Join us at Peoria Nazarene Church for our weekly worship gathering Sunday at 10:30 AM. You can also join us online via Youtube or Facebook.
Families are welcome to worship together for the season of Advent. Busy bags that go along with the sermon are available for kids at the welcome center each week.
Whenever Christians talk about patience, someone often declares, “Don’t pray for patience, or else God will give you situations to practice patience!” People say this earnestly because many of us are not people of patience. We like two-day shipping and high-speed internet and fast food. We do not like to wait. So when we are confronted with a passage about patience, we might want to jump past the text, especially when it talks about being patient in suffering, and not grumbling. How many of us have grumbled while waiting in line for something that was taking a little too long on a stressful Monday morning? If this doesn’t feel a bit convicting for most of us already, this passage falls on the Sunday of Advent when we celebrate joy! Even the Advent candle color changes to pink to represent that suffering isn’t going to last and that joy is coming. It feels almost contradictory to have a passage about patience in suffering without grumbling against our brothers and sisters during the week when we are celebrating joy.
The question is before us: Can we have joy in the midst of patient suffering? We struggle with inconvenient moments in our fast-paced world, but what about when we are faced with true suffering? What about when there are famines and persecution, like what the early church faced? What about when we face pandemics and the loss of loved ones? Is there a way to be patient in the midst of that suffering? Is there space for joy, even there?