Proclaimer Blog
Patience, patience
If you read the fruit of the Spirit as a preacher, I wonder if one of the greatest challenges is whether we are patient. Evidence of the fruit, of course, is evidence that we are keeping in step with the Spirit, filled with him. So it’s sometimes a useful exercise to read the Galatians verse and ask yourself some pretty searching questions.
On this basis, I wonder how many of us preachers would stumble over patience (or long-suffering, or forbearance, depending on your translation). I had a happy lunch last week with Dick Lucas and we reflected and riffed on this for a while (if you can imagine him riffing). We live in an instant gratification world, as we all know. We complain when we see this quality creeping into church – we see a lack of commitment, we see people flitting from church to church at the slightest provocation.
But do we pause and ask whether we suffer from the same lack of patience in ministry? I long for people to be changed by the word. I long for conversions. I long for breakthroughs. And I get impatient when there are none. There is a kind of godly ambition which is holy and fuels prayer. But there is also a kind of ministry impatience which gets too easily frustrated at people’s lack of progress.
There’s a tension here, is there not? I want to be on my knees praying that John Smith will believe, pleading that Joan Smith will be sanctified. But I also need to channel my impatience into godly prayer rather than letting it overflow into ministry frustration.
Patience, Mr Preacher, patience.