Praying for Patience
Our most passionate prayers for patience are often spoken when we are feeling the least patient. “Lord, give me patience,” we plead, longing for God to answer us with an immediate feeling of absolute patience. But God does not seem to work that way often. It seems that even when we’ve prayed, we have to fight hard against feelings of impatience in order to respond with patient words and actions. Feeling like hypocrites, we wonder when and how God will answer our prayers for patience.
Wondering this shows that we are thinking incorrectly about patience. We are viewing it as a feeling that God inserts into our hearts, but the Bible tells us it is a fruit that comes as a result of walking by the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-25). We think that we need the feeling of patience first, before we react to our circumstances, but we have forgotten that fruits are not roots. Fruit does not come first. It is not what causes the growth of a tree. In fact, it is the very opposite. It is the end result.
Imagine you’ve hired a physical trainer and at your first workout session, you ask him to make sure you’re strong enough to do the workout. He would be very confused because the point is not to be strong enough to workout, but to workout so that you grow in strength. The more the workouts stretch your muscles to their max, the stronger you will become.
It is much more likely that when you first meet your physical trainer, you will ask him to help you get stronger, and then you will follow whatever instructions he gives you. Even when the workout gets hard, when your muscles are shaking and you can’t catch your breath, you do your best because you know that your trainer and you have the same goal in mind. You are both working to make you stronger.
When we ask God for patience, we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves in circumstances that push us to what feels like the very limit of our patience. Just as workouts are opportunities to grow in strength, so these circumstances are opportunities to grow in patience. Without them, we would stay stagnant. But when we walk through them by the power of the Holy Spirit, begging God for patience as we go, reacting not according to the flesh (the stressful impatient feelings rising up in our bodies) but according to the Spirit (the knowledge that to love is to act in patience, and that Jesus would have reacted in patience), that is when God changes us. That is how we grow in patience.
So when and how will God answer our prayers for patience? Probably today, tomorrow, and every day after that, by generously placing us in and helping us through the very circumstances that push us to the limits of our patience. Live through those circumstances fighting for patience in dependence on the Spirit, and look back one, five, ten years from today and see the growth.
Image by @weareambitious