Guidelines For Christianity: The Fruit Of Patience Series

”But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control; against such there is no law.”

A small boy is sent to bed by his father.

Five minutes later … “Da-ad…”

“What?”

“I’m thirsty. Can you bring me a drink of water?”

“No. You should have got a drink before you went to bed. Go to sleep.”

Five minutes later: “Da-aaaaad …”

“WHAT?”

“I’m THIRSTY. Can I have a drink of water??”

“I told you NO! If you ask again, I’ll have to come in there and spank you!!”

Five minutes later … Daaaa-aaaaaad …”

“WHAT?!!”

“When you come in to spank me, can you bring me a drink of water?”

I guess we could classify that as patience. “People aren’t very patient are they—particularly in our society?

A man’s car stalled in heavy traffic just as the light turned green.

All his efforts under the hood to get the car started have failed,

and to make matters worse, everyone behind him begins honking their horns.

He finally walks back to the first driver behind him and says...

"I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to get my car started.

Why don’t you go up there and give it a try...

I’ll stay here and honk your horn for you."

Patience....

I’m sure you’ve been in situations where your patience has been severely tested...

Many of us pray like this: Dear God, please grant me patience. And I want it right now.” Do you have patience? The Scripture passage says that patience is an aspect of the Holy Spirit’s fruit.

Patience is a fruit of the Spirit...On the surface that might surprise you because up to this point we’ve been saying that the fruit of the Spirit is just that...

fruit....given by the Holy Spirit in the life of the CHRISTIAN...

We agree that things like love....joy....peace....these are things given by the Holy Spirit... But some of the others...patience....kindness....gentleness...

these are human qualities to strive toward...Right?

We tend to think of PATIENCE as a personality trait. Some people are patient...

some people aren’t. Some think that when it comes to patience, it doesn’t matter if you are a Christian or not. Some Christians are patient...and some are......well....they aren’t so patient. Even sinners can be patient, right? After all,

there’s an old saying that says "patience is a virtue", which reinforces the idea that patience is something we strive for...something we work at...NOT something we receive by the Holy Spirit.

What is Patience? The NASB calls it patience. The KJV calls it long-suffering.

The Greek word used in the original translation of the Bible is literally translated to mean long temper.

Patience – the quality that does not surrender to circumstances or succumb under trial; it is the opposite of despondency and is associated with hope. Longsuffering - is that quality of self-restraint in the face of being provoked.

A Scriptural study of the word "patient" and its forms...patience...patiently...shows that those words appear 45 times in the Bible...A study of all 45 occurrences of those words will conclude that the Bible speaks about patience in 3 different ways...

First of all, the Bible talks about God’s patience...On the surface...you might think that this doesn’t apply to us...Of course, God is patient...He’s perfect...We are imperfect...We should just go on to the other ways that patience is described in Scripture and forget about this one...

But if we are going to talk about patience, we have to say that God is a patient God. Think of how long He waited for you to accept His Son Jesus Christ. He’s still waiting for some of you. *** Time is of non-essence to God – He waits patiently [mercifully – in order that men might come to repentance] knowing that His day of wrath will come.

We are supposed to strive to be like Christ. Of course, we don’t BECOME God.

But, we ARE supposed to use God as our example...

To keep our eyes on Christ...

to allow the Holy Spirit to work in us so that we can become more like Christ...

So, we need to look at God’s patience...In 1 Peter 3:20 it tells us that "God waited patiently, in the days of Noah..." In the days of Noah, sin had become so widespread that God only spared 8 people during the flood. In spite of the stench of all the sin, God waited patiently while the ark was being built. Aren’t you glad God was patient?

It certainly would have been easy to just be done with the whole mess. I mean it’s only 8 righteous people. Some scholars put the population in Noah’s day to be about the same as the population of the world today. They calculate based on the typical family size in the days of Noah...how long people lived...calculating the rates of growth, and so on. The population of our planet today is about 6 1/2 Billion people.