Two thousand years feels like a long time to wait. Jim Osman says that's exactly the point.

Continuing through 2 Peter 3, Osman tackles the mockers' challenge in verse 4: where is the promise of His coming? Peter's answer comes in two parts, and this sermon focuses on the second: God's patience. Osman walks through what that patience actually means, tracing it back through Exodus, Isaiah, and the Psalms to show that the Old Testament's "slow to anger" God and the New Testament's patient Father are the same God, not two different ones.

He works carefully through the Greek behind "slow" in verse 9, distinguishing tardiness from sovereign timing, and uses Habakkuk's own wrestling with delay as a parallel. Then comes the heart of the message: who exactly is God being patient toward? Osman pushes back against a popular reading of "not willing for any to perish," arguing from context that Peter is addressing God's own people, the elect not yet gathered in, not the whole world indiscriminately.

The sermon closes with four practical encouragements, including a direct word to anyone listening who has yet to repent. This episode offers a clear, doctrinally grounded answer to anyone wondering why God seems to be taking so long.

Trouble has a strange way of feeling like a curse. Phil Johnson makes the case from James 1:2–4 that for the Christian, it's actually the opposite.

Working through one of the earliest letters in the New Testament, Johnson identifies the James who wrote it: not the apostle, but the Lord's half-brother who became the leading elder in the Jerusalem church. From there, he turns to the text itself, "consider it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials," and unpacks why that command isn't naive but deeply theological.

Johnson works through the Greek word behind both "trials" and "temptations," distinguishes between testing from God and enticement from the devil, and draws on the suffering of Job and Peter's failure and restoration to show that affliction is never random. It's purposeful, sovereignly governed, and aimed at one outcome: maturity that lacks nothing.

Three convictions anchor the message: trouble is a blessing, not a curse; tribulation tests us rather than punishes us; and trials perfect us rather than defeat us. For anyone wrestling w

The mockers had a question: Where is the promise of His coming? Time had passed. Apostles had died. Nothing had changed. Pastor Jim Osman addresses that question head-on as he works through 2 Peter 3:8 — and the answer is as pointed today as it was in the first century.

God does not experience time as we do. He is not encumbered by it, constrained by it, or running out of it. He meets no deadlines, feels no urgency, and is exhausted by no length of years. A literal thousand years is to Him what a single day is to us — not because time is vague or undefined, but because He is eternal and we are not. The delay in Christ's return is no evidence of a failed promise. It is simply a reflection of the unbridgeable difference between the eternal God and creatures made of dust.

Drawing from Psalm 90 and Peter's deliberate use of its language, Pastor Osman traces what God's relationship to time actually means for the church — and what it does not mean. He corrects three common misuses of this verse: as an argument for long creation days in Genesis 1, as a framework for end-times chronology, and as a basis for treating the thousand years of Revelation 20 as figurative.

The point stands: time has no bearing on the fulfillment of God's Word. His return remains imminent. The only question is whether we are found watching.