Galatians 5
Let’s hear from God’s Word. This
is James chapter five, verse seven. It says, be patient, therefore,
brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer
waits for the precious fruits of the earth, being patient about
it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also
be patient. Establish your hearts, for the
coming of the Lord is at hand. “‘Do not grumble against one
another, brothers, “‘so that you may not be judged. “‘Behold,
the judge is standing at the door. “‘As an example of suffering
and patience, brothers, “‘take the prophets who spoke in the
name of the Lord. “‘Behold, we consider those blessed
who remain steadfast. “‘You have heard of the steadfastness
of Job “‘and you have seen the purposes of the Lord, “‘how the
Lord is compassionate and merciful.'” And now Galatians chapter five.
We’ve been making our way through the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
And we read in verse 16, it says, But I say, walk by the Spirit,
and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the
desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of
the Spirit are against the flesh. For these are opposed to each
other, to keep you from doing the things that you want to do.
And down to verse 22, but the fruit of the Spirit is love,
joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness,
self-control. Against such things there is
no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus
have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Let’s pray together. Our Lord,
we pray tonight that you’d make your word powerful in our lives. sow good seeds in us, water them,
fertilize them, make them sprout and grow and nourish them into
full-grown plants so that our lives display the fruit of the
Holy Spirit. And this we pray in the name of Jesus, our Savior.
Amen. All right, tonight is about patience.
And in the scriptures, patience, another word for patience is
long-suffering. And you see how just that word
is a picture in itself, long-suffering. It’s a lengthy word. It’s got
a dash in it, a hyphen. Longsuffering. It’s a word picture
in its own right. It literally means suffering
long before acting. I have a pastor friend who, when
I was in my younger days of ministry, said there are a lot of situations
as a pastor where you better take a deep breath, and you just
better, under your hat, in the quietness of your mind, count
to 10. And while you’re counting to 10, maybe God will give you
wisdom. Maybe God will cool you down. Maybe God will give you
the right words to say. And I found that to be very true.
But that’s also true when you’re raising children. It’s also true
when you’re in the workplace. It’s also probably very true
in the classroom as a police officer. Name your situation. Long suffering is something that
we all need. Think about impatience. Think
about impatience. Some people just have a short
fuse. Doesn’t matter what you do, they’re gonna snap. That bomb is gonna go off. Some
people have short fuses. They’re members of what we call,
is it rageaholics? They’re always, that was for
you, Jay. Seinfeld. Yeah, not because you’re
a rageaholic. You’re an easy going guy. But
they’re constantly on the edge. They’re constantly about to snap
about something. You know people like this. You
just walk on eggshells around them because you don’t want to
be the next target of their rant or their catharsis. We may sometimes find ourselves
in a position where seasons of tension and stress can bring
seasons of tension and stress in our homes or our personal
lives. Another great piece of advice
I was given as a pastor is when you’re under the pressures of
pastoral ministry, do not bring them home. My wife and I both
grew up as preacher’s kids, so we know how this works, and though
we do bring the church home oftentimes, you can bring the tension of
your workplace, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a pastor or
whatever, you can bring the tension of the workplace in the home.
And here’s the sad and sinful thing about it. Somebody totally
unrelated to your work or to the other stresses you’re dealing
with is going to get in the brunt of your impatience because of
some sort of tension-related situation. Now it may be that
impatience comes in maybe a once or twice in a lifetime event.
You become angry about something, some sort of injustice done against
you or others, and in an act of impatience there is some momentary
action, and maybe action is needed, but it’s event-oriented. The thing we need to be careful
about impatience, whether it’s our daily activity because we’re
on the edge, or because of seasonal tension in our lives, or because
we see something momentarily, is we need to remember that sometimes
our actions based on impatience can leave irreparable damage
to our loved ones, to our family, to coworkers. We may lose the
trust of someone. We may lose a job over it. It
can cost us a lot. And so patience as a fruit of
the spirit is something we ought to learn well. Now think about
righteous indignation for a moment. Are there not times when we ought
to be angry? When our fuse ought to be short?
The situation calls for someone to act and to act quickly and
decisively and maybe even with anger, some sort of holy wrath. We see it in the character of
God against Sodom and Gomorrah. He’d had enough of their sin.
He’d had enough of their inhospitality. He’d had enough of their godlessness
and their idolatry. And he said, that is it. He brings
down justice upon them. Or how about Moses in the story
of the Exodus? When the Hebrew taskmasters were
relentless upon the people of Israel, what did he do? He took
out his anger and killed one of the Egyptians who was a taskmaster
over his Hebrew people. We have to be careful though.
We have to be careful because when God executes his anger,
when he executes his wrath, he does it in holiness, he does
it in perfection, he does it in just the right way. When Jesus
cleanses the temple, for example, he does it in a holy way. But
in this world, we who bear the sword, we who have the keys to
the kingdom and the church, or we who are called to bear the instrument of the rod
in our homes, we need to take great care because some forms
of justice can’t be undone. So we need to consider well how
we serve in our areas of leadership with relation to impatience.
One good key distinction is to distinguish between God’s impatience
and yours. God’s impatience will be perfect.
God’s impatience will be justified. Your impatience most often will
not be. And so to bear the fruit of the
spirit is important. Let’s talk about patience. Well,
actually, let’s keep on impatience just a little bit more. What
is impatience? Well, before we describe it,
it probably stems from a lack of love and joy and peace. Lack of patience, impatience
comes from your surroundings. It comes from pressures being
upon you, and there may be all kinds of reasons for your impatience. It may be an injustice that you
see. It may be your unwillingness to accept God’s timetable or
his plan, and you’d rather yours be enacted. It may come from
Others working too slow a pace for your comfort and your desired
outcomes. Impatience can come from trials.
Impatience, as we very well know, particularly you who are elementary
school teachers, can come from other people’s weaknesses. We
think about Abraham waiting and waiting and waiting on the promised
child. And what does he do after a time? He takes matters in his
own hands. His wife comes up with a wonderful brainy idea.
Well, if we can’t have a child of our own, take Hagar, my servant,
and let’s have our promised child through her. And God says, that
is not the way. And so we see Abraham impatient.
Or in our passage this evening from 1 Samuel 13, we see Saul.
He can’t wait on God’s man to do God’s work. And so he does
it himself and God rejects his kingship. We see impatience in
Jesus as he cleanses the temple from the money changers, as he
shuts down the marketplace. Well, before we get into what
is paid, We know what impatience is, our
rage, our flying off the handle, our inability to long suffer
under pressures. But what about fake patience?
Some people repress their frustration. They hold it in, they push it
back, and it’s pent up and it’s pent up and it’s pent up until
at some point in time they are a ticking time bomb and somebody
is gonna catch hell when it breaks loose. Maybe it’s seen with denial. I’m not angry, I’m not upset,
I’m not, upset or angry with you. There’s repression, there’s
suppression. We think it’s ungodly to be angry.
We think it’s ungodly to speak in exuberance over something
that is wrong. And that anger is suppressed,
it’s just underneath and it’s waiting to come out. But it can
also show up in the form of people who are just too laid back. No,
they’re just plain lazy. They’re too lazy to care. They’re
soft and they’re passive, and they take everything from everybody. Sometimes we call that patience,
but it’s really a form of ungodliness. And then there’s a form that
takes place where people are too proud to show their anger.
They’re too proud to show a response to something done to them. And
a lot of times this will come up in church life. It’ll come
up in family strife. It will come up in the form of
something with our employment. There was a man years ago in
our church who kept losing jobs, had good jobs. He was an engineer,
had really good jobs, but he kept losing jobs. And so finally
the other pastor and I sat down with him and said, why is it
that you’re losing jobs? There’s gotta be a problem. You’re
a smart guy, good engineer. He had an anger problem. He had
an impatience problem. He would lose it. And he would
lose it with people and he would hold it back. And so we said
to him, you know, A lot of people have this trouble. You just need
to figure out what to do with it. You need to find somebody on
the job that you can talk to about your frustrations. And
you need to understand that not every problem will be solved.
And not every problem will be solved according to your liking.
But do something with your anger. It’s building up. It builds up
and it’s costly to you. It’s costly to your family. It’s
costly to those who are around you. But you see how our impatience
even our fake patience can affect us. See, neither full impatience
or fake fruit will see you through hardships. So what do we need? We need true patience. We need
patience that comes out of our being new creations in Christ.
We need patience that comes out of the divine. It needs to be
from the fruit of the Spirit. and we need God to be at work
in us. But what will patience look like? How will it manifest
itself in our lives? Well, there’s a bunch of ways
in the Bible that patience is made manifest. I’ll start first
with preachers. Paul tells Timothy and he tells
the Thessalonians that we have to preach the word with patience.
We live in a culture that wants instant results. And the apostle
Paul says that we are to warn and encourage and preach with
patience, with perfect patience, he actually says. Now, that’s
pretty hard to do, because what is a tendency of a preacher to
do? Somebody in the church is a little testy and they get on
your nerves a little bit, and you just want to take your Bible
and like a machine gun, just, you know, some divine spray, But what does Paul say? Be perfectly
patient with people. What does Paul tell Titus? He
says, remember how you were once foolish. And in the loving kindness
of God, he saved you. So we need to be patient in our
pastoral way with others, not just me as a pastor, not just
the elders as shepherds, but all of us. We need to be patient
and let the word do its work in people’s lives. Well, patience
also takes the form of endurance. We just endure. We’ve heard a
lot of that in Hebrews lately. We endure, we persevere, we keep
on keeping on. We’re long-suffering under the
hardships of this world. There’s endurance, there’s perseverance,
there’s keep on keeping on even when the sweat is pouring off
of us, even when the hostility around us is oppressive. There’s being steadfast, steadfastness,
long suffering in our walk with God and our walk with others,
in our daily trials and difficulties. We’re steadfast. We stand firm. Our feet don’t move. We are not
shaken. There’s waiting. Another thing
we don’t like to do is wait. We don’t like to wait at all.
We hate waiting lines. We hate being put on hold. The
other day I called a some company, I forget what it
was, and I was on hold for 24 minutes until I reached an operator. Thanks be to God for Verizon’s
unlimited minute plan, because they use 24 minutes of them,
and I heard their advertisements the entire time. But we spend
a lot of time waiting. Not just waiting lines, we wait
on answers. We wait on blessings, we wait
on certain events to trigger so that we can get on with life.
So God calls us in our patience to wait. Here’s an aspect of
patience you probably don’t think of, but it’s actually a key component
of patience, and it’s faith. Faith is looking to God. Faith
is looking to things we cannot see. It’s trusting that what
is promised will be true. Faith is believing that what
has been committed to us will come to pass. But faith sees
what others can’t see. When others say, God is not at
work, we say, no, he’s at work, we just can’t see it. We know
always that God is on the move, that he’s up to something. Another
aspect of patience is related to the second coming. Be patient,
James chapter five says. Be patient until the Lord’s coming. We’re patient, knowing that all
that we’re facing will soon end, that God’s second coming, his
rescue of us will come to pass. Here’s another aspect of patience.
It’s probably one you’ve not thought of, but one that’s helpful.
When you are around people that drive you nuts, help them. Okay, we’re trying to get our
kids out the door. Hurry up, get your shoes on.
You know, grab your Bibles, whatever. We heard people out the door
to church. We’re impatient. Well, what’s
a more practical solution? Let’s help find shoes. Let’s
help tie shoes. Let’s lay them out the night
before. Let’s find Bibles. Let’s make success possible.
But graduate that from your children. Do that in the workplace. Do
that in the church. Help people find their way. And
then, You’ll have less reason for impatience, but you’ll also
be solving a problem. What images does God give in
the Bible for patience? He gives all kinds of images.
He speaks of the patience of Job. You’ve heard of the steadfastness
of Job and how God brought forth fruit in his life. Job was miserable,
but God was teaching him a lesson. Or how about the farmer who plants
a seed, he waters it, and he waits. He waits for the seasons
to change and expects a harvest. Or we read in Revelation chapter,
I can’t remember, maybe it’s chapter six, of the martyrs who
have lost their lives for the sake of the gospel. They’re under
the altar and day and night they cry out saying, how long, oh
Lord, how long? How long, how long until you
avenge our deaths? And so sometimes we have to wait
on God’s justice, God’s timing for things. And with parents,
What is Paul’s admonition to parents? Don’t exasperate your
children. Don’t wear them out. Don’t wear on them by your impatience
and your exasperation. You know, we think of the fruit
of the spirit being being people that are patient.
We think of rosy, happy pictures. I’m going to be kind to people.
I’m going to be nice and godly. But at some point, At some point,
you’re gonna be the brunt of somebody’s catharsis. Somebody is gonna treat you like
a punching bag. Somebody is gonna just go nuts
on you. And it may be because they’re
angry at God. Often ministers get the brunt
of it because somebody’s angry at God and you represent God
and so they just unleash hell on you. It may be that this person
is angry at a man or a woman or something and you just happen
to be the right place at the wrong time and you catch it all.
But it’s a time to be wise. It’s a time to respond and not
react. It’s a time to be gracious to
people and to help them, to show in their impatience your patience.
But here’s a word to the wise. Here’s a word to those who may
provoke impatience in others. Ask God to give you wisdom, to
speak about certain things at the right time, to speak about
things in the right manner, and to have the right expectations.
We’re human. We need to learn how to work
people. You know, the last thing a husband needs when he walks
in the door from work is to be bombarded, you know, before he
even sticks a toe in the threshold with everything that happened
that day. Give him two minutes. Maybe three if you’re smart.
But learn how to work people. Learn how to place things the
right place at the right time, the right manner, with the right
expectations. Here’s another aspect of patience
we need to remember. It involves forgiveness. It involves
repentance. Our patience with others, as
Jesus says to Peter, ought to be endless. How often should
I forgive? Seventy times seven. We need
to remember that God has patience with us. But we need to have
some sort of chat with God maybe from time to time and say, God,
I’m impatient with your timing. I’m impatient with this black
hole I seem to be in. I’m impatient with not knowing
what’s next. I’d like to know. Maybe you won’t
show it, but please at least know I’m frustrated. I’m growing
impatient. It’s hard. It’s an idolatry.
I’d really like to know, but I’d rather, I guess, be godly
and rest in you. But there’s a lot of repentance
and forgiveness that needs to come into this. Here’s one last
thing to remember. God is patient with me. Remember
that parable where the man owed a year’s worth of wages? And
he went in to his master and the master said, I’ll forgive
it. But the man immediately went out and another man owed him
only a day’s wages and he had the man thrown in jail. And when
the great master heard of it, he was indignant, he was angry.
And he went and found that man and said, I just forgave you
a year’s wages and you can’t forgive a day’s wages. And he
had the man hauled off justice was served. Be careful. Be careful and remember that
God is patient with you. And he’s put up with a lot from
us, has he not? He’s put up with so much from
us. Remember these words from James, behold, we count them
blessed who endure, who are patient, and who are long-suffering. Let’s
pray together. Our God, you’re gracious to us.
You put up with so much from us. And we bless you that you
do not treat us as annoying children. You do not treat us as our sins
deserve, but you treat us graciously and mercifully and kindly. And
may the fruit of the spirit bear in our lives patience with others. And may it show others what you
are like. We pray all this in Jesus’ name
we pray, amen.