Heavenly Father, we pray for the virtue of patience, in our hearts, homes and our lives. We want to wait patiently for Your will to enfold in our lives. May we learn to wait patiently for You to bring Your answers to our prayers. We want to cooperate and wait on Your plans for us.
Hebrews 4 : 12 For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
Table of contents
Waiting Patiently
As we wait on You, we pray to turn to Your Word for comfort and direction.
- Your Word is solid and reliable.
- The Word brings us truth.
- Your Word gives us strength.
- The Mighty Word of God chases away our worries and our fears.
- The Gentle Word refreshes us.
Romans 5 : 3- 4 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces.
Teach Us To Be Patient
Lord, teach us to be patient – with life, with people, and with ourselves. We sometimes try to hurry things along too much, and we push for answers before the time is right.
Teach us to trust Your sense of timing rather than our own and to surrender our will to Your greater and wiser plan.
Help us let life unfold slowly, and teach us to savor each experience and learn the lessons behind each story.
James 5 : 7 Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains.
Lord, teach us to be patient – with life, with people,and with ourselves. Click To Tweet
Tolerance and Patience
Teach us Lord, to be sweet and gentle in all the events of our lives, in disappointments, in the thoughtlessness of others, in the insincerity of those we trust, in the unfaithfulness of those on whom we rely on.
Let us forget ourselves so that we may enjoy the happiness of others. Let us always hide our little pains and heartaches so that we may be the only one to suffer from them.
Teach us to be patient in our suffering and learn to profit by the suffering that comes across our path.
Colossians 1:11 May you be strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy.
The Virtue of Patience
Lord, we ask You to grant us the virtue of patience. We pray that it may mellow us, not harden or embitter us, that it may make us not irritable. That it may make us broad in our forgiveness, and never narrow, proud or overbearing.
May no one be less good for having come within our influence. No one less pure, less true, less kind, less noble, for having been a fellow believer with us, in our journey towards an eternal life with You Lord Jesus Christ, Amen!
Read also: Prayer for Patience and Prayer for Divine Direction for My Life Today
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Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him . . . Psalm 37: 7
We belong to the now generation. We want what we want, and we want it now. And if we can’t get what we want right away, then we pout, get angry, or blame God. Unfortunately, this attitude has carried over to our prayer life. We pray, and if our prayers are not answered immediately, then we lose complete faith and wallow in self-pity, feeling God has ignored us or simply doesn’t care. Even worse, we may feel that God doesn’t love us! Oh, how sad this must make our heavenly Father, who loves us so much, He gave His only Son to come to this earth and die on a cross—so that we may live eternally with Him! How soon we forget His incredible sacrifice. If you need more strength and patience, pray and ask God to provide more faith to trust Him more, and He will. Remember that God created you, loves you more than anyone else on this earth ever could, and wants only the best for you! He is worthy of your trust! And here is the kicker that so many struggle with the most—God’s timing is not the same as yours. His timetable of making things happen doesn’t always match up to what you think it should be—so keep this in mind when waiting for your prayers to be answered: God’s timing is perfect! Pray for patience, keep praying, and don’t ever stop praying, even if it takes years—because God will never let you down—not ever! He always answers prayers.
— Erica Christie-Campbell
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There’s a common saying among Christians: “Don’t pray for God to teach you patience–you won’t like what he’ll put you through to learn it!”
I don’t think much of that saying. It makes God look like a nasty schoolmaster, for one thing. It’s also the wrong reason. That is, I agree with the advice, “Don’t pray for patience.” I just think there’s a far better reason for it.
Lessons from experience
I think I have a bit of background from which to speak about this, and not just this blog item. As regular readers here know (and they’ve been patient with me talking about it!), for almost four years I’ve been unable to walk without pain and a limp. For most of those four years the doctors and therapists have been telling me I’m about six to eight weeks from full recovery.
Obviously it’s turned out to be a lot more complicated than that. Obviously, too, I’ve been waiting and waiting for that recovery, which has remained firmly and consistently just out of sight around the corner. It would have been easier just to have known how long it was going to take from the start, instead of dealing with the repeated disappointment of unsuccessful treatments all this time.
Yesterday, in my first physical therapy appointment since surgery number four (which was six weeks ago) I got the word: I’ll probably see gradual improvement this time. It isn’t that the surgery wasn’t any less successful; quite the opposite, actually. It’s that months of inactivity have weakened and stiffened my lower leg quite seriously. Progress, they’re telling me, won’t be measurable day by day or even week by week, but month by month. I should be back to full speed in a year or so.
That sounds like a long time to me.
The first surgery was kind of a pain, and the second and third were disappointing, but I made it through in pretty good spiritual and emotional condition. This time I’ve had more trouble with it. It’s been rough. That’s the main reason you’re not seeing me write as much as usual here: I’ve had real trouble pushing through the emotional barriers: the pain, the fatigue, the effects of lost sleep, and the discouragement that’s been lurking at the edge of my consciousness and sometimes pushing its way right in. I’m tired, I’m feeling a lot of loss, and I’m simply feeling sad a lot of the time.
Patience? So what?
Here’s another way to look at what I just said. I did fine with this, emotionally and spiritually, for a long time. That was patience in action. I would go so far as to say it shows I practiced patience to a fairly high degree, which means that somehow I must have learned patience to a fairly high degree. Sure, I could use more of it in traffic, and sometimes also in conversation with my family members (okay, not just sometimes), but still most people would agree, I’m no slouch at this patience thing.
I think that’s all true. I think it all leads to an important question: So what?
Several other important questions follow after that one. Why does patience matter? What’s it good for? It’s a mark of a mature character, one might say. So why does that matter?
God didn’t create us to be great at toughing things out
I was thinking about all these things earlier today–a lot earlier, in fact, at about 3:15 or 3:30 this morning, when I would rather have been sleeping. It was worth being awake, though, because that’s when I realize that patience wasn’t the point. God didn’t create me to become great at toughing things out. He created me as someone to love. He created me to love him. And he created me to live in loving relationship with others.
Yes, Scripture speaks often about growing in patience, learning endurance, and so on, but patience itself isn’t the point. Rather, patience reflects our trust in God and supports our relationship with others.
Patience is for relationships
It’s not hard to see how patience supports our relationships with others. If everyone would just do what I want them to do, the way I want and when I want, I’d never need to be patient with them. Conversely, if I would quit harboring the desire that they would be that way, they’d have a lot less need for patience with me. Impatient relationships are self-centered relationships. I’m not loving you if I expect you to operate on my agenda and my schedule.
When it comes to relationships, love is the point. The apostle Paul didn’t write, “and now abide faith, hope, and patience, these three; but the greatest of these is patience.” He identified love as the greatest virtue (1 Cor. 13:13). Patience counts interpersonally precisely because it is a way of loving.
Patience is the emotional fruit of trust in God
In relationship with God, patience is a way of trusting. This is what really struck me while lying in bed this morning. Impatience is a way of telling God I don’t think he’s doing his job right. It’s an expression of distrust toward God’s wisdom, his goodness, and his timing.
I distinguish impatience from dissatisfaction, which I can illustrate again with the story of my foot. I can be dissatisfied with its current atrophied condition and let that drive me to do the physical therapy I’ve been prescribed, while trusting God to be loving me and doing good for me regardless of the condition of my foot. On another scale, my unhappiness with the state of the world can drive me to pitch and do my part to help.
The difference between godly patience and impatience isn’t (as some might think) that patience waits while impatience acts. Patience could be very quiet or very active; either one is possible. Either way, patience trusts God to be taking care of me today and my work’s outcome tomorrow—or my prayers’ outcome, or my relationship efforts’ outcome, or my waiting’s outcome….
Patience is therefore the emotional fruit of active trust in God’s goodness and love.
So early this morning, while lying in bed, I told God, This is a really long road you’re asking me to walk (or limp) along. Right now I want to tell you I love you, and I’m going to quiet my heart and let you love me.
Don’t pray for patience, pray for love and trust instead.
Patience isn’t the point, love and trust are. Patience matters, yes, but it matters because it is an expression of what really counts: my love and my trust. It’s an observable measure of how much we love and trust, too.
So now you can see why I don’t think much of the usual advice about praying for patience. My advice instead would be, Don’t pray for God to teach you patience. Pray that he would teach you to love more and trust more.
While you’re at it, would you pray the same for me? I could use a lot more of both!
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