Patience Series

Patience

PPT 2 Series Title

PPT 3 Message Title and Text

Ga 5:22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,

Ga 5:23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. (NAS)

Before we get into this weeks message let me remind you something from last weeks message.

First I brought some fruits and did a show and tell. Using actual fruits to teach basic spiritual principles on the Fruits of the Spirit.

For example, I noted mango is not natural to this area. The lesson was, your temperament is no excuse for not having a fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit, is the fruit of the Spirit. It is not your nature, but His nature being revealed through you.

Asian pear reminds us to bear fruit out of our ethnic group, race, culture, circle of friends etc. If you only bear fruit around the people you are like and are familiar with, you are nothing more than a false face. To only show kindness to your friends is not the biblical fruit of the Spirit, to show it to them and to your enemies is the real deal.

Prunes reminds us that the fruits cause reactions and surprisingly some of them are not pleasant. In other words you might show kindness, but you may get the opposite reaction. That is what happened to Jesus, but that is no excuse to stop bearing spiritual fruit.

Then we spoke on gentleness and use Jacob's concern to not overdrive the children and the flocks on the way to the promised land.

We also used a text from David's life when speaking about his rebellious son, he said "deal gently with the young man for my sake." He deserved to be treated much differently, but love tempers anger into gentleness.

So this week we are going to talk about the fruit of the Spirit that is called patience, in the KJV it is translated longsuffering, I didn't want to use that translation because it includes the word suffering in it. Which is what most people think of when they think of patience. Patience is not a form of suffering, but of peaceful overcoming of suffering, through the agency of the Holy Spirit.

We begin by saying patience is a fruit of the Spirit.

In other words it is the outflow and product of the Holy Spirit being resident in a person's life.

If you plant corn, corn will grow. God placed His Holy Spirit in us, patience is one of the fruits that is produced as a result of that.

Twice in Matthew 7 Jesus said, "By their fruits you shall know them."

I want to take a minute here and try to show the difference between short term fruit, and long term fruit of the Spirit in a persons life.

A story is told of a trucker who stopped to get gas and chow while on a long haul. The waitress had just served him when three swaggering, leather-jacketed bikers --of the Hell's Angels type entered & rushed up to him, apparently looking for a fight. One grabbed the hamburger off his plate; another took a handful of his French fries; & the third picked up his coffee & began to drink it. The trucker didn't respond as one might expect. Instead, he calmly rose, picked up his check, walked to the front of the room, put the check & his money on the cash register, & went out the door. The waitress followed him to put the money in the cash register & stood watching out the door as the big truck drove away into the night. When she returned, one of the bikers said to her, "Well, he's not much of a man, is he?" She replied, "I can't answer as to that, but he's not much of a truck driver. He just ran over three motorcycles out in the parking lot."

That is short term fruit of the Spirit. In other words he had patience that lasted 5 minutes. But it was completely negated by his next action. Don't let that happen, don't have short term fruit.

Let me illustrate long term fruit:

PPT 4,5 text

Lu 9:51 And it came about, when the days were approaching for His ascension, that He resolutely set His face to go to Jerusalem;

Lu 9:52 and He sent messengers on ahead of Him. And they went, and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make arrangements for Him.

Lu 9:53 And they did not receive Him, because He was journeying with His face toward Jerusalem.

Lu 9:54 And when His disciples James and John saw [this,] they said, "Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?"