Fruit of the Spirit: Patience

Hey, if you're new here, my name is Josh. I want you to know I say this often. I want you to know that you just walked into a room full of broken and sinful people desperately in need of a savior who are just here to seek Jesus. So if that sounds like you, you're in good company. And whatever your background or your struggles or your openness to God or your baggage that you walked in with today, you're welcome here.

Because we want to be a place where everyone can find hope and care and community in the healing power of God. And we believe that that's found in Christian community pursuing Jesus together. We also love to help people take a step towards Jesus. And so if you've never taken a step here at Whitewater and you're ready to get connected in some way, we would love for you to stop by the information desk after the service to meet our team there. They would love to get to know you, answer some questions that you might have, get you in a community of other believers pursuing Jesus, find a place that you can share your gifts here with the family.

So please do that. Please stop by the information desk after the service. If you've been around for the last few weeks, you know that we've been in this study on the fruit of the Spirit, studying through the part of the Bible where Paul describes this fruit to us. The fruit of the Spirit is the evidence that we are living a life that's abiding in Jesus. Jesus tells us in John 15 that those of us who are abiding in him, the true vine, will and are producing much from fruit, spiritual fruit.

This is the fruit that makes us look like and act like and think more like Jesus. And this fruit is the fruit of the Spirit. We can't miss that part. It's the fruit that belongs to the Holy Spirit. It's empowered and made possible through the Holy Spirit.

It's not the fruit of hard work. It's not the fruit of good behavior. It's not the fruit of Bible study. It's not the fruit of coming to church. It is the fruit of.

Of the Spirit. It only comes from his power, and it only comes through him abiding in Jesus and the Holy Spirit. That power is in those of us who believe in Christ and have given ourselves to him and named him as Lord and Savior of our lives. So in that sense, those of us who are in Christ are fruit trees. We produce this fruit, and we cannot produce this fruit on our own, but we certainly can hinder and starve and Keep this fruit from growing on our own.

We discussed this a lot more in the last few weeks. So if you missed those, please go back and listen to them. But last week we sent you home with two bits of homework. No shame if you missed them. There's still plenty of time.

You have the rest of your life to practice these things. Literally. The first was to memorize Philippians 4. 8. We said these are the ingredients to the recipe that nourishes our patience, our peace.

It nourishes our peace and it is a weapon that is formed against our worry, fear and anxieties. The second challenge then was for us to shift our prayers to from just presenting our problems to God like show and tell, and putting them back away and carrying them off with us, and instead start presenting our God to our problems. Because if we hold our problems, our worries, fears and anxieties up in our face all the time, and we meditate on those things, we cannot see how big our God is in comparison to them. But if we take the time to go lay our worries, fears and anxieties down at his feet, and we step back and and see them in comparison to our God, we can proclaim that if he is for us, then they cannot stand against us. So we said we should shift our prayers.

But let's read together Philippians 4. 8. We'll put it here on the screen. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. Will you pray with me?

Heavenly Father, help us to do that. It sounds so simple and yet it's such work for us to even remind ourselves to do it. Holy Spirit, would you empower us to memorize these words to carry in our pockets and deploy whenever we need them? Teach us today what patience, real biblical spiritual patience, looks like. Would you till up the soil in our hearts and minds today and make us ready to receive the challenge and encouragement and truth through your word today that you want to teach us in Jesus name, Amen.

Well, today we look at the spiritual fruit of patience, everyone's favorite thing. The word here used in Galatians 5 is the word macrothumia. What a great word. This word literally translates to long suffering or long tempered. It describes a person who has a long fuse, someone slow to anger or disruption, someone who doesn't easily lose their temper.

File that word temper away for a little bit. We'll come back to it. As we hone in on true biblical Patience. But before we get there, let's do what we've been doing and define what patience isn't. We've been doing this through looking at what we're calling false fruit.

That's good activity that looks like real fruit but isn't. And then looking at the evil twin of the fruit. It is the fruit that Satan is trying to convince us to consume and produce in our lives. That's worse than the fake fruit because it's actually poisonous to our lives and the lives of others. So the fake plastic fruit.

Patience, I think, comes most often for us in the form of what I'll call passive endurance. Passive endurance. That sounds pretty good, to passively endure something. But passive endurance is not motivated by faith. It's rooted in laziness.

Laziness. Passive endurance is mistaken for patience. When someone simply endures a situation without actively trusting God, without obeying his will, without stepping forward in faith, it's lazy waiting without any expectation. It's enduring without hope. It's remaining idle without when action is needed.

Passive endurance sneaks into our lives in subtle ways. We call it waiting on God. But in reality, we're too lazy to take action or hold ourselves accountable or practice faith. You might remember in our Armor of God series we talked about the shield of faith. We talked about real biblical faith and said that it only becomes actual faith when you step out onto it and put your weight on it.

When you practice it, that's when it's proven to be real faith. The fake fruit of passive endurance shows up in our careers when we're in a toxic or dead end work situation and we might be praying that God will do something about it, but we don't do something about it. We don't put a resume together, we don't do any networking, we don't learn any new skills. We just kind of toss a prayer out to God and then sit back and watch instead of stepping out in faith. It shows up in our marriages when we know that we've been slowly drifting apart ever since that one fight or the baby came, or we got that new job and we ask God to do something about it.

But we continue to stay late at the office. We continue to come up with every excuse why we can't just go out on a date and date each other or go to a marriage retreat. The truth is we're just too lazy and passive to make things better. We're defeated before we begin. It shows up in our finances when we pray that God will do something about our debt, but we're not willing to cut up our credit cards or stop going out to lunch every day or get rid of that TV subscription that we never needed.

We say that we're patiently waiting on God, but we're actually just not willing to hold ourselves accountable. Whether we're unwilling to study while asking God to help us pass an exam or a test, or unwilling to apologize while asking God to heal our relationships, or unwilling to practice while asking God to help us get onto the team, Passive endurance is rooted in laziness and it is not biblical patience. It's fake fruit. It looks noble on the outside because we're saying we're trusting on God, waiting on God, but in reality it's just a guilt free way to be inactive. True biblical patience, as we'll see in a few minutes, is active.

It is hopeful. It's watchful. It's willing. So what about the evil twin? It looks actually a lot like fake fruit.

It looks like passive endurance, but it's even more insidious because of how it is rooted. The evil twin of patience is avoidance. It's rooted in fear and tolerance. Unlike passive endurance, which can sometimes be shaken off if we just kind of wake up to the fact that we're being lazy, avoidance is far more deceptive. It dresses up like wisdom, like kindness, like virtue.

It convinces us that doing nothing is faithfulness.

It whispers that staying silent, tolerating sin, or avoiding discomfort is the godly thing to do. Avoidance takes root when we fear confrontation or mistake tolerance for love. It's the person who won't set boundaries with a manipulative family member because they think that being a Christian is to never say no. It's the one who watches a friend or a loved one or a child drift further and further from God or stay distant from God, but says nothing out of the fear that it might drive them away. When your silence, our silence, might be the very thing that's keeping them from God.

It's the friend who watches someone spiral into self destruction but says, I don't want to seem judgmental so I'll just wait. It's the person who won't go to counseling because they're afraid of facing their own brokenness. It's the person who is an addict who knows that they need to step out into the light, but they dread being exposed, refuses to step through because success is just as terrifying as failure. Avoidance, dressed up like patience is not obedience. It's actually self preservation at the cost of truth.

It convinces us that inaction is godly when in reality we're just unwilling. We're unwilling to risk discomfort or rejection or fear or change. At their core, both passive endurance and avoidance are marked by the same inaction. Inaction. But true biblical patience is both active, expectant.

True biblical patience is active and expectant. It moves toward God in hopeful obedience. And something that we have to understand about this act of patience is that it often looks pretty unimpressive from the outside. In the book of 2 Kings, we meet a character named Naaman. And Naaman is the commander of the army of the king of Aram, which is Syria.

It's a whole other story to go into the details of the strained relationship between Israel and Syria. They remain at war with each other, but Naaman contracts leprosy. It's a bacterial infection that's eating his skin away, and they don't have a way to heal it in his time. And an Israelite girl, which ironically, he captured in a raid on, on Israel, he captures this girl as a slave, and this girl is now the servant to his wife. And he has leprosy.

And this servant girl from Israel tells Naaman's wife, hey, I know a prophet from Israel. His name is Elisha. He can heal your husband. And Naaman is desperate, so he decides that he'll go to Elisha and give this a try. And this is where we pick up in 2 Kings 5, starting in verse 9.

So Naaman went with his horses and chariots this big to do and stopped at the door of Elisha's house. Elisha sent a messenger to say to him, go wash yourself seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will be restored and you will be cleansed. Now remember, Naaman is a really important guy. And Elisha, who is not a really important guy, doesn't have time to come to the door to even talk to Naaman. It's not like he had some gigantic estate or something.

And he sent his butler Jeeves to go and talk to Naaman. I wonder if he might have even sent his son or his daughter to go to the door. Like, let's try this. Naaman won't like this, but go tell him to go dip in the Jordan. And Naaman is unimpressed.

He's insulted and he's angry. We keep reading, but Naaman went away angry and said, I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call on in the name of the Lord his God, wave his hand over the spot and cure me of my leprosy. Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel. He's like, I got rivers at my house. I came all the way over here and you want me to go in the dirty Jordan River?

Couldn't I wash in them and be cleansed? So he turned and went off in a rage. He's ticked. Naaman wanted Elisha to come out and do something impressive, wave his hands around and call on the name of God and do something loud and big. But active waiting doesn't fit into Naaman's agenda.

And that's what God wants Naaman to learn. So Naaman is mad. He huffs off. Let's keep reading. Then Naaman's servants went to him and said, my father, if the prophet had told you to do something great, would you not have done it?

How much more then when he tells you wash and and be cleansed? How much easier could it be, boss man? So he went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times as the man of God had told him, and his flesh was restored and became clean, like that of a young boy. See, true patience doesn't just sit around and do nothing. But we have to be comfortable with the fact that active patience often looks unimpressive.

And while the Bible doesn't tell us this, I'm thinking about Naaman. He's already mad. He goes down to the water and he goes in the second time and the third time and the fourth time and the fifth time. And by the fifth time, he's thinking, this is the dumbest thing I have done ever in my life. I wasted all this time, all this energy.

And the sixth time, and he's like, okay, one more time. I will do it one more time. And he dips and he comes up and he's cleansed.

And that question, if you had been told to do something great, would you not have done it? I think that's a question that we need to be asking ourselves on a regular basis when it comes to this practice of active, obedient patience. Active patience is on display lots of times in the Bible. It's on display in Noah's life as he actively builds the this gigantic boat for 50 years while he waits on it to rain. We see it in Moses life where there's this moment where all Moses has to do is hold up his staff as God fights the battle for him.

We see it in Paul's life. He's imprisoned multiple times in his life. And if I'm imprisoned for preaching the gospel, I'm going to sit there and just moan and groan and complain, but. But he doesn't do that. He worships.

He evangelizes the guards like, well, I got a captive audience here. Might as well tell them about Jesus. And then he writes all these letters to the churches that become the books of the Bible that we read today. They're Ephesians and Philippians and Colossians. He wrote them in prison.

He didn't just sit there and wait. These people did not send up a prayer and sit back and do nothing. They walked in active, patient obedience. And it looked pretty unimpressive. I guarantee you Paul did not think that thousands of years later we would be talking about how great it was that he was waiting in prison.

James, the brother of Jesus, compares this kind of patience to the way that a farmer waits on the harvest. James 5:7 says, Be patient then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord's coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains. You, too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lord's coming is near. I don't know if you know anything about farming, but no farmer worth his weight just sits back and crosses his fingers and goes, God, I pray that you will bring a harvest.

They don't. They get their equipment ready, and they get the ground ready, and they get the seed ready, and they go and plant it, and they combat pests and weeds, and then they wait on God to bring the real power. This is how active, patient waiting looks. Now, remember we said at the top that biblical patience is tempered by. I want to look at that word temper, because I think when we look at that word, we most often think of people losing their temper.

Someone who has a short temper. Right. But it's a much deeper word than that. Maybe the best way for us to think about this word is how it's used in the process of making steel. Steel is tempered.

The process of tempering steel makes it less brittle and more durable and more flexible. The way the Bible talks about patience is very much like the process of tempering steel. Now, I'm not a metallurgist, nor the son of a metallurgist, but I did some study on steel making, and I may or may not have stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Everyone under the age of 30, you can ask us old people what that means after the service. Anyway, this is an oversimplification, for sure, of metallurgy. But the process of steel being made, this is how it works. You heat up iron to over 2,500 degrees, and it becomes molten iron. And then different ingredients are added to that molten iron, depending on the type of steel that's being made.

And then they take that really hot steel after it's formed and they quench it in oil or water to quickly bring the temperature down. And what that does is it hardens the steel. It makes it super hard, but it also, as the outside of the metal, cools faster than the inside of the metal. It locks these little fracture lines inside of the metal. It traps it inside, it makes it very hard, but it also makes it very inflexible and brittle.

If the steel stays in this untempered form, then it easily breaks as stress or pressure or impact is put on it. The tempering process takes that quenched steel and reheats it to a temperature below melting and holds it at that heat for a period of time, and then slowly lets it cool down to room temperature. This process releases those little internal fractures and stresses in the steel while keeping its hardness. The longer the tempering process and the higher the tempering temperature, the tougher and the more flexible the steel becomes. One of the types of steel that's generally tempered at the highest temperature for the longest time is structural steel.

Correctly tempered structural steel holds an incredible balance of hardness and flexibility and toughness and durability. Structural steel, of course, is what we use to make gigantic structures, high rise buildings and enormous bridges. So what does this have to do with patience? Well, true biblical patience does not come through a quick quenching that happens as we become Christians, as we are baptized into the water. It's the outcome, through a careful process of heat over time that makes our patience tough, durable, and flexible.

There is no shortcut for durable patience, because like steel, if the tempering time is too short or the heat too low, our patience will remain brittle, fragile, easily broken. And I don't know if you're anything like me, but I sure feel like my patience is like that. When we understand this, it helps us make far more sense of how James 1 describes the way patience is formed. Patience is formed through heat over time. This is why he can say something as insanely crazy as this.

Consider it pure joy. My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, whenever you face heat over time, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance or long suffering, or tempering or patience. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. As much as we hate this reality, true biblical patience is formed through heat. Over time it is tempered, and we can either embrace this tempering process as pure joy because we trust that God is doing something that is nurturing and growing patience in us over time.

Or we can do everything in our power to. To get ourselves out of the heat as quickly as possible and walk away like brittle steel that breaks easily under pressure and impact. But when our patience is properly tempered, it becomes more and more durable, flexible, tough. It becomes the structural kind of patience that God can build impressive things with.

You know, we said from the beginning of this series that the fruit of the spirit is fruit that when it's produced, it makes us look more like Jesus. And as I was thinking about God's patience, it's on display in a thousand ways in the Bible. But it made me consider kind of one of the craziest patient things that he did, and that was to send Jesus as a baby. And at Christmas time, like, we look at that story and we think, oh, that's so warm and nice and so humble. Just feels really good.

But I gotta tell you, if I was the project manager on that team of bringing Jesus to the earth, I would have some serious pushback at the table. I would be like the guy at the table going, listen, God, I mean, the whole Jesus is a baby thing, I get what you're trying to do. It sounds. I mean, that's nice. That'll make people feel good.

But don't you think it's pretty ineffective and inefficient to send him as a baby? Like, we gotta wait 30 years to get to the good stuff like healing and preaching and feeding people and doing miracles, raising people from the dead. Babies can't do that. The world's in a pretty tough place right now. God, don't you think it would be way smarter if you just sent him as a man right now?

He could just get right to it. But our patient God is just as interested in the process as he is in the product. God is willing to wait. He's willing to wait for the world to be tempered, for Jesus as a man to be tempered over time, for the process to do its work. And the end result is exactly what.

What he was looking for. But we have to be willing participants in his work. Have you ever noticed that we're completely willing to wait on lots of things that we deem is worth our time? I don't know anyone who goes to a restaurant and orders a pork chop and tells them, hey, don't worry about getting it up to temperature. Just bring it out as fast as possible.

I'm not really worried about salmonella. I enjoy hanging my head over a toilet and vomiting for days. No one does that. We don't go into surgery, a major surgery, and we're like, listen, Doc, I got two and a half hours. So whatever you got done at two and a half hours, just zip me back up.

Even if things aren't put back together quite right. Right? We're willing to wait on all kinds of things. And we're not willing to wait on the creator of the universe to do his work in. In us.

When he purposely puts us in a season of waiting, we don't have time for that. We can all look back at some season of our lives that we know that God put us in a season of waiting and it was so good and so beneficial to us. And then we loop back around to the next one and we don't have time for it again. And the truth is that every day we're all waiting on something, aren't we? We're waiting on smaller things like the popcorn to be done in the microwave, or the light to turn green at an intersection, or for the sermon to be over so we can go to lunch.

We wait on medium weight things like hearing back on a job interview or a college acceptance letter, or closing on a new house. Some of us are waiting on a baby to be born or longing to be married, or waiting to save up enough money so we can get out on our own. Some of us are waiting on. On really heavy things like a biopsy report, waiting on our divorce to be finalized. We're waiting on chemotherapy to be over a court hearing.

Maybe we're waiting in hospice with someone that we love. And I have never once in my life ever heard someone in a season of waiting say, this is pure joy.

And I really hope that this heat gets hot enough for long enough to temper my patience so that God can build beautiful things with it. No one says that. But what if. What if in our waiting, instead of being so frustrated with having to wait, we instead started to view these seasons of waiting as seasons of. Of tempering, as seasons of growth.

What if we started asking God how he wants us to be actively patient? Patience is tempered through heat over time. That's true about heavier or harder things in life, but it's also true in the little things too, like waiting in the school pickup line or being stuck in traffic. I have to admit, every day as I go towards Kentucky and cross the bridge from Indiana, three lanes goes down to one, and I have to remind myself that I am a pastor.

Or when I walk up to the checkout line at the grocery store with four things, and the entire county got there before me. And they have baskets full and they're all five rows deep, and I'm losing my mind. Or when I'm already five minutes late. And even though for the last two hours I've been asking my three teenagers, do you have everything you need for us to walk out the door? Somehow I'm still sitting in the car, losing my mind because they're still not outside.

That probably never happens to anybody else. Nor do I experience that on a weekly basis. But what about those moments? Could God be wanting to do something in those moments, too? Could God be wanting to display in me his kind of biblical patience so that my teenagers can see what that actually looks like, instead of growing up to view things like me that stung coming out?

See, I think that God is ready in any moment for us to grow into the likeness of Jesus. And he wants us to use all of these situations we've described today to temper us through heat over time. So here's our challenge for today. The next time we find ourselves in a moment of waiting, whether it's something small like standing in line, or something really heavy like waiting on test results, what if instead of losing our minds, what if instead of complaining or sticking our head in the sand or pulling out our phone for another dopamine hit, what if instead of quenching the heat as quickly as possible, we take a deep breath and we pray this simple prayer. God, what do you want to do in me while I wait?

What if we pick up our heads and look around the checkout line for someone that he might be wanting us to engage with? And we ask ourselves, God, what do you want to do in me while I wait? That's it. One question. Because if we believe that God is always working, then even in our waiting, time isn't being wasted.

God, what do you want me. What do you want to do in me while I wait?

You know, the other way that we see Jesus patience on display in his life is as he hung on the cross and he is being jeered and made fun of. And they literally say to him, if you are the son of God, then why don't you take yourself down off that cross?

But he knew.

He knew that that heat, that extreme heat, just shy of melting him over time, was what it was going to take to accomplish what he set out to do. He knew that. And he, even though he could have called down a legion of angels from heaven to rescue him, he could have snapped his Fingers and Rome would tumble in a second. He was patient. He endured the cross.

We read this a couple weeks ago for the joy set before him. He endured the cross because he knew that God could build something incredible off of that kind of tempered patience in his life.

If you didn't get a communion cup today, will you bring me one? Thank you.

Thanks for being patient with me. That was a joke. If you didn't get a cup, just raise your hand. Our team's got them and would love to bring you one. We've got one up here in the front.

He patiently endured the cross.

We love the idea of having endurance, don't we? But we don't remember that the beginning of that word is endure.

Endurance takes enduring. And this is what Christ did for us on the cross as he hung there. He knew that you and I would be here today celebrating his life and death and resurrection through communion.

And just the night before, he was with his friends, sharing a meal together, and he broke bread and he gave it to them. And he says, this is my body given for you. And every time you eat of this, remember what I've done for you. This is his body given for us.

In the same way he took the cup.

He said, this is my blood poured out for you. The blood of the new covenant. This is the blood of patient endurance. When you drink of it, remember me.

Heavenly Father, we really stink at patience.

And I pray that that simple sentence, we stink at this, would just reverberate through the room, that we would all just kind of pick that up and swallow it. We stink at this. We all do. There's no one in this room who is a patient magician, and they can just make it happen.

I pray that you would build in us a willingness to endure.

And we see right now, in this moment, as we share in communion together, that this there is nothing greater to exemplify than your patient endurance on the cross. Because there was something greater on the other side. So help us to live that way, to look around and ask, what do you want to do in me while I wait? Would you do miraculous things this week? Would you open our eyes to incredible possibilities and opportunities sitting in front of us?

Would you make us even 1% more willing to suffer through the heat a little longer?

We need your help.

But thankfully, your Holy Spirit is the power that invigorates and enlivens and makes this possible. So we pray by your spirit that we can be like you in our patience. In Jesus name, amen.