Model Of Patience

Let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.

James 1:4

One of the best-known idioms in the English language shows up consistently in the day’s news: “the patience of Job.” People are said to exhibit the patience of Job when undergoing difficult circumstances or in their daily struggles. But truth be told, Job was not always a patient man. Until the end of the book of Job, he was on an impatient mission to prove he wasn’t the cause of his own suffering.

So if Job is not a good example of patience, who is? Working backward from Galatians 5:22—“The fruit of the Spirit is . . . longsuffering [that is, patience]”—we arrive at Christ. The fruit of the Spirit represents the Spirit’s manifestations of the life of Christ in us—so Christ must have been the personification of all the fruits of the Spirit, including patience. But what about when Christ drove the merchants out of the Temple with a whip, turning over their tables of money and cages of animals? Was that patience?

For a Christian, patience is willful and cheerful submission to the will and timing of God in one’s life. Patience is not always meek and quiet—but it is God centered, which makes it a measure by which to evaluate whether we are patient or not.

Cheerful patience is an holy art and skill, which a man learns of God.

THOMAS MANTON^a