things are going to take time. We have to be okay with the idea that we might not see improvement—much less full-scale revival—for years.
I want to point your attention to King David.
The man loved God, and he wanted to build God a richly-appointed house of worship. Because the king was a man of bloodshed, God declined David’s offer. The temple would have to wait for the next generation, when Solomon would oversee its construction.
David did not throw a fit or feel sorry for himself that he would not get to do this great deed and see its completion. Instead, he did as much as he could to make the dream a reality by stockpiling materials to leave for Solomon (see 1 Chronicles 22).
That is the kind of thinking we need to adopt.
Your household might not be as well-run as you want it to be overnight, but the more you work at it, the better it will get, and the better you will prepare the next generation to have strong families of their own.
The challenges in your relationship with your spouse, or your difficulties with a child, will probably not be fixed with one conversation. In fact, it will only get harder after the one conversation, as everyone will then have to strive to be consistent in their follow-through. But it’s worth doing.
The nation has a long, long way to go, and impacting it from the top down might not ever be the kind of thing we get to do. But, we can make our communities a better place through our prayer and involvement.
My small, Bible Belt town is having their pride parade this weekend, and it both saddens and sickens me. Lord willing, one day we will get it shut down. But that’s probably not just one election away. It will take time, prayer, and patient effort.
The church might not look as close-knit and dynamic as you and I want it to be by next Sunday, or by next year, or even by the next decade. But we can certainly try to move it in that direction, and leave it in a better place for those who come after us.
Your congregation might not be ready and willing to start engaging in table fellowship and deep, spiritual conversations. And, one hospitable dinner or two probably won’t change that. But putting in years of time together will certainly move it more in that direction.
Think long term
The first century church had heard Jesus was coming back, and it seems that some of them at Thessalonica took that to mean they should give up on daily life and start watching the sky. 2,000 years later, aren’t you glad that mindset didn’t win out? Aren’t you glad the church’s leaders kept walking straight into the buzzsaw of persecution to keep advancing the church, even though they weren’t around to see what it would become?
Like them, we don’t know that we have tomorrow… but in another sense we should labor as though mankind has two thousand more years, and as though we believe what we do today will affect how those millennia go.
As it’s often been said, “People overestimate what they can accomplish in a single year, but they underestimate what they can achieve over a decade.” Frustration comes from the overestimation. Fulfillment comes from putting in the decades worth of work.
So, we go all-in on faith and start walking. If we could see the result from here, we wouldn’t need faith. If we could hit a button and skip the tough parts, or make it happen immediately, we wouldn’t grow. Give thanks for these trials.
Everything might not be great now. It will probably not be great tomorrow. Stop looking for instant results, but rather, give it a decade or two of steady, faithful plodding and see what God does with it. You’ll be glad you did.
Notes
The Men’s Excellence Workshop dates have been set! It will be April 22-24, 2027 in Centerville, TN. More info to come, so be sure you’re on the email list.
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Needed to hear this today. Very good reminder