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“Add To Your Faith | Jesus' (Unbelievable?) Patience”
Categories: Add To Your Faith | 2025
I need to start by confessing a weakness: Jesus was so perfect that I sometimes feel incredulous toward him. It’s still hard to believe that he could be SO good. Whatever virtuous thing we desire to know, we should learn it from him. Such is the case with patience: he was so patient that I find it nearly unbelievable.
He was patient with the disciples—the men who heard him day after day and yet who rarely attained to what he was teaching them. For three years, he taught, rebuked, corrected, and demonstrated the truth of God’s ways, often repeating the lessons for men with thick heads and dull hearts. And yet, as John said, “he loved them to the end” (Jn. 13:1). What patience!
He was patient in accomplishing God’s purposes. In may circumstances where we might be tempted to follow our impulses and rush something important, Jesus determinedly maintained his course. He stood his ground, slowly and steadily approaching the cross on which he would give his life, accomplishing his father’s purposes exactly as was intended (cf. Jn. 16:32). What patience!
He is patient, even as he waits in Heaven to bring his faithful ones to himself. As he told the apostles on the night of his betrayal, “if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (Jn. 14:3). He waits in Heaven with God—his father and ours—until the perfect time for his return. Indeed, he “is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pt. 3:9). What patience!
And so, we learn from our Lord. Like the master who is patient toward us, his servants, we learn to be patient toward our fellow servants (cf. Mt. 18:21-35). We learn from his example, so that we too can teach with patience, face life’s suffering with patience, and lead others to repentance with patience. And hopefully, by the way that we add this virtue to our faith, the world will look to us and occasionally find themselves thinking with incredulity, “What patience!”
- Dan Lankford
