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Preacher: Pastor David Ball
Scripture: John 16:25-33
Welcome to our summer series on the fruit of the Spirit from Galatians 5, where we explore how the Holy Spirit empowers believers to bear good fruit as witnesses for Christ in a dark world. Today, we focus on patience, a quality that doesn’t come naturally to our impatient, control-seeking nature, amplified by a world of instant gratification. Patience, meaning “long-suffering,” involves enduring suffering and forbearing with others, reflecting Jesus’ character. Our impatience reveals a struggle to trust God’s sovereign timing. Still, we can cultivate supernatural patience by rooting ourselves in the rich soil of His gracious patience, seen in His slow anger toward Israel’s rebellion and Jesus’ endurance on the cross. This enables us to endure trials without retaliation, forgive others, and shine as a countercultural witness to Christ’s love in an impatient world. Resting in God’s patience, we bear this fruit through the Spirit’s work, not our own effort.
Transcript
Well, welcome, especially uh if you are a guest of ours this morning. I’m so so glad that you’re here. Uh this summer we’re in the midst of a a series uh that you can see on on the screen, the fruit of summer, where we’re uh looking together at the fruit of the spirit as Paul uh his list of the fruit of the spirit uh in Galatians 5. Uh the reason is in this series we’re in the season of Pentecost. uh and as the day of Pentecost was the coming of the Holy Spirit and the baptism of the Holy Spirit upon the church and all believers to empower them to be witnesses for Christ and the world. So the work of the Holy Spirit’s doing in us now and and the bearing of good fruit that Paul’s listing here for us uh is being done in us so that we might be witnesses for Christ in a dark world that is desperate for his truth. And and for those who who’ve been with us, you’ll remember or if you know Galatians 5:22 to23, the list of the fruit of the spirit that that Paul gives is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And today, we’ve come to patience. We’ve come to patience. But before we dive in, uh, one of the guiding principles that we’ve been talking about throughout this, uh, this series and understanding the fruit is that the fruit that a tree produces is only as good as the soil in which the tree is planted. Uh, that that’s a biblical principle. It’s what the the Psalms reveal that the the tree that’s planted beside the living water that bears good fruit in season and and out of season. You know, a tree that’s planted in bad soil doesn’t bear fruit, but a tree that’s that’s uh planted in good rich soil produces productive, good and pleasing fruit. The same is true of the fruit of the spirit in our lives. Uh it’s dependent upon the soil in which our lives are planted, in which our lives are founded. I’m not going to give you another analogy or story of my uh of my uh of my taking care of my yard in bad soil. I’ve got plenty of them, but uh but not not today. I’ll spare you from that. Uh but one thing we have to understand in this whole series of talking about the fruit of the spirit is that the the fruit of the spirit, all of these things, they don’t come naturally to us. They don’t come naturally to us. Otherwise, uh, it wouldn’t be the fruit of the spirit at all, would it? It’d just be the fruit of David. Um, I have a lot of them, but it’s, you know, but but this is the fruit of the spirit’s work. I’m kidding, by the way. You know, some of them come maybe more naturally to us, or at least on the surface and a superficial understanding of what these are. Some of them come more naturally to us than others. Uh but you know when that happens it’s usually when we’re comparing ourselves to one another right uh you know when we’re comparing ourselves to one another or or the people around us in our lives we can say you know uh you know I’m pretty patient compared to uh soand so uh you know we we like to play that game uh but when we compare ourselves to who the fruit of the spirit is truly revealing uh we all can recognize that we fall well short because the fruit of the spirit represents Jesus. It’s who he is. It’s his nature. It’s the nature of God himself. The standard for love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. It’s Jesus because the fruit of the spirit is the reflection of him. So while while some of us may be more loving than others, I think we can all agree to that. Uh when we compare when we compare to Jesus’s love and not to other people, we all fall short of the glory of God. The fruit and the reflection of Jesus doesn’t come naturally to us. We weren’t just born with it. It doesn’t come naturally. So it is with patience. So it is with patience. We are by nature impatient people. We are by nature impatient people. We’re restless, short-tempered, especially when we get irritated or are forced to be delayed in any way uh or uh face any opposition to what we’re trying to accomplish. Right? It happens to all of us. I I don’t think anyone here likes uh being in traffic. I don’t think anyone likes waiting in any kind of line. It’s why they you can pay extra money for fast passes at the at the big amusement parks because they know you’re impatient and you’ll pay them more money to hopefully not have to wait in that line anymore. I know you can relate to it. I I know I can because we hate to wait. We hate to wait. And the world we live in is a world that is progressing on providing us more and more with instant gratification more and more to get things right away. All technology or at least a portion of it, a good portion of it, right, is always working to provide faster and faster service. Are you old enough to remember the the 90s or the the early 2000s and dialup modems? Remember how long that took? It was excruciating. Although we I don’t think at the time I would have thought that, but now I can’t imagine what it was like. Or do you remember the days of standard TV? Standard TV where you had to watch commercials. My kids don’t get this at all. Like a commercial comes on now because they’re the streamers are making money, right? and a commercial comes on and they’re enraged. They’re enraged. How dare they put a commercial here. I I’m I’m watching this thing. I shouldn’t have to do that. I know. I feel that way, too, right? Even if it’s just a one minute commercial, I’m like, this is absolute hell.
Everything around us is designed uh to feed into our impatience. everything around us from the internet to same day deliveries right from Amazon constant notifications on our phone so that we get it right away it’s always right now and it’s instant there’s everything’s playing into our hatred of waiting the world around us just amplifies our own impatience and this impatience of ours it reveals a deeper issue that’s lurking there in the human heart. And in our context this morning of the fruit of the spirit, our natural impatience reveals the soil that our lives are actually planted in. Our impatient re reveals our deep desire for control and our struggle to trust in God and his sovereign timing and will for our lives. We all struggle with it. We all struggle to plant our lives in it and to trust him with it. We want to plant our lives in our own control of what’s going on in our world. And that struggle for control is what breeds the impatience at us. It has this deep and it has a negative impact on all the people around us, even the people that we love most. But what is patience? What is patience that Paul’s speaking of uh in Galatians 5? Uh the Greek word uh it’s made up of two words that mean long anger. Long anger. That’s that’s what the the word lit literally means. Patience is the quality of waiting a long time before expressing any kind of anger. It carries with it two primary implications for our lives. And that the first one is this that patience is an endurance that’s given to us for suffering. And the second is patience is the forbearance that we’re given through the fruit of the spirit in dealing with other people. which are the two biggest threats to our total sense of control of our lives and our dominance over the events in our lives. We can live a good amount of the time fooling ourselves in the illusion that we’re in control, right? Most of the time we can fool ourselves into thinking that we’ve got all this right where we want it to be and that uh it’s going to be okay. But suffering and other people always get in our way. always get in our way and they interrupt our progress towards where we think we want to go and where we think we want to be. And when we face suffering and people who get in our way, we get frustrated, we get short-tempered, we get angry, and we treat people in ways that are not loving.
Listen, I’m totally guilty of this. I’m totally guilty of this kind of impatience that breeds anger and and resentment and frustration. My kids know it when I get home from from a long day where I feel like I I’ve had about all that I can have and all I want is some peace and some harmony. But I come home to their needs. How dare they? And to my responsibilities there. And at best I get kind of grumpy. But at worst I’ll blow up about something. I’ll blow up about something. The dishes are being dirty. They’ve been here all day. Didn’t I say to do something about that? Or things laying around on the floor. You know, that kind of stuff. That’s just the normal kind of stuff. But out of impatience, there’s a reaction and treating people, the people that I love most, in ways that I don’t want to. And yet my desire for control, the soil that I find myself rooting my life in most of the time, which has now gotten interrupted, I can say things that hurt them. How about in our suffering? How about in our suffering? There there’s nothing that gets in our way to life like suffering. a sickness, an unwanted physical ailment. Nothing like being in a hospital and being uncomfortable and in pain and just having to wait to get in the way of our control, right? And in our impatience for that loss of control, it gives birth to frustration and anger. We get mad even at the people who are who are caring for us. The people who are probably, you know, sacrificing a lot of their own time and their own uh their own energy, their their own mental health. And yet all we can think about is ourselves.
But patience, patience, the God-given fruit of the spirit’s work in our lives, it gives us a supernatural trust in God’s sovereignty and his goodness. That’s the work of the spirit, the fruit of the spirit in our lives in the midst of the suffering and in the midst of the people who are interrupting our lives and our in unwanted ways for us. Ji Packer said it this way in knowing God. He says, “Patience is a fruit of knowing God’s love and sovereignty. It enables us to wait without grumbling, confident that he is working all things for his glory and for our good. But if we are by nature impatient people, how can we be patient? How can we have this fruit of the spirit?” Well, it begins by being rooted in the good soil of God’s goodness and his grace. Because to trust God, we must know who he is. We must know fully his patience. And more importantly, we must know his patience for us. In Exodus 34, God described himself to Moses. He said, when he called him, he said this about himself. the Lord. The Lord the compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, slow to anger. That’s that’s the the Old Testament equivalent to uh to the Greek word that we see in the New Testament for patience. God is slow to anger. That is his nature. And this is repeated over and over again in the Old Testament, over and over again throughout the Psalms. Now, keep in mind, especially here, uh what was going on, uh God says this about himself even in the face of Israel’s incredible sin and rebellion against him. He’s just rescued them from slavery in Egypt. And yet, they’ve gotten out into the wilderness, right? And Moses goes away to go meet with God. And what do they do? They make a golden calf to worship and to put their trust in because they think that’ll save them. And yet God and Moses then then intercedes on behalf of God’s people, not for his anger and his wrath to destroy them completely. And God revealed this about himself and his own character. And they’re repeated over and over again. Remember Jonah? Remember how angry Jonah was with God because of God’s patience for Nineveh? He was so angry that that he ran away, right? He ran away because he didn’t want to proclaim God’s patience and his mercy for the people of Nineveh. He wanted God’s swift wrath and judgment to fall upon them. Now, there are plenty of examples of God’s wrath and judgment in the Old Testament. But even those, ironically, they even those display and show off God’s patience. You know, if you’ll remember those who are with us this last summer as we were wandering in the wilderness waiting to be back in this this building, uh uh we went through together the book of of Joshua. It was a fan favorite. Um and and if you’ll remember, we dealt in that whole series with the very difficult subject of God’s wrath and his judgment upon the people of Canaan. But we also learned that even in the midst of that when understood in the light of Genesis 15:16 where God had declared to Abraham that his descendants would not inherit the land of Canaan until the iniquity of the Amorites was complete. Do you remember how long that took? 400 years. 400 years. How’s that for the patience of God? 400 years. The prophet Hosea Hosea in in chapter 11, he he just marvels at the God’s patience in the face of Israel’s constant rebellion and sin. And then ultimately we see the personification of God’s patience ultimately in his son Jesus Christ for us. Jesus’s life and death were full of patience. Jesus waited 30 years before he even began his public ministry. Jesus was constantly being tested by his own disciples, wasn’t he? Those that that he loved most, those that he trusted most, those that he had called to follow him because they were always slow to understand what he was trying to say to them. Can you imagine just how frustrating that would be? how frustrating it would be to be teaching about uh loving and serving one another and that that’s what the kingdom of heaven is all about. Uh that the first will be last and the last will be first. Right? All these great and wise teachings that were just spoton and then to find them arguing about who’s going to be the most most important. I would have lost my top. Imagine his patience with Judas who he knew would betray him. He knew it. He had his patience with him. Jesus wept over Jerusalem. You know why he wept? Because he knew how long God had patiently waited for them to repent and return to him and what was going to be possible for them if they did. But of course, the supreme patience of Jesus was displayed in his endurance of suffering for us. The violence, the cruelty, the injustice of the cross. And yet he patiently endured the cross to carry the full weight of our sin without retaliation and always trusting in the goodness of his heavenly father. See, until we grasp, until we receive and own the patience of God for us, not just as a concept, not just as some big theological idea, but until you’re able to receive and grasp his patience for you,
until you own the fact that God has to be patient with you,
or else you’d be destroyed.
Until we can receive it, we’re never going to receive the fruit of the spirit’s work of patience in us. Because of Jesus, we can patiently endure suffering because Jesus did it for us. The apostle Peter wrote in first Peter uh 1, I mean in 1 Peter uh uh I think it was chapter 1 uh verses 12 to13. He says, “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice in so far as you share Christ’s sufferings that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.” Now po, you know, Peter’s primarily talking about persecutions here in suffering, but it but it certainly covers all suffering in general. And then in verse 16, yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God. And then in verse 19, therefore let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful creator while doing good. This teaches us a little bit about our patience in the in the face of suffering. Uh number one is this. We should never be surprised by it. We should never be surprised by it. I think somewhere along the line, maybe it’s the health and wealth gospel, the cheap grace gospel, whatever, whatever you want to call it, uh teaches us that uh somehow that uh when when we become followers of Christ that we’re not going to face any more struggles. everything’s going to go well with us if we just have enough faith and we just believe nothing will ever go wrong. But that’s not what the gospel tells us. That’s not what Jesus taught us. We will we will face trials and sufferings of many kind. So what Peter’s telling us is that number one uh we should expect it. And by expecting it alone gives us the ability to have some patience in the midst of it. Number two is this do not retaliate. We don’t retaliate in the midst of our suffering. We follow Christ who didn’t fight back. Number three, this call Peter’s calling us to not quit. He says, “Keep doing the good, right? Keep following God’s will for you in your suffering. Don’t give up.” And then number four, know that there will be an end. There will be an end to your suffering one way or another. Either in this life or when Christ returns in the consummation of all things. When he makes all things new, our suffering, whatever we’re going through, will end. But not only can we be patient through the work of Jesus and his spirit in us in the face of our suffering, we can have patience the forbearance for other people to forgive other people for the things that they do or that they failed to do. We don’t use the word forbearance enough, do we? Because it carries with it such the beautiful picture of what a forgiveness is. It’s carrying it’s burying it’s bearing the sin. Jesus is obviously the model. Jesus carried our sin upon the cross upon himself. When we forgive others, we’re bearing the sin. We’re bearing it. We can forgive people rather than holding a grudge. We can bear with people even when they irritate or anger us. We can overlook something that was hurtful or unkind, rather than fighting back with harsh words or having to make sure that you get even with that person. We can be patient with others because we are very aware of our shortcomings and our own weaknesses. That’s the freedom we have in Christ. Remembering that God is patient with us. And friends, when our lives are firmly rooted in the rich soil of God’s gracious patience for us, the Holy Spirit grows and it produces in us a patience that is a reflection of Jesus to the world. A Christian Christian who patiently endures suffering and patiently forgives others shines with the light of Christ in an impatient and an unforgiving and relentless world. A church that bears the fruit of patience is one of the strongest witnesses to Jesus of all. You know, I was told in seminary as I was being prepared to, you know, that same thing about that we should expect suffering, I was taught as a going into seminary and being prepared to to be a minister, I was prepar I was told that the problem with the church are the people. Um, and that wasn’t them. It wasn’t you. It was that we we the problem with the church is us. We’re all so different. We’re all so different. different visions, different ambitions, different wants, different likes, different dislikes, different causes that are particularly passionate to us that the that we are can find particularly important in this moment. There’s a lot of space for conflict, isn’t there? There’s a lot of of place for irritation, for anger with one another. When we can bear the fruit of patience and loving one another, that’s a community that people want to be a part of. It’s so countercultural. It’s so opposite of the world around us because that is a reflection of a savior that people want to know.
Friends, we’re being called to bear the fruit of patience in this world as witnesses for Christ. But that patience comes not from trying harder or working harder, but by resting in the rich soil of God’s grace and patience for you. Friends, start each day by by rejoicing with the Lord and thanking him for his patience, recognizing the truth of what he’s had to forebear for us and continues to on our behalf. It will begin to bear the fruit of the spirit’s work of patience for others in our lives. There’s this poem. It’s a simple one, maybe even a little silly. Uh it says to dwell in love with saints above oh that will be a glory but to dwell with saints we know ah that is a different story. It’s true isn’t it? May the Holy Spirit fill us with all patience as we trust in the finished work of Jesus. As we abide in his loving patience for us, may we shine brightly for his glory in this dark world. Amen.
