The Power of God’s Slow, Faithful Love

For a distraction‑free layout that’s easy to read on mobile, print for study, and share with others, we’ve also prepared a nicely formatted printable version.

🖨️ Open the printable transcript

---

Awesome. Let’s go ahead and be seated. Let’s begin. Let’s pray for this service, this message, our ability to hear what God wants to say.

Lord, I thank you that you are present, that you are at work. Thank you that we do have reason to have joy, because you have come, and you are here, and you are returning. You are all those things. You are all. You are our past. You are our present. You are our future. And it all makes sense because you came as a baby, which doesn’t make sense.

So God, help us to live in light of this incredible truth. In Jesus’ name, amen. Amen.

Oh, hey—awesome. This is one of my favorite pictures. I have it hanging up in my room, and it is Jesus as a toddler, playing with Mary and Joseph. Laundry blowing in the wind, right? Hanging. A dirty table in the background with toys on the ground.

The earth is kind of highlighted. The ground, right, is kind of bigger than you might expect proportionately. I think it is communicating that Jesus comes into, and as, an ordinary, mundane human being. I mean, do you ever think about Jesus learning to walk? You know, he didn’t come out of the womb just, like, walking around and talking, right?

This is crazy—the incarnation. God made flesh. God entering our world as a human.

I was thinking about all of the fantastic and beautiful and grandiose, powerful promises and prophecies that are fulfilled at Christmas, that kind of ramp up. When you read the Gospels, you just see one prophecy after another—hope, longing—that God is on the move, and that the promises made for thousands of years to the people of Israel are finding their fulfillment.

Something new is happening. The Messiah is on his way. Light is shining in the darkness. The dawn is arising. The morning star. The root of David. All of this— all this powerful imagery.

The angels come, right? I don’t know if my—oh, it’s not on. Let’s see.

Here we go. The angels come. Oh, we don’t have the Scripture. Okay, listen to the angels:

“Do not be afraid,” the angel said. “I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David, a Savior has been born to you. He is the Messiah, the Lord.”

These are fantastic images, right?

Today in the town of David, a Savior has been born to you. He is the Messiah, the promised one. He is the Lord, the King of kings and the Lord of lords. And what’s the sign?

This heavenly host—myriads of angels opening up the skies. The shepherds are like, “Oh my goodness!” And what do they say?

“This will be a sign to you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

For me, this is a little bit anticlimactic. This seems a little bit disappointing.

If you are waiting for the Savior of the world, you are living under Roman oppression, you are waiting for the thousand-year promise of a Messiah to come and free your people and bring salvation to the world. Angels have lit up the sky—and now there’s a baby.

I think why this is disappointing is because, especially for us, we are enamored with speed and scale. In our culture, we are enamored with speed and scale. The faster, the better. The bigger, the better. The more successful means faster, bigger, scalable, mega, right?

We have, in our culture and as human beings, a discomfort with slowness.

Slowness—like the slowness of a baby entering your life. I don’t think anything slows your life down more than a baby. An infant.

I mean, you put your life on hold when that child comes into your life. It interrupts the pace of your life. It interrupts what you thought could be accomplished in a day.

It slows it way down.

This is what enters the world as the fulfillment of all the promises of God—the healing of the world.

This is the slowness of God.

I think as we come fresh off Christmas and we enter a new year, we should take seriously and just recognize the slowness of God and how God chooses to work in the world.

And it’s slow. It’s slow like a baby being born.

And when does Jesus speak his first public words? How old is he? Around 30 years old. Thirty years before anything starts to resemble anything close to all the promises that were declared at the arrival of this Messiah.

The slowness of God.

Love moves at the speed of relationship. Love moves at the speed of our concrete, daily existence.

And so I want to talk about that. There’s a French theologian named Teilhard de Chardin, and I have this other quote where you can listen to it. He says, “Above all, trust the slow work of God.” Above all, he says, trust the slow work of God.

The first Christmas is loud with promise—angels, prophecy, proclamation, Mary’s Magnificat, right? The high things will be brought low. The low things will be raised up.

And then there’s quiet.

The Messiah arrives as a baby.

Luke tells us that after the glory of Bethlehem, Jesus returns to Nazareth, an unremarkable village. Remember what the Pharisees say: “What good can come out of Nazareth?” Nazareth.

He lives an unremarkable life. And Luke gives us only two summary statements for the next 30 years:

“The child grew and became strong. He was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was on him.”

And then:

“Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and others.”

So the longest stretch of Jesus’ life is described in a single word: grew.

Grew at the pace of a human being grows.

You know, they say when you have kids, there are really long days and short years. You can feel that, right? Really long days and short years. It goes fast.

But the incarnation teaches us that God’s love is slow. I didn’t say hesitant. I didn’t say weak. I didn’t say absent. I said slow.

Because God honors time. He honors our bodies. He honors the rhythms of creation. He honors relationships. He honors freedom.

So the incarnation is God’s ultimate refusal to hurry.

And you’re already saying, “Hurry up. We’ve got to get to lunch,” right? “Taking too long here.”

The incarnation is God’s ultimate refusal to hurry.

God does not merely announce salvation with angels and prophecies. God submits salvation to time.

After all of these miraculous signs, there are diapers. There’s sleep deprivation. There are toys to pick up. There are scraped knees. There are chores. There are calloused hands. There are awkward adolescents. I’m talking about Jesus here.

There are unanswered questions. There’s learning how to read Torah. There’s learning how to pray the Psalms.

Slowly.

Year after year after year. Day after day after day.

Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and favor with God and others.

He didn’t appear fully formed. He wasn’t fast-food Jesus, right? He wasn’t Amazon today delivery, next-day delivery, same-day delivery Jesus Messiah.

He grew.

So God does not merely tolerate slowness. God inhabits it.

That’s what the incarnation is about. The way he saves the world is by inhabiting time—not overcoming it, not superseding it, but inhabiting time.

God doesn’t bypass human development. God submits to it.

God doesn’t save the world by skipping the ordinary, everyday things of life—making your kids breakfast, going to work.

God redeems the ordinary by dwelling inside it.

He comes into the ordinary and dwells inside it.

So we’re always looking for the extraordinary. We define the miraculous by the extraordinary. But what if the miraculous is actually the all-powerful God of the universe entering, inhabiting the slowness, the limitedness, the everyday experience of our life, and working at that pace—working within that pace?

So let’s look at a couple of reasons why this might be the case—why God’s love is so stinking slow, right?

God’s love is slow because God works concretely. God works in your actual life. He works in the actual limitations of the human experience.

He acts. He works within the fact that you, as a human being, need at least eight hours of sleep. You have to eat every day. You can’t run as fast as a cheetah, right? You are limited.

And this is the sphere in which God works. He works within the concrete reality of our everyday life.

God saves the world in a body. He doesn’t even save the world in the most powerful body. He could have come as a Roman privileged general, right? But he didn’t.

He could have come riding on a war horse. Instead, he comes in the body of a Palestinian Jew riding on a donkey. Donkeys are slow, right? Slower than horses.

And he rides through this after 30 years living in a no-name town called Nazareth.

So God doesn’t just arrive as an idea. He arrives as an infant who’s got to be held.

And Dietrich Bonhoeffer helps us understand this. Bonhoeffer insists that God always meets us concretely. He meets us in particular people, in particular places, at particular moments.

So look around you right now. This is where God’s meeting you—right here. In the people, in the faces of the people that you interact with. In your children, in your partner, at your workplace. At the random encounters with people at the store. In the jerks that cut you off.

This is where God is working.

When your car doesn’t start, when things slow you down, maybe that’s the time to perk up and say, “Hey, how is God at work?”

It’s in the concrete reality.

So God doesn’t save us from afar. God saves us from within life itself—within life itself. And that includes the slowness of it.

And so we see this in Jesus’ life. I’m just going to emphasize this over and over again.

Jesus himself learns to walk before he learns to preach. Jesus learns to listen before he teaches. Jesus learns obedience, Scripture says, through what he suffers.

So God himself submits not only to the limited, concrete existence of the human experience, but to the suffering of the human experience. And he actually learns from that.

Hebrews 5:8 is where that says so.

God’s love is slow because God takes the human experience seriously. He takes our bodies seriously. He honors growth.

God works at the pace of human becoming.

I like that—God works at the pace of human becoming. And it takes a while to become human, which we get stressed out by.

I think this is really good news for people who live ordinary lives. You guys live pretty ordinary lives, don’t you? I don’t see the president in here. And even the president lives an ordinary life most of the time.

LeBron James lives an ordinary life. He’s still got to eat. He’s still got to get up. He’s still got to sleep. He’s still got to take his kids to school—or at least pay someone to do it.

So most of our life is ordinary, and this is really good news.

For the people who are limited, God chooses—actually, this is the very ground in which God works—is in your really slow commute to work, in a traffic jam, in your limitedness, in the time it takes to cook a good meal, in the time it takes to wait for someone to come back after a really hard, difficult argument and make things right.

This is the stuff in which God works.

This is the soil of the concrete lived experience of a human being.

Second—so God’s love works in the concrete because it’s slow, because God works communally and relationally.

At the church, A New Creation, where I pastor most of the time, right, we say, “We move at the speed of relationship,” because God does, and relationships are really slow.

And we want to override that. We want to control that. But God works at the speed of relationship. God’s love works at the speed of relationship.

Jesus doesn’t grow up alone, right? This is easy to miss. We tend to imagine salvation as something that happens to individuals, but the incarnation tells us a different story.

God does not save us by extracting us out of relationship and the human experience. God saves us through belonging.

And Jesus comes and belongs. He connects. He grows up in a family, related to a community, a village in Nazareth, part of a religious community—the people of Israel. He goes to synagogue.

He is part of all of these relational connections, that each small conversation, each word of encouragement, each look given to him from an elder in the community or his parents—these are part of his formation. They are part of how he grew in wisdom and stature over long periods of time, just like us.

So Jesus grows within relationship, and so do you. There’s no getting around that. There’s no solution beyond being in relationship. And that’s how we are formed.

He grows up relationally.

So this is good news. I’m going to skip that. No—I’m not skipping that. I’m going to go back to it. Hold on.

Eugene Peterson—have you, I don’t know if you’ve read much of him—he wrote… he didn’t write the Bible, which would be pretty cool. He did a translation of it, or what do they call that, a paraphrase of the Bible called The Message.

But he also wrote a lot of books. And I really appreciate Eugene Peterson because he really emphasizes the slowness of God’s work—the everyday, ordinary.

He wrote a book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction to describe life.

He was looking at the Psalms of Ascent.

In our church, in our community, living in the International District, it’s really slow. Super slow. It’s frustratingly slow to be at work and to live in that place.

And we have adopted that phrase. We say it’s a long obedience in the same location. It’s just a long obedience in the same location.

That’s where we choose to grow—grow at the speed of a tree.

Okay, it takes a long time.

And you just root yourself in a place with a people, and you allow God to bring the fruit.

So you can’t rush. You can’t rush relationship without damaging it. You can’t rush a relationship.

There’s no—you know—speed dating that maybe gets a relationship started, but it doesn’t make a marriage, right? It doesn’t make a covenant-faithful relationship.

So God doesn’t rush Jesus past childhood. God does not rush him past dependence on his parents. God does not rush him past learning how to belong and be in relationship with other people.

The Son of God learns what it means to be human by being with people day after ordinary day.

Now think about what this means for us. If God chooses to heal the world through 30 years of embedded relational life, then the slow work of healing in you, in me, in us—it’s not an interruption, right?

The slowness isn’t an interruption or a struggle. It’s actually—this is God’s work. It is God’s work.

The slowness, the relationships—this is the way that God works.

He walks with us. He doesn’t just fix what is broken.

God walks with what is broken. He works from within the brokenness.

So healing—just take away this—healing happens at the speed of relationship.

God’s love is slow, not because it’s inefficient, but because God is faithful. That’s how he works.

All right, the last reason.

So God’s love is slow because it’s concrete. It’s in our everyday life. It’s also slow because God works at the speed of relationship—your healing is at the speed of relationship.

And then the last point here is that God refuses control and coercion.

God’s love is slow because he refuses to coerce you and to control you and to speed things up.

Don’t you wish you could get the people in your life to just grow up? Right? There are some people in your life that you just want them to grow up.

And if you had a magic wand and you could say, “Boom!”—or this is what happens when we parent our kids. When our kids don’t do what we want, what is our tendency? We get bigger and louder, don’t we?

That’s our tendency. We get bigger and louder. Why? Because we are trying to control and coerce and manipulate them toward our preferred way of them being.

We want to accelerate their growth.

But God doesn’t do that. God is patient. God is kind. God has eternity, and he will not override your human will.

He will not override, coerce you. He will not manipulate you. He will not control you. He will not force you.

He will invite you.

And that takes time.

God could have arrived with force. What’s less controlling and coercive than a baby?

He doesn’t come with military might. He doesn’t come with financial power. He doesn’t come with eloquence.

He comes with dependence. He comes weak, vulnerable.

God could have imposed peace. He could have demanded allegiance. He could have overpowered resistance.

Instead, God arrives as a child that must be received. That’s all you can do with a child—receive.

A child can only be received.

This isn’t weakness. This is endurance—love with endurance.

One of my favorite recurring themes of Scripture is the hesed love of God, the steadfast love of God.

You see this phrase repeated over and over again. This is when God is revealed to the people of Israel, through Moses.

He reveals his true nature through character. He says, “The Lord, Yahweh, is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding, overflowing in steadfast love.”

This isn’t a sentimental affection. This is persistent, covenantal, enduring love—hesed.

It is a love that stays no matter what. It is a love that waits. It doesn’t seek to control. It doesn’t withdraw when things don’t go its way. It doesn’t coerce when it’s resisted.

It simply stays. It simply endures. It remains constant.

The love of God constantly invites us. The love of God, like the sun, is just there. It warms us and waits for us to respond and open up to its presence.

I think this is encouraging because if the love of God endures forever, that means God has time.

He’s not rushed. He’s not in a hurry for you to get your act together.

I mean, it’s better for us if we do. But he’s like, “Okay. If you want to persist in that rebellion, if you want to persist in doing that thing, I’ve got time.”

And it grieves his heart, but he’s waiting. He’s enduring. He’s patient.

“Patient” comes from the same Latin word pati, which means to suffer.

To be patient is to suffer. To suffer what? The choices of someone you love.

You’re patient with somebody who’s destroying their life because of the choices they’re making. You wait.

That’s the love of God that endures forever.

Another psalm—Psalm 136: “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.”

God doesn’t panic. God doesn’t dominate. God doesn’t take shortcuts. He persists with love.

And that’s why God can wait 30 years in Nazareth. He refuses to seize power. He resists the temptation to arrive through spectacle. He chooses the cross instead of coercion.

A theologian named Jürgen Moltmann reminds us that God does not redeem the world by overpowering it, but by enduring with it.

God’s power is the power of suffering love—the power to remain faithful even when rejected.

That’s the power of God: bears all things, hopes all things, believes all things. Love never fails.

I want to end with this quote from Eugene Peterson. I came across this a while ago, and I need to be reminded of it every year. It’s a good thing to be reminded of as you go into this new year.

“The person who looks for quick results in the seed planting of well-doing will be disappointed. If I want potatoes for dinner tomorrow, it will do me little good to go out and plant potatoes in my garden tonight.”

Right?

There are long stretches of darkness and invisibility and silence that separate planting and reaping. During the stretches of waiting, there is cultivating and tending and nurturing and planting still other seeds.

I love this because I’m the kind of guy that wants potatoes for dinner tonight—not tomorrow, tonight. And I want to plant this morning.

I want them to grow in a microwave.

But that’s not the way of God.

God’s way is the slowness of a garden. God’s way is the patient cultivation of one particular plot of ground—that is your life.

And if you think of your life as a garden, a plot of ground—not a mega farm with acres and acres—but one plot of ground, weeds are going to grow up in that plot. Weather is going to affect that plot.

You’ve got to till the soil. You’ve got to fertilize it. You’ve got to water it. You’ve got to weed it. You’ve got to be patient with it.

You cooperate with the weather and the timing of it all. You can’t rush it. You can only work the soil with patience.

That’s what it looks like to cooperate with the slow work of God.

It’s not that we don’t do anything. Saying God’s work is slow doesn’t mean we wait and watch Netflix for God to act.

It’s actually an invitation into the slow rhythms of life.

It’s an invitation to live your life awake to the presence of God in every moment, and to acknowledge that this is how God works—in what you are doing right now, in the conversation you are having right now, in the stage of life you are in with your kids right now, in the stage of life you are in with your career right now.

That time is now. That’s where God is at work.

And if we’re looking for the miracle to be the extraordinary inbreaking of dramatic change, that is a very rare thing.

The miracle is actually that the God of the universe inhabits your everyday, ordinary rhythms of life.

So remember, we don’t ask God to show up because he’s already here. We ask ourselves to wake up to how God is present and at work.

That’s the work. That’s where the growth is.

And I think this is good news for a guy like me, because I get discouraged sometimes—every year around this time—because I look back and I’m like, “Oh man, I’m still not huge and muscular. I’m still not a spiritual giant. I’m still not this or that.”

But maybe that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be, because it’s the slow work of God.

So the question is not, “How can I grow by leaps and bounds next year?” The question is, “How can I enter into the faithful rhythms of everyday life?”

How can I enter the rhythms of everyday life faithfully, awake to what God is doing, and submit myself to the slow work of God?

So let me encourage you, as you make New Year’s resolutions—if you do that kind of thing—if you look at this year and what you want to do, let me invite you to think of your life this year as a small plot of ground in your small corner of the world.

In this plot of ground, there are relationships you want to grow and bear fruit. There are things within you that you want to grow and bear fruit and overcome.

There are some weeds that have grown up over the last year that you want to uproot and take away.

And there’s a connection to the source of your life—the Creator, God—who waters and actually causes things to grow, that you can connect with.

So choose the plot of ground and tend to it. Don’t try to grow the biggest garden.

Instead ask, “How can I have a fruitful garden with what God has given me, in the place and season that I’m in?”

That might be a couple of relationships that you sense God would have you pay special attention to—relationships you tend with slow, hard, consistent work.

Maybe it’s, “I want to connect with that person regularly—once a week, once a month.” Maybe it’s your spouse or your children. “I want to have a family meal once a week around a table.”

What would it look like to deepen your connection with God? What kind of everyday rhythms—not epic 50-day fasts—but daily connection, daily time with God, cooperating with the slow work of God in your life?

Daily rhythms of prayer, listening, stillness, Scripture—things like that.

All that to say, if God is willing to take 30 years to prepare the healing of the world, your slow growth is not a failure.

It should take a lifetime to grow in the maturity of Christ. And he won’t be done until after death—and I think there’s probably still growth afterward.

As we walk with God, he has a whole eternity where we grow and deepen, like a really long tree that grows roots.

So if God refuses to coerce history, and he works through diapers and dishes and carpentry and quiet faithfulness, your ordinary life is not insignificant.

Doing the dishes is sacred. Going to work is sacred.

The incarnation proclaims that God is with you, patiently working, healing in you and through you at the speed of love.

That’s the good news of Christmas. I think that’s the good news of the incarnation.

Christmas does not end with angels. It continues with growth—growth at the speed of a baby, moving from toddler to adolescence to adulthood.

And I think that’s very good news. It’s good news for me.

So let’s pray.

Lord, I thank you for this reality—that you work in the slowness and in the inefficiency and in the ordinary of life.

God, would you wake us up to your presence in the everyday, mundane rhythms of our life?

God, I pray that you would show us what our plot of ground is—what the relationship or couple of relationships are that we could tend.

I pray that we would respond to your invitation, your enduring love that persists and invites.

How can we consent? How can we cooperate with your love at work in the world?

In Jesus’ name, amen.