Summary
Patience and Walking Humbly
Advent forms a people who wait. Living between the first coming of Christ and His return, the Church cries, "Come, Lord Jesus," knowing that the Father alone holds the day and hour. Yet patience is not only about awaiting the Last Day; it is about trusting God day after day, in every diagnosis, every unresolved problem, every unclear future. The question is whether we can be patient with God Himself.
The prophet Micah, contemporary of Isaiah, asks what offering could ever please the Lord—burnt offerings, thousands of rams, rivers of oil, even the firstborn? The answer comes in Micah 6:8: "He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" Justice is what is right and fair, rooted in God's law. Kindness translates the Hebrew chesed—steadfast love, what Luther called "goodness in action." And the third word, "humbly," is rare; it appears only twice in all of Scripture and carries the sense of walking attentively, thoughtfully, with understanding.
To walk humbly, then, is to walk with attentiveness to who God is, what He has done, and how utterly we depend on Him. And here is the hinge of the matter: this humble walk is bound together with patience. When we are attentive to His grandeur, mindful of His promises—"I am with you always," "I will never leave you nor forsake you," "I will not leave you as orphans"—we begin to grasp that He holds every blink and every heartbeat in His hands. From that knowledge, patience is born. As the Patience and Walking Humbly 12-4-22 study puts it, if God has done all this for me, I can wait on Him.
What does not come naturally is the humble walk. By nature we march to center stage, expecting God to perform the script we have written for Him. Like Adam and Eve, who would not trust the goodness, provision, and plan of God, we stride into sin, laying on the horn at the Almighty: get going, do something, or get out of my way. Self-reliance is the opposite of attentiveness, and impatience is its fruit.
Three simple questions break that pattern. What do I deserve? The eternal wrath of God for sin. What do I have? The Lord Jesus Christ, who bore that wrath in our place, who has claimed us in the waters of Baptism, together with every blessing of body and life that flows from Him. What am I promised? That today is one more day in an eternity already secured—the glory of heaven, where suffering and trial are no more. Wrath replaced with grace; Christ Himself as our chief blessing; heaven prepared and waiting. These promises do not merely inform us; they give birth in us to the humble walk and to the patience that walks beside it.
The Mosaic law forbade yoking an older ox with a younger one except in a training yoke, where the stronger animal carried the weight while the younger simply walked alongside and learned. This is the picture Jesus draws in Matthew 11:28-30: "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me… for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." The crushing load of trying to make ourselves worthy of God's love is one we were never meant to carry. Christ carries it on the cross. He gives us His perfect life, takes our sin, and yokes us to Himself, where He bears the weight and we walk beside Him. Because we know the One to whom we are yoked, we can wait—on His timing, on His will, on the unfolding of His promises. He empowers the very thing He calls for: do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with your God.
Video citations
- “Patience and Walking Humbly” 12-4-22 — Would you open your Bibles, please, with me? To the Old Testament, to the Book of Micah, if you're using a few edition of Holy Scripture, Micah's on page 819, 819, for our study today. We continue…