I Peter 3 : 8-22

Life in the Spirit: Patience 

This is from a series on the fruits of the Spirit found in Galatians 5

Context for this message is a series of sermons focusing on one fruit of the Spirit at a time. The congregation is a urban church with historic roots of almost 150 years.

Looking back on the last 10 years of your life, what do you wish you had not quit?

Do you wish you had completed high school, college, grad school?

Do you wish you had kept on taking voice lessons, piano lessons, skiing lessons?

Do you wish you had stuck with that low level job that promised advancement, but you couldn’t put up with waiting anymore?

Do you wish you had worked harder on your relationship with your parents so you had somebody to turn to now, or with your children so you wouldn’t feel so lonely now, or with your spouse so you wouldn’t feel so guilty now?

Do you wish you hadn’t given up on God? Most of us don’t like to dwell on our failures anymore than we have to. We don’t want to look back and see where we gave up hope and settled for something less than what we could have had if we had stuck it out. We don’t want to think about the what ifs, the questions that challenge our understanding of ourselves and our place in life today. Often when we look back, it is for the purpose of defending our actions. Of saying to ourselves “I made the right decision when I quit.” But still down in our deepest heart, we can’t let go of that question,  “what if I had stuck it out?”

The apostle Paul tells us that the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace ,patience. Patience!? How can patience be a fruit? You’ve got to wait for fruit to grow. And how can you wait, unless you have patience? Isn’t this a difficult fruit to bear?

The dictionary defines patience as “a calm endurance of hardship, annoyance, inconvenience, delay, and so on. It seems that we usually think of patience in that way. It’s a calm endurance of hardship and so on. With the emphasis, I guess, on calm. And so we get the idea that what the Spirit needs to do in our lives is to make us calm. But I think a careful reading of scripture will show us that calm endurance is not what this fruit is about. Endurance, yes indeed! Calm endurance, no!

The patience that is fruit of the spirit should be defined for the Christian as ” the power to endure through life’s quitting points.” Did you get that, the power to endure through life’s quitting points is patience. That is what the Spirit does for us when it grows this fruit in our lives. It doesn’t make us calm, as a matter of fact, this patience just might make us very agitated. For the word in Greek can also be translated long-suffering. long-suffering. That’s not a calm endurance. When we suffer, we are agitated. For suffering is enduring that which we want very much not to endure.

Patience. long-suffering takes no talent. For suffering comes to us, takes us captive, pins us down. We are victims of suffering. Some can suffer with more grace than others, but it is a fruit of the spirit to be able to suffer long. To endure what we want very much not to endure. Patience, therefore, is the power to be a creative victim, says Lewis Smedes. It is not passive. It is an active, tough, aggressive style of life. It takes power of soul to be long-suffering. It is not merely hanging on. Patience is the power of suffering and, and, creating life in the midst of suffering.

You may be saying to yourself, I don’t get it. Why should suffering be a part of my life? Why don’t we just stick with the usual definition of patience as calm endurance? Then I can see the fruit of the spirit when my copy machine won’t work. But I don’t know about this enduring what I don’t want to endure!

The answer to this is to understand what the Bible is talking about when it speaks of patience. And when we do that, something surprising happens.

It begins with the word that is used for patients macrothumia is a word only rarely found in the Greek literature. It is as if there was something that you desperately did not want to endure, you did what you could to not endure it. It was not a concept that meant anything to the Greeks. But along comes the Jews who want to translate the Hebrew scripture into the Greek language. And as they study what we call the Old Testament, they discover that God’s attitude toward mankind can only be described as long-suffering, as patient. He is a God whose wrath against sin is so great that God again and again displays the destruction that comes because, because of that sin, yet, he is a God who will also restrain his wrath so that grace and loving kindness can rule.

God so hates sin that he desperately wants to not endure it in any way. Yet he will suffer the evil infection of his very good earth, so that you and I can know his love. God’s patience doesn’t overlook anything. It just sees further than you and I do. It has the end of the world in view. That’s when God’s patience will end. His wrath will be vented on sin. And only those who have seen that God’s patience is not indulgence but an opportunity for repentance will escape his wrath.

It is in that context that Paul tells us that the fruit of the Spirit is patience.

Peter tells us that Christ died for sins once for all. The righteous for the unrighteous, to bring us to God. When you look at Jesus, you see an example of the creative patience, the active long-suffering of God. Jesus endured all the way to the cross. In the garden of Gethsemane, he cried out to his father let this cup pass from me! He desperately did not want to endure what lay before him! But he also said, let your will be done. Note, he didn’t say, let your will happen. No let it be done. This was active!

Every time a soldier plucked the beard of Jesus or someone slapped his face or the whip tore open his back, all Hell’s demons screamed at Jesus, quit! You don’t have to go through with this! When the nails went through his hands and his feet, when the bystanders ridiculed him and, and , he couldn’t feel his father’s presence anymore, his whole soul screamed quit! But he was doing his father’s will. And finally he did. Why? Why? He had done no wrong! He had done nothing that would collect the wages of sin. Why? To bring you and me to God. That’s what patience is all about. Patience is the power to endure through the quitting points of life.

What does this mean, then, for us?

The following are some ideas as to what this means.

First, nowadays we want instant stardom, overnight success, overnight growth, half hour solutions to problems we took years to get into, even instant spiritual fruit. But staying power, endurance, loving so much you can suffer long are not instant. If our expectations are not met overnight, we have a tendency to quit. We quit jobs, educational programs, relationships, and spiritual quests because they’re taking too long. We can’t be bogged down anymore. Satan loves to hear us say that because then we won’t take the time to learn to resist him. Without the spiritual endurance that built that  spiritual discipline in our lives, we are incapable of the patience the Holy Spirit wants to produce in us.

So first of all, answer this question, do I have the endurance necessary to reject quick fix solutions to my life’s problems?

Secondly do you know how to crash through the quitting points in your life? Jesus kept going when everything said quit. Can you? If you are a runner, you know what a quitting point is. It happens all of a sudden. Your sides are burning, your legs are heavy, your throat is burning, and your mind is screaming, enough! Quit! You are at a physical quitting point.

They come at work when you’ve had it up to here. At home when your spouse starts in where he or she left off in your argument from last night. It happens when you’re struggling with the sin in your life, and you finally say ohh why not indulge myself once? That’s a moral quitting point.

They even come in your walk with God. I just completed a three month walk with God with a group of people who often were tempted to quit. But they managed to crash through the quitting points and made it all the way through. They suffered my insistent demands all the way through. But they didn’t give up. I saw the Holy Spirit being present bring patience into their lives.

How do you keep from quitting? This is how: you count the cost of quitting before you throw in the towel. Quitting is not glamorous, although the media want us to think that it is. Quitting does not develop your character. God does not call quitting blessed. And in most cases, you’ll regret it the rest of your life. Instead, turn to God, and draw on his strength, and crashed through the quitting point. In doing so you’ll build your character and you’ll find fruit on your limbs