The Perfect Work of Patience

This year, I graduated from houseplants to outdoor gardening. What started out as a small tea garden quickly spread into vegetables, fruits, and the occasional flowering plant to attract bees to my squash plants.

I usually buy plants or seedlings, since my record with planting from seed isn’t great, but when I saw a packet of snowdrop bulbs at the garden store last week, I snapped them right up.

But the thing about planting bulbs is, you have to be patient. Snowdrops planted in October won’t peek through the soil till late January (if at all.) It will be months before I know if the bulbs will grow and bloom.

It’s often that way with spiritual growth. James 1:2-4 tell us,

 “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.”

When we are in the midst of what James calls “divers temptations,” we can’t see the end result. These tests and trials aren’t pleasant—in fact, they’re downright hard—and we usually don’t even know the purpose of them until afterwards. But when we look at our trials through the eyes of faith, we can trust that the trying of that faith will bring forth patience.

But we have to let patience “have her perfect work.”

It’s easy to be impatient with the trials of life, it’s natural, in fact. But God isn’t interested in building up the “natural” responses of the flesh. Instead, He wants to grow in us His own character, to teach us to let His Spirit control our responses. This is the perfect work of patience, and it is a guaranteed result of trials—if we choose to yield to the Holy Spirit.

2 Peter 1:5-8 is another passage that describes the growth of Christlike character, and it includes that same word, patience.

“And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity. For if these things be in you, and abound, ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Look again at the character qualities listed in that passage. They are the outflow of the Holy Spirit in the heart of the yielded Christian. But they don’t happen all at once. Sometimes all we can do is tend the seeds of hope, looking with faith towards the promised harvest.

Are you in the bleak winter months of a trial? God wants to do the work of patience in your heart. Will you yield to the Holy Spirit and let patience make you “perfect and entire, wanting nothing?”

“Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompence of reward. For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise.”

Hebrews 10:35-36