The Patience

The Lord had been speaking of hard things to come, of persecution and betrayal, of being hated for his name, of a world grown hostile. And into that dark forecast he set a single quiet counsel that would carry his people through it all. In your patience possess ye your souls. Not by force, not by flight, not by fighting back, but by patience the soul is kept. It is a small sentence, and it holds the secret of surviving with the soul intact whatever comes against it.

Consider the word possess. To possess the soul is to hold it, to keep mastery of it, to remain in command of the inner man rather than being driven and scattered by every wind that blows against us. And the Lord says this possession is the fruit of patience. The impatient soul loses itself. It is carried away by anger at the provocation, by panic at the threat, by despair at the delay, handed over to whatever circumstance happens to press on it. But the patient soul holds itself together. It is not at the mercy of the moment. In its patience it possesses itself.

THE SOUL KEPT BY PATIENCE

See how much of the soul is lost through impatience. A hasty word spoken in a moment of provocation, and the peace of a day is gone, and perhaps of a friendship. A panic in the face of trouble, and the soul is scattered, unable to pray or think or trust. A despair at the slowness of relief, and faith itself is shaken. In every case the soul is lost, given away to the provocation or the fear or the delay, no longer its own. And in every case patience would have kept it, would have held the tongue, steadied the heart, sustained the trust. The patient man is the self-possessed man, and the impatient man is possessed by whatever assaults him.

We must not mistake this patience for a weak passivity, a mere spineless enduring of whatever comes. It is strength, and a rarer strength than any that strikes back. The word means to remain under, to bear up beneath a weight without collapsing and without fleeing, and it takes far more strength to remain than to run, to bear than to lash out. The patient soul is not the one too weak to react, but the one strong enough not to, strong enough to stand under the pressure and keep its footing and its faith while the impatient are scattered all around it.

THE TRYING THAT WORKS PATIENCE

But where does such patience come from? Not from ease, for ease teaches nothing. It is forged in the fire. The trying of your faith, the apostle James says, worketh patience. And the apostle Paul says the same, that tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope. The very trials that test us are the furnace in which patience is made. We cannot have the fruit without the fire. This is a hard word, for it means that the troubles we would give anything to escape are the necessary makers of the very patience by which alone we can possess our souls in trouble. God does not teach patience in a life kept free of every trial. He teaches it in the trial.

And so the apostle can say the strange thing, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations, knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. Joy in trials, not because the trials are pleasant, but because of what they are working, the patience that keeps the soul. And he adds a warning, let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. The patience must be allowed to finish its work; the trial must be borne through to its end and not cut short by our impatience, or the perfecting is lost. Half- learned patience keeps the soul only halfway.

WAITING ON GOD

Much of patience is patience toward God, the willingness to wait for his time and not run ahead of it. We are quick, and God is not slow but unhurried, working to a clock we cannot read, and the impatience that most troubles the soul is often impatience with God, the fretting that he does not act on our schedule. Rest in the LORD, the psalmist counsels, and wait patiently for him; fret not thyself. And the apostle sets the husbandman before us, who waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. The farmer does not dig up his seed in impatience. He waits, trusting the seasons and the God who sends the rain.

For impatience with God is at bottom a distrust of God, a secret suspicion that his timing is careless or his delay unkind. Patience toward him is trust, the settled confidence that his slowness is not neglect, that he is never late, that the delay itself is doing a work in us that the swift answer would have prevented. So we are told to run with patience the race set before us, not to sprint in our own strength and collapse, but to endure, to keep on, to wait out the long middle of the race when the finish is not in sight, trusting the God who set the course and waits at its end.

THE PATIENCE OF GOD

We learn patience best by considering how patient God has been with us. He is called the God of patience, and his patience is not a cool indifference but a long and costly bearing with a people who have tried it beyond measure. The Lord is longsuffering to us-ward, the apostle Peter says, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. The very slowness we sometimes resent in him, the delay of his judgments and his promises alike, is the patience of a God who bears long with sinners that they may have space to turn. We are alive and not consumed because God is patient.

And if we would know how much he has borne, we need only remember how much we have given him to bear. The sins repeated after they were repented of, the promises made to him and broken, the coldness returned for his love, the slowness of our own hearts to learn what he has taught us a hundred times. Through all of it he has been patient, not casting us off in our failures, not consuming us in his just anger, but bearing long, waiting, giving us yet another day and another mercy. The patience we find so hard to show our neighbor is the patience God shows us without ceasing.

So we are told to be patient as he is patient, to forgive as we have been forgiven, to bear with one another as God has borne with us. The soul that has truly felt the patience of God toward its own sins cannot be harsh and hasty with the sins of others, for it knows how much it has been forgiven and how long it has been endured. Impatience with others is, at bottom, a forgetting of how patient God has been with us. Remember his longsuffering, and it will make you long-suffering.

And there is the patience of Christ himself, set before us as our pattern. When he was reviled, he reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously. He bore in silence what we could not bear for an hour, endured the cross and despised the shame, and did it with a patience that never once broke into retaliation or despair. The apostle prays that the Lord would direct our hearts into the patient waiting for Christ, and into that same patience of Christ, so that the endurance we are asked to show is not a strength we must find in ourselves but a sharing in his.

So in your trials, great and small, in the provocations of the day and the long testings of a life, possess your soul by patience. Do not let the hasty word or the sudden fear or the fretting delay carry your soul away from you. Bear up under the weight; remain; do not flee and do not lash out. Let the very trials work their patience in you, and do not cut the work short. And wait on God, trusting that his unhurried timing is not unkindness but wisdom. For it is not by force or flight but by patience that the soul is held together and kept its own through everything that comes against it. In your patience possess ye your souls.