Many people struggle to have patience, a wonderful fruit of the spirit (Gals. 5:22-23). So why is patience such a hard virtue to master? I mentioned patience and its connection in my last post “The Sneaky Pride of Flesh.” I used to think I had become a very patient person until my daughters got a bit older, and they challenged me repeatedly. Gradually I realized I needed way more patience.
As I speak with other women, they tell me this is a difficult virtue to acquire too. One younger woman told me she felt impatient, maybe even angry, with a newly hired worker she was training. The Lord convicted her that her impatience was a form of pride. She was really good at her job, and she was not patient with someone who could not possibly understand the job when he was still so new at it.
As she spoke, God convicted my heart, because I have been impatient with my daughters when they are learning some new skills. When they were young, I could tell they needed immense patience learning to use the potty, feeding themselves and more. I had such patience for my little girls who still looked so babyish. Yet as they grew, they began to look more mature, and I may have forgotten how young my daughters still are. Now they are teens and look so mature and try to act so independent, but they still need their mom’s tender heart.
Pride and also an unwillingness to accept the reality of myself and others must have been at the root of my impatience. At times I may have thought of the dozen chores I still wanted to finish, when my daughter said she did not understand her pre-algebra. When I went over a concept I thought she understood but instead she stared blankly or even looked away and called for her dog, I got very mad. Sadly I was being impatient. No, she should not have called for her dog right after asking for help and while I was giving it. But she is easily distracted, and I am asking God to help me use more humor to diffuse times when I feel frustrated. Using humor is more humbling for me than getting mad, and thus I know I NEED to use humor at those times. Otherwise the anger I feel is fed by my impatience and is a form of pride.
We need discerning to know the healthy times to be impatient, because we shouldn’t wait too long for some things. God can tell us what they are. I have been “too patient” with service calls, refunds and other things. Then the sellers, and other providers were more than happy to take advantage of my waiting for them while they were not honoring their work. But in relationships with people, patience is most often the right response. Even when we should push someone to act, we can do so kindly and humbly. I just read about a similar situation in Gal. 6:1b, “You who are godly should gently and humbly help that person back onto the right path.” Although this verse was about a fellow believer who fell into sin, I felt so convicted by the words “gently and humbly.” I cannot justify my impatience when I read of being humble and gentle. And just a few verses after that, I read Gal. 6:10, “Therefore, whenever we have the opportunity, we should do good to everyone one—especially to those in the family of faith.” I can see how being patient and serving others needs to go together.
I don’t want to have pride and be harsh and impatiently bang around while I provide food, wash dishes and clothes and do other chores to serve my family. God cares about my attitude as I serve others. And in my heart, I don’t want to hurt my family and friends anyway. I want to be patient.
Sadly, our pride can tell us our time is too valuable to waste by slowing down or helping others (Gals.6:3 “If you think you are too important to help someone, you are only fooling yourself. You are not that important.”) We also might have unrealistic expectations of others, as I did with my daughters who aren’t as mature as I sometimes expect.
Yet I also get impatient with myself. Others have called me unkind names, but I have also called myself a dummy for mistakes I made. I have grieved the Holy Spirit, not just by being harsh and impatient with others, but also with myself. I must speak gently with others, but I am learning to speak gently with myself too. As such, I love the Bible passages about God’s patience with me. He models this so well, and I can learn to be more like him.
We may be impatient with ourselves, because we don’t lose weight fast enough, or we don’t master a godly skill (like overcoming grumbling and complaining) fast enough. We expect ourselves to be better or father along than we are. We might think we are too permissive. Or we might think we’re spiritually lazy if we catch ourselves grumbling again when we had vowed to give up complaining.
In our frail humanity, we can frustrate ourselves. We may have been taught phrases like: “Do your best,” and when we don’t achieve our ideal, we believe we didn’t work hard enough. But idealizing any goal can lead to disillusionment.
If you often feel frustrated and impatient with yourself you might have unreasonable self-expectations. We can even misquote Scripture to push these unrealistic expectations on ourselves. Philippians 4:13 says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” but it does not mean we have to do everything well or even do everything. It actually refers to our ability to do “all things” Christ has called us to do. There are many things Christ has not called us to do or be.
When we are frustrated with ourselves, we might need to ask ourselves if the goal we are missing is God’s true plan for our lives. If God isn’t calling us to this goal, our frustration is valid, because we aren’t supposed to do that. If we begin to sense God doesn’t want us to do this, we can ask him what he does want us to do. Knowing how God wants to replace that old goal or change it may take time.
Or if we are rushing ourselves, our timing may not match God’s timing. God may be saying, “Slow down,” or even “wait.” We may even need to set this goal aside until God gives us a green light again. God gives us seasons of rest when we are not supposed to strive. For example, check out these three verses about rest: Eccel.3:1, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” and Psalm 127:2, “It is useless for you to work so hard from early morning until late at night, anxiously working for food to eat: for God gives rest to His loved ones,” and Mark 6:31, “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.” So whether this is the wrong goal or the wrong time to achieve it, we need to wait on God if we sense (due to our self impatience) something is wrong.
Some of us have been shamed for trying to understand ourselves and determine our temperament, strengths, weaknesses and our heart’s deepest desires (not the evil heart Jeremiah spoke of in 17:9, but the heart God puts in us in Psalm 51:10). While resting and waiting patiently may drive us crazy, there is still so much we can do in a season of slowing down to learn “self patience,” and patience with others. During this time we can learn about our temperament. I wrote about this in my posts “Difficult Person or Different Personality,” “No Favorite Child: Intro to personalities and temperament,” “Four Greek temperaments,” “Love Languages: love preferences.” We can explore our spiritual gifts. If you type “Spiritual Gifts Test,” into the search option of your computer, many tests come up, or if you don’t like these, ask me and I can copy the test we used in my women’s discipleship at my church.
In our quiet rest, we can savor God’s love for us. Our self impatience may simply come from not allowing our hearts to accept all of God’s love for us. He loves us dearly. We don’t have to push ourselves too hard. I also wrote about that in my posts “You Matter: God says so, and so do your loved ones!” and “I Don’t Feel Close to God: Veteran Christians not feeling that passion.”
Whether we are impatient with ourselves or others, one way to overcome that impatience is to reflect the Father’s love for others and ourselves (Psalm 103:13, “As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.”)
When we see how much God loves others and ourselves, we can ask God to give us more of his tender love. We can get to know ourselves better, so we can have more patience with them. Next we can get to know others more (and ask God to teach us more about them) so we can treat them fairly, based upon who they are now. Even if we want our friends and family to be strong and capable, they may not be at the place where we want them to be (or where we want ourselves to be too).
The Christian walk consists of so much surrender. In this case, we need to surrender to God our goals for ourselves and for others. If we let him show us where we and others are (emotionally, spiritually and more), we can learn to accept this reality, even if it hurts to see ourselves or our loved ones far from the level we had hoped. Accepting reality is not surrendering to mediocrity. It is simply being honest before the Lord. Only he, via the Holy Spirit, can work change in our lives and others. In our flesh we can strive to make changes, but this will only produce impatience (Romans7:5, “For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death.”)
When we accept ourselves and others realistically seeing how and who they (and we ourselves) are now, we can come to God and tell him we hope for more. Is my child rude and unkind? I would need to accept this for now. Or am I complaining and grumpy too much, even now? I need to accept this, not forever, just for now. Only when I humbly admit to God my weaknesses and my loved ones’ weaknesses can I surrender these to him. Then I can pray for him to change them and to change me.
My impatience comes from fear (lack of accepting current reality—that’s also called denial) as well as pride. Both fear and pride refuse to surrender to God. Both of these bad qualities spur us to impatience.
And I might wonder why I am still impatient when I already “surrendered” my bad qualities to God (or others said they did this too). We have to realize the Scripture says we are to be a “living sacrifice” (Roms. 12:1.) A living sacrifice can crawl off God’s altar and go live for herself again. Our surrender to God has to be daily, even multiple times a day. Our flesh really resists surrender, (hence the title of my last post “The Sneaky Pride of Flesh.”) We must fight a constant battle against our flesh, in this case against our impatience and all the bad qualities that spur impatience (pride, fear, denial and more). We have to admit this will be a battle we wage until we die (Gal.5:17, “The sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the Spirit wants. And the Spirit gives us desires that are the opposite of what the sinful nature desires. These two forces are constantly fighting each other, so you are not free to carry out your good intentions.”) So the more we invite the Holy Spirit to fill us, even multiple times daily if we are really striving, the more we will have victory over this dreaded impatience of ours.
So while I once thought I had become a very patient person, I now realize I will never become patient in my flesh. But I can keep asking God to refill me, and he can keep working in me to fight this battle.
Remember, when God put Adam and Eve on the earth, Satan (the fallen angel) got to go there too (Genesis chapter 3). Even in the perfect world, God placed humans where they had to battle evil. It is sad that Adam and Eve fell, but we still have this idea to ponder: God made them fighters, even in their perfect state. God expects us to fight. Thus we realize we must fight our own flesh. And with God’s help, we can do it! We can face our impatience, and we can fight it. We just need to give up the idea that before we go to heaven, we can become perfect. Instead we must realize we will always fight our impatience. Once we realize this, the battle gets easier, because we are no longer fighting our denial—we just fight the impatience and flesh.
Together, we can fight these battles. We can become more like Christ every day, even if we do have to fight our flesh every day. God loves us dearly and he says we can do it (Romans8:37, “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”) I pray we have blessed you with this post. Thanks so much for joining us!