Perfect Patience

“But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life,” (1 Timothy 1:16 ESV)

Do you ever hear someone confess how impatient they are? I’ve been the one on the confessing end surrounding a lack of patience many times. I remember years ago someone comically warned me not to pray for patience because something difficult was bound to happen in my life to test my patience or lack thereof. There became this unspoken fear of attaining patience in my life. I began to view patience as only for the pastors or extra sanctified believers around me. I didn’t feel set apart enough to enter the category of patient. Maybe you can relate. What the Lord has beautifully brought to my attention through studying His Word is that I should have been focusing on His patience, not the miniscule version of patience I could attain. My attention should have centered on His perfect patience and what that means.

Patience is defined by Oxford Languages as, “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.”

The patience of God is illustrated daily; with every breath we breathe. His patience overwhelms His Creation that is marred by sin. The fact that He’s gifted us with Salvation and then continuously lavishes His grace on us, is His patience.

He’s God—He’s eternal perfect wisdom—He is the only Omniscient One there is and will ever be—So He created His creation KNOWING that left to freewill, we WILL sin. And He’s so holy, He can’t abide with even a speck of sin… all of this points to His innate patience before He chose to create us. Within this perfect patience, He had already set a plan for Salvation for His people through the work of Jesus Christ at the cross in eternity past.

The entire plan of Salvation—Jesus being born of a virgin, being fully God, yet fully man, living a sinless and perfect life, revealing His deity through miraculous wonders and signs, being captured, tortured, and bearing the holy wrath of God for all of His children’s sin, taking our place in that well-deserved punishment, hung on a cross to die a physical death, was buried, to resurrect to life again three days later, having defeated death and the power of sin on the believer, and ascend back to heaven—The entire plan of Salvation is marked with God’s patience for His children. Not only does the entire plan of Salvation point to God’s patience, but through the life of Christ we have an example of patience that magnifies perfect patience as He willingly endured the cross as obedience to God the Father. We cannot atone for ourselves. We cannot keep ourselves from sinning. We cannot rise to perfection in any way that would garner an eternal life in Heaven next to our Perfect God. God knew all of this prior to Genesis 1:1. We must recognize the beautiful patience of our wonderful God. 

God’s patience does not negate the consequences of sin. It’s actually through our sin that we radically recognize the patience of God.

If we’re honest about our deeply embedded sin nature that derives from our corrupted desires, manifesting from our own free-will and in light of God’s boundless holiness—we should all be like Herod Agrippa in Acts 12. He did not give God the glory and attempted to possess the praises of the people. Because of this, he was struck down, breathed his last breath, and was eaten by worms. The fact that this hasn’t been the fate of all of us yet, is the patience of God.

We can recognize God’s patience regarding our sin all the way back in the beginning of Genesis. God knew the sin that was going to take place in the Garden of Eden. He could have struck Adam and Eve to death and cast them into an eternal doom right then. He could have wiped out all future remnants of the human race at The Fall in Genesis 3.

But He didn’t.

His patience endures.

His patience is evidently present and perfect, and infinite as He is infinite. Not only did He patiently allow Adam and Eve to continue to breath, but He cared for them so much that He expelled them from the Garden of Eden so they wouldn’t fall in any future temptation and fail from the expression of their own free-will, and then eat of the Tree of Life and live forever in a sinful state.

He is a patient God.

The fact that God has gifted us with sanctification journeys points to His loving patience toward us. He is so holy and calls us to be holy, but He doesn’t expect a holy perfection from us while in our physical bodies of flesh. So, He providentially allows us to grow in this holiness.

That alone shines so much light on His perfect patience.

If patience is a gift from the Holy Spirit and a mark and a fruit of the Holy Spirit, along with Love, Joy, Peace, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self-control, we can rest in knowing that God is in all sense perfectly patient. He wouldn’t call us to bear something that He doesn’t emulate in an absolute boundless way. Now, we know we will never conduct ourselves in perfect patience this side of glory, but His grace makes up for all that we could never attain. His grace points back to His overwhelming patience with His children whom He’s called before the foundations of the world were created.

I love the instruction of the Apostle Paul written to the church at Colossae. He writes,

“Put to death what is earthly in you…Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him,” (Colossians 3:5,12-17 ESV).  

Paul is instructing and challenging and calling those who are repented believers to a holy lifestyle that is consistent with our new identities in Christ Jesus. He is reiterating that believers have been chosen by God and stand before Him as His beloved holy ones. Paul is instructing the believer to put on the virtues of Christ and patience is listed among these top tier virtues—this magnifies the attribute of God’s perfect patience. Though we can’t obtain His perfect patience, it is an attribute of God that is communicable to a degree to the believer. We are to take part in His patience as we grow in His grace and grow in His wisdom and grow in His likeness, we are to bear with others in patience.

What a gift from the Lord that He’s allowed space for the believer to take part in the attribute of His patience.

I encourage you to seek to become more patient as He is patient. I encourage you to welcome the sanctifying moments that challenge you to rise in patience all the while you rely on the strength of the God of Perfect Patience.

I Trust my God, I Trust my God, I Trust my God

Ardently His,

Jess