“But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. James 1:4”

One of the best known idioms in the English language shows up consistently in the day’s news: “the patience of Job.” People are said to exhibit the patience of Job when undergoing various circumstances or in their daily vocations. But truth be told, Job was not always a patient man. Until the end of the book, Job was on an impatient mission to prove he wasn’t the cause of his own suffering.

So if Job is not a good example of patience, who is? Working backwards from Galatians 5:22 – “But the fruit of the Spirit is…longsuffering (that is, patience) – we arrive at Christ. The fruit of the Spirit represents the Spirit’s manifestations of the life of Christ in us – so Christ must have been the personification of the fruit of the Spirit, including patience. But what about when Christ drove the merchants out of the temple with a whip, turning over their tables of money and cages of animals? Was that patience?

For a Christian, patience is willful and cheerful submission to the will and timing of God in one’s life. Patience is not always meek and quite, but it is God-centered, which makes it a measure by which to evaluate whather we are patient or not.

Cheerful patience is a holy art and skill, which a man learns from God.