Character-building Patience – the sequel

Last time I mentioned that patience is a community thing. We have to be patient with circumstances. We may also have to be patient with others around us who are under the same pressures and perhaps not reacting so well as we are. Now our patience with others may have more benefits than just calming situations down. It may help remind someone of God’s wonderful patience with us. 

Has He not been patient? You and I owe our very existence to the patience of God. Without His millennia-long patience we would never even have come to birth! 

In 2 Peter 3 from verse 3 on we read that scoffers will come in the last days. “They will say, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.’” Peter reminds them how the sudden coming of the Great Flood shows us how swiftly God can act when He chooses. He goes on, “But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfil his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. … Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God? … [C]ount the patience of our Lord as salvation.” (ESV)

Each of us probably has a story of someone who blessed us by their patience towards us. In my case a memory strikes me from way back in 1967, and my unlikely benefactor was a gruff, ageing sergeant-major. I was a raw teenage cadet in the Combined Cadet Force, faced with passing my proficiency. Among other hoops I was required to jump through, I had to make the grade at target shooting. After a number of attempts with the .22 Lee Enfield rifle I had not yet reached the 60 marks needed. I approached our arthritic sergeant-major, seated at his desk at one corner of the safe end of the school rifle range, surrounded by a pile of cartridge boxes. 

“Please let me have another go, sir,” I begged. “That’s all very well, Demore, but these cartridges cost money – sixpence a time. We can’t be forever wasting them on you.” 

I must have looked pathetic and desperate enough to soften his resolve, however, and he gave me another chance. It paid off. On the crucial day I scored a creditable 71. In the end, though no soldier really, I achieved my proficiency. 

Without God’s incredible patience I would be a failure in far more important areas than not scoring enough bull’s-eyes on a rifle range. I would fail, for all eternity, to make it into heaven. That I can confidently “hope, by His good pleasure/safely to arrive at home” is down to at least two breathtaking facts: though I am essentially no different from the baying crowd who jeered as Jesus was crucified, He patiently endured a painful death to fulfil His Father’s salvation plan for the likes of me He puts up patiently with me though, day after day, my behaviour makes it look as though I’ve got nothing to be grateful to Him for. 

Put no strain on God’s patience. Your salvation depends on it. Instead, mirror it by being patient with someone else – it may depict God to them!

Character-building Patience

The findings of a 2006 survey of more than 1,000 adults revealed that most people take an average of 17 minutes to lose their patience while waiting in line. Also, most people lose their patience in only 9 minutes while on hold on the phone. I can certainly sympathise. More than once recently I have wrestled with complicated call centre options and given up in disgust.

The “patience” of an Old Testament character called Job was proverbial from early times (James 5:11). However, any serious reader of the Book of Job will soon discover that the hero was anything but patient in the modern sense of the word. He bewailed his wretched state and repeatedly took God to task for allowing it to happen. In other words, he was human. We can all identify with the strength of his feelings. Yet he is rightly credited with patience, but of a different order, as we shall see later.

James in his fifth chapter was addressing Christians suffering gross persecution. Faced with persistent discrimination and injustice, they were tempted to give up following Christ. After promising so much at the start, submitting to the gospel seemed to be leading them nowhere. How could James possibly comfort them and stiffen their resolve? He writes that those who persecute and exploit them will eventually come to rue the day. But how will they go on in the meantime?

“Be patient, therefore, brothers,” urges James, “until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit 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” (James 5:7-8 ESV).

“Be patient”? “Give up” would seem to be a more appropriate reaction. But what James advises is not passive fatalism, but an active, productive and wholesome endurance.

First, we are to be patient because there is a reward in view and personal development to be gained on the journey. We wait patiently, and that suggests waiting for something. That something is clearly the second coming in glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. But in waiting we also grow. The farmer works patiently for a harvest; with a harvest, he and his dependents can emerge from the winter fit and well. In the same way, the Christian uses his or her best endeavours in the midst of trials, aiming for a spiritual harvest of maturity and completeness.

Second, patience is rooted in dependable promise. The “early and late rains” are promised in the Bible and are a standard Old Testament image of God's promised faithfulness (Deuteronomy 11:13-14). In exactly the same way, God has given Christians a promise: Christ’s return. It isn’t just a pipe dream or a happy ending to a fairy tale; it’s a promise backed up by Christ’s resurrection, which has already happened. Isn’t that a spur to endurance?

Third, patience influences our behaviour patterns. We live and react differently when exercising patience. We’ll look at one practical outworking of this shortly. “Establish your hearts” is the watchword in verse 8. The heart is the seat of courage and resolve. Exercising Christian patience, we do the courageous and resolute thing rather than always cynically taking the line of least resistance.

Finally, the Lord’s coming is at hand. The way it is put in the original language, it’s as good as here already. The moral is: don't give up now!

James goes on to give one practical piece of advice and an example to encourage us. The practical advice is, “Do not grumble against one another”. This is profoundly wise. One danger with communities under stress is that individuals start turning on each other. This simply adds to the pressures. Patience is a community thing!

The examples to inspire us are the Old Testament prophets and ... Job. Job may have bemoaned his fate in plaintive terms, but he never short-circuited his misery by following his wife’s misguided advice to “Curse God and die”! As a result he became an inspiration, a byword for successful endurance.

A writer comments, “Suffering enters the believer’s life; perseverance is the believer’s response; blessing comes from the Lord, who is full of compassion and mercy. ... All of this demonstrates the character of the Lord, which is finally what James wants his readers to know with confidence.”

May God grant us this year a patience from God that just keeps us going confidently on our way, whatever happens!

Birth, crucifixion, resurrection or Pentecost?

If you ever want to get your head round all the different groups there are in Christianity, try the following exercise. Look at any church stream and try to gauge which part of the life of the Lord Jesus is the main inspiration of its followers. It will either be His birth, His death, His resurrection or the sending of His Holy Spirit. (There may be groups that focus on the Ascension or on Jesus’ earthly life, of course. But these and any others will probably be subsumed under one or other of the Big Four.)

Of course, spokespersons for each church stream will be careful to insist that Jesus’ birth isn’t everything (nor His crucifixion, nor whatever else it happens to be). To hold that opinion would, they realise, be heresy and error. Heresy actually means “picking and choosing” – highlighting the doctrines you like and ignoring the rest. That will not do for any church that places itself in the Christian mainstream. A church with an “incarnational” mindset, in whose eyes Christmas is the time of year when we really get into the heart of God, will be very careful to give Good Friday, Easter and Pentecost due weight as well. Typically this point of view would be held by Catholics and by many in the Church of England.

Yet somehow those stressing the incarnation always come back to the amazing truth that God was born as a human being – that He became incarnate in our world. It is, they affirm, an amazing condescension on the part of the everlasting God that He should voluntarily limit Himself to the straight-jacket of our time and space. Though His existence is from all eternity and to all eternity, He let Himself be tied down to a precise period in human history. An ancient statement of Christian belief states that Jesus Christ “suffered under Pontius Pilate”. Pilate is a real historical figure. We have specific dates when he was in charge of Judaea: 26-36 AD.

Whatever part of Jesus’ career we lay stress on, we can all agree that His incarnation is a comfort beyond measure. For many of us, time hangs heavy. The frail elderly person in slow decline, battling pain and loss of powers, may long for her release from this earth as day follows uncomfortable day. The addict may wonder how many more days and nights he will have to endure where he must stifle his craving. The long-term prisoner dare not mark the passage of time overly closely; it is too depressing to think about. Time is a pitiless master.

Now I agree that the Lord Jesus did not have to endure suffering in quite the same ways or for quite the same extended periods as the people I have mentioned above. As far as I know, He had no catastrophic illness, no addiction and no lengthy imprisonment. He died in His prime, like the casualties of war who grow “not old as we that are left grow old;/age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn”. Yet His sufferings were on a divine scale. I cannot begin to imagine what an infinity of suffering went into those three hours on the cross. He absorbed suffering not just as man but as the God who could take charge of any and every situation in the universe if He chose. To refrain from retaliating, moment by moment, takes a humility and a self-restraint that I cannot fathom.

The letter of Hebrews puts the implications across in superb fashion: “Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:14-16).

Perhaps the late Poet Laureate John Betjeman captures the incarnational spirit as well as any mortal can, in his Christmas poem:

… And is it true,

This most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,

A Baby in an ox's stall?

The Maker of the stars and sea

Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,

No loving fingers tying strings

Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare -

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine.

Many lights, one Light

At this time of year it is common to see great arrays of Christmas lights festooning the outside of people's homes. I can't remember this being the case when I was a child. The occasional enterprising householder might put a string of coloured standard light bulbs on a tree in the garden, but that was about as far as it went.

Nowadays many homes spend fortunes on illuminations specially manufactured for this season of the year: lights that blink on and off; lights making Santa or star shapes. Sometimes they are intended to attract a wider audience than just family, neighbours or passers-by. They may be a spectacle that folk come from a distance to admire. Visitors will often be encouraged to give something to a good cause if they appreciate the display.

Personally I don't quite know what to make of it all. It could express joy or exuberance or just an urge to cheer up the long dark nights.

A recent article by Our Daily Bread writer Julie Ackerman Link helped me make better sense of this new phenomenon. She spoke of one such display in her neighbourhood, a spectacular one to which many neighbours contributed. She commented:

“The sound-and-light display is so elaborate that it requires a network of 64 computers to keep everything synchronized.

“When I think about these holiday lights, I am reminded of the Light that makes Christmas a holiday for many — a single Light so bright that it illuminates the whole world with truth, justice, and love. This Light — Jesus — is everything that the world is longing and looking for (Isaiah 9:2,6-7). And He has told His followers to display His light so that others will see and glorify God (Matthew 5:16).

“Imagine if Christians worked as hard at shining and synchronizing the light of God’s love as the families of that neighborhood work when they illuminate their street with Christmas lights.”

This makes sense to me. We should point others not to superficial pinpricks of light but to the great Light of truth, our Saviour Jesus. How badly people need a reliable truth source today! Lies and half-truths are found on every side and at all levels, from heads of state to local families. Even churches, that are supposed to be the foremost bodies to represent Jesus Christ, are not without their lying and devious leaders. Spiritual darkness seems to brood and to reign supreme in many corners, as though it were midwinter all year round.

Of course, when all is said and done, the sun is always shining even when we cannot see it. It takes faith to keep believing that the light is there even though all around seems to be darkness.

Jesus is the true light of the world. John 1:5 reminds us, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” He, the living Word, was of a piece with the written word of God, the Bible. Psalm 119:105 gives credit to that word as light: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” (Quotes are from the ESV.) What a comfort and an assurance it is to walk in the light of Jesus Christ! “I am the light of the world,” He announces. “Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

Just a final sobering thought: the light is not there just to attract and intrigue us like fairy lights. It is truth and love, but it judges us too. John 3:19: “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil.”

People Like Us

A little group of enthusiasts in Worcester was putting on a display of medieval games, open to the public. I went along out of curiosity and asked a string of interested questions about the lives of people in those far-off days. “Do remember,” I was informed, “that these were people just like us.”

They meant me to go away thinking that our forebears were not so very different in their outlook on life. They might have fewer conveniences and the business of existing might have been more of a daily struggle. Yet, for all that, we are part of the same human family and they would have had feelings and responses that we would recognise today.

Well, up to a point. Of course we have a common humanity, but – just to take two topics among many – how can we possibly enter into the mindset of those whose average lifespan was barely half what it is today, and who lived with death as a daily reality? And then how can we think like those for whom the unseen spirit world, the domain of the after-life, was not just the stuff of fantasy video games but a driver of the most intimate details of their domestic routines? How did they feel about that: were they prisoners of an invisible realm? Or did they in some way experience a richness we can never now realise?

Moses in Psalm 90 verse 12 calls on God to “teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (ESV). If you expect a long life, you are not inclined to notch up each day as one more day lent, and so may miss the wisdom that can be derived from contemplating this.

November is a month for pondering the brevity of life. During it, there falls the Remembrance season. (That fact makes this time of year particularly poignant for me. My mother died between Remembrance Sunday and Remembrance Day in 1997.) This current November we mark the 50^th anniversary of the day when President John F Kennedy was gunned down. His time in office held huge promise and brought high hopes – all crushed in an instant of time.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

bears all its sons away;

they fly forgotten, as a dream

dies at the opening day.

Isaac Watts, 1674-1748

Borne away and forgotten most mortals surely are – coming from an unseen world, returning to an unseen world, out of human sight and generally speaking out of human mind. But this is not the case in the mind of God, the Ruler of that unseen world. He observes the fall of the smallest expiring sparrow. His word, the Bible, unlocks something of the puzzle of the world beyond as it relates to humans, both before we were born and after we are physically dead. That world is laden with blessing for the believer.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will …” (Ephesians 1:3-5)

“... and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6-7).

To those for whom Jesus Christ is of no account, the unseen world is a primitive superstition. Yet to others it is a realm of glorious fulfilment where the Rock of Ages reigns supreme. So we can move on to the last triumphant verse of Isaac Watts’ hymn:

O God, our help in ages past,

our hope for years to come,

be Thou our guard while troubles last,

and our eternal home.

The Rarity of Repentance

An epitaph in a Spanish evangelical church to Percy Buffard, the Englishman who founded the Spanish Gospel Mission 100 years ago, quotes Malachi 2:6. This reads: “True instruction was in his mouth, and no wrong was found on his lips. He walked with me in peace and uprightness, and he turned many from iniquity” (ESV). To say that a man not only introduced people to Christ but “turned” them “from iniquity” is quite striking. I have found that it is one thing for people to turn to Christ and quite another for them to turn away from old, bad attitudes and habits of mind.

Puritan author Thomas Watson once wrote, “Greater power is put forth in conversion than in creation. When God made the world, he met with no opposition; as he had nothing to help him, so he had nothing to hinder him; but when he converts a sinner, he meets with opposition. Satan opposes him, and the heart opposes him; a sinner is angry with converting grace. The world was ‘the work of God’s fingers’. Psalm 8:3. Conversion is ‘the work of God’s arm’. Luke 1:51. In the creation, God wrought but one miracle, he spake the word; but, in conversion, he works many miracles; the blind is made to see, the dead is raised, the deaf hears the voice of the Son of God. Oh the infinite power of Jehovah!”

I say a hearty Amen. For someone to be a new creation in Christ is an even greater wonder than the original creation. It is often maintained that there are more connections in the human brain than there are particles in the visible universe. To get through all those trillions of connections, fundamentally to change the mindset of a human person, seems a tall order indeed. Yet God did it in the Lord Jesus Christ, He still does it today, and He uses many remarkable people as His agents in this precious work.

Even so, there is today a great deal of self-deception around the whole area of conversion. A person may claim to have had a converting experience and even be able to point to the date. Yet the bad side of his or her old life continues to flourish unchecked. There is the semblance of conversion but no repentance. The person has not turned from iniquity. Maybe there is no godly leader around to point out to that person, courteously and humbly, that his or her attitude and way of life does not match up to their claim of conversion.

If there was ever a man whose whole outlook on life encouraged people to turn from iniquity, it was Percy Buffard. Born in the late 1800’s in modest circumstances in England, he was headed for a professional career but developed a passion for evangelising Spain. On visiting there he found a prevailing church riddled with worldliness and superstition. After determined and patient work selling Bibles and Christian literature, and setting up a health care ministry, he was able to assemble groups of people and instruct them in God’s word. He made a particular study of Colossians, the letter of Paul which sets out the great aim of that apostle: “Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28 ESV).

To this day the churches of the Spanish Gospel Mission are earnest in instructing their people about the gospel and the impact it should have on a man’s or a woman’s lifestyle, a credit to the founder under God.

Thank God for Christian leaders of vision and principle who do not merely notch up a tally of conversions. Their heart is to see their audiences depart from iniquity and become fully mature in Christ.

Provision through the storm

Some of us who read RBC Ministries' "Our Daily Bread" notes have spotted in the past how at times they are uncannily relevant to what is happening on the day they are meant for. This is the case even though they are written some nine months in advance.

Of course, you could say that this would happen anyway by the laws of chance. Yet God moves in mysterious ways. In the lovely book of Ruth (2:3 ESV), we are told about the destitute heroine, "So she set out and went and gleaned in the field after the reapers, and she happened to come to the part of the field belonging to Boaz" - the very man who was in a position to transform the situations of her and her mother-in-law! Did it just happen - or was it divine Providence?

Let me quote Jennifer Benson Schuldt's article from this Sunday in full:

"Early one morning the wind began to blow and raindrops hit my house like small stones. I peered outside at the yellow-gray sky and watched as trees thrashed in the wind. Veins of lightning lit the sky accompanied by bone-rattling thunder. The power blinked on and off, and I wondered how long the bad weather would continue.

"After the storm passed, I opened my Bible to begin my day with reading Scripture. I read a passage in Job that compared the Lord’s power to the atmospheric muscle of a storm. Job’s friend, Elihu said, 'God thunders marvelously with His voice' (37:5). And, 'He covers His hands with lightning, and commands it to strike' (36:32). Indeed, God is 'excellent in power' (37:23).

"Compared to God, we humans are feeble. We’re unable to help ourselves spiritually, heal our hearts, or fix the injustice we often endure. Fortunately, the God of the storm cares about weaklings like us; He 'remembers that we are dust' (Ps. 103:14). What’s more, God 'gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might He increases strength' (Isa. 40:29). Because God is strong, He can help us in our weakness."


That very night, the worst storm in decades "happened" to hurtle across southern England. It symbolised many things. We humans are resentful when we come across outbreaks of power beyond our control. They may be forces of nature, the attitudes of assertive people, or weaknesses in ourselves. We wonder whether God cares because He does not prevent these things from happening or take them away at once. Yet the evidence of the Bible is that God is supremely powerful, that He does not forget us, and that in Christ He empowers believers even in the midst of their weakness.

The punchy thought at the end reads, "God is the source of our strength".

Isaac Watts wrote a much-used hymn that began,

I sing the mighty power of God
That made the mountains rise,
That spread the flowing seas abroad
And built the lofty skies.

Later verses - one of them left out of most modern hymn books - run:

In heaven He shines with beams of love,
with wrath in hell beneath:
'tis on His earth I stand or move,
and 'tis His air I breathe.

His hand is my perpetual guard,
He guides me with His eye;
why should I then forget the Lord,
who is for ever nigh?

Scripture (unless otherwise stated) taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.