Patience And Discipleship

There is a virtue that has quickly become endangered in our practice of discipleship today. Few might notice the decline of this species, and it certainly hasn’t happened overnight. Slowly but surely, patience and our grandparents’s virtues, have become virtually extinct from our modern mindset regarding discipleship. This virtue is a mark of Holy Spirit vitality in a church and in a people. And it’s something I am not.

I am is an impatient person. Waiting, enduring, and sticking at something long-term is a chore for me. I would prefer instant gratification in regards to just about everything. When it comes to spiritual transformation in myself and in the lives of others, I like to say I’m eager for change. The reality is however, that I am impatient. Somewhere in the back of my mind I believe our churches should grow faster, we should see more missional communities develop, and that lost people should get saved right now. Christians should get over their besetting sins today not tomorrow and certainly not next month. Unbelievers on our street should come to Jesus right now, next week is too late.

We pastors try to be clever and cloak this lack of patience in what we call “urgency.” Somehow the "spiritual fruit" of urgency is more valuable than the spiritual fruit of patience. Yet only one of those two qualities made the list of spiritual fruits in Galatians 5:22, and urgency isn’t it. Patience is the endangered species we desperately need to recapture in our talk and practice of discipleship.

There are countless articles, books, and materials in publication these days on what constitutes a healthy church. Many of these resources are helpful for thinking through the functions and practices of the local church. I have yet to see one, however, that measures the health of the local church on the vitality of the Spirit’s fruit in our midst. Instead of measuring our church health and growth in terms of physical numbers, dollars, and downloads, shouldn’t we look to the biblical paradigm for health? Could it be that we have failed to understand what makes us healthy and vibrant, and exchanged the Spirit’s work among us for what we can largely manufacture and measure ourselves?

It’s my belief that the list known as “the fruit of the Spirit” in Galatians 5 is more than just a personal checklist of character traits for the Christian. These qualities should not just be embodied by individuals that make up the church, but are the very qualities the church, as a communal entity, should embody. When we look at the local church, as a whole, we should see a people of love, joy, peace, patience, etc. Things like love, joy, and patience should be prominent traits in healthy missional communities and healthy churches.

To truly say there is a movement of the Spirit among us, we must look for the signs of the Spirit. Those signs are not necessarily rapid growth, large budgets, and cultural influence. We can grow things and call them “spiritual” and understand that the Spirit had nothing to do with them. Nor can we look at small bastions of fundamentalism and “holiness” and concur that they are spiritually healthy either. Chances are that many of these groups are just as deeply mired in the “works of the flesh” that Paul speaks of (like divisiveness) before unpacking the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:19-21). What we must look at as a real measure of true Spirit-led, Spirit-filled healthy churches are the fruit of the Spirit. Do we see love, joy, and so forth as growing and evident as a culture in our churches? This is how we know the Spirit of God is actively at work in our midst.

I had to add this afterthought as a P.S.

Patience As A Gospel...

Patience is more than waiting. I like the word that some of the older English translations use for this concept of patience: long-suffering. It is the idea of bearing with someone, enduring the hurt and pain of their failure and sin. Long-suffering calls us to take some hits, get messed up with failure, endure disappointment. It calls for a long-term commitment. This isn’t our weekend life-improvement project that resolves itself at 6pm on Sunday evening before we head back into a routine week. This is the day-in, day-out grind of shared-life. Long-suffering calls for endurance. We can’t give up at the first failure. We stick with it. We endure the sin. We pray for change. We love the offender.