Patience: Synchronizing Your Heart with God's Heart: 100 Days with Christian Mystics

Everybody wants it, but nobody wants to learn it. While teaching, I have often heard people say: “I am just not a patient person”, “Never ask the Lord for patience because He is sure to bring trouble!”, “I know I need to be more patient, but…” And many, many other similar comments. Patience is this thing that everyone recognizes that they need, but few are willing to go to the Lord and ask Him to make them patient. We will ask to be more loving, more generous, more compassionate, more busy, but seldom will we ask to be made more patient. Almost everyone believes that suffering is always matched with learning patience. And while I would say that suffering is indeed a powerful means for learning patience, the need for patience is really much more important for general living that maybe we ever realized. For instance, consider the need for patience in the following: Traffic jams, long lines at the stores, relationships, work environments, healing, aging, church, and many, many more. In fact, patience is a constant state of being that is indispensable for being a person who is calm, peaceful, unruffled, unhurried, compassionate, kind, loving, generous, self-controlled, humble…it seems to me that patience is an inherent quality to be found in every single facet of life. Combine that with the absolute need to be in sync with God, and you can easily see that patience is a thing that you must ask God to develop in you, in whatever manner He chooses. The men and women, whose works are featured in this book, were people who understood waiting upon God, persevering through hardships, enduring difficulties and learning the invaluable quality of patience in all things. Since patience is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, this book begins with selections that reveal the patience of God, then moves to the patience we get from God, and then our need to be patient with God. The first two give us the proper context for why we must submit ourselves to His work in all things that impact us in order for us to learn to trust Him and to know how much we really are loved and cared for. The third section is where “the rubber hits the road.” No matter what anyone believes or says, it takes a long time for most people in relating to God to come to the place of understanding where they know that God’s timing is always best…no matter what! But this is a reality that is learned only through trial and error. It is totally against our old natures to wait for anything. Self always wants what it wants now. But God’s ways, His timing, His processes, His reasons are always the very best imaginable. So that is why this vital ingredient called patience is so very important for growing into Christian maturity. Maturity is not how much you know about God, but rather how well you actually now God Himself. And knowing God as Himself is what He wants more than anything else. Patience is the firm foundation upon which He is then able to reveal insights into who He is and what He really wants from, and wants to do for, each of us. God is patience itself. May you come to understand and know Him better as a result of spending time in reading this book, praying your way through it, and laying yourself before Our Heavenly Father regarding this crucial attribute called patience. "All the exercises of the spiritual life, our reading and praying, our willing and doing, have their very great value. But they can go no farther than this: that they point the way and prepare us in humility to look to and to depend alone upon God Himself, and in patience to wait His good time and mercy. The waiting is to teach us our absolute dependence upon God’s mighty working, and to make us in perfect patience place ourselves at His disposal. They that wait upon the Lord shall inherit the land; the promised land and its blessing. The heirs must wait; they can afford to wait." Andrew Murray