Patience is the focal theme of today's discussion on Living the Selah Life, where we delve into the biblical understanding of this virtue as encapsulated in Galatians 5:22. This episode explores how patience signifies the ability to endure difficulties and extend grace to others, reflecting God's own enduring nature. We explore the multifaceted dimensions of patience, including our responses to challenging circumstances, interactions with difficult individuals, and the waiting for divine timing. Through this exploration, we aim to understand how the Holy Spirit equips us with the capacity for patient endurance, allowing us to navigate life with grace and trust in God's goodness. Join us as we reflect on the necessity and significance of cultivating patience in our daily lives.

Takeaways:

1. The podcast emphasizes the significance of patience as a divine quality that we can cultivate in our lives through the Holy Spirit's assistance.
2. Listeners are encouraged to reflect on their personal experiences with patience and to recognize how God's patience is evident in their circumstances.
3. Patience is described as having the capacity to endure difficulties without losing hope or becoming bitter, highlighting its essential role in spiritual growth.
4. The episode illustrates that patience operates in three main aspects: with circumstances, with people, and with God's timing, each demanding unique expressions of endurance.

The content shared on Living the Selah Life is for spiritual encouragement, personal reflection, and informational purposes only.

It is not intended to diagnose, treat or replace medical, psychological or professional advice of any kind.

Please consult a licensed healthcare provider or qualified professional for any physical, mental or emotional health concerns.

The views expressed are those of the host, Kimberly Lockenoy, and are based on personal experience and Biblical insight, not clinical training.

Welcome back to Living the Selah Life, a podcast that invites you to slow down, breathe and reconnect with the presence of God.

I'm your host, Kim, and this space is for anyone longing to become more familiar with his presence.

Each episode is an intentional pause, a moment to reflect, realign and remember that God meets us when we create space for Him.

So take a breath.

You are right on time.

Let's live the Selah life together.

Hey Hey y'.

All.

Welcome back to Living the Selah Life.

In our last episode, we talked about faithfulness.

We talked about faithfulness as God's reliable nature and how he shows up in our daily lives consistently.

Today we are going to talk about patience.

My sister told me that all of her patience is supernatural, praise God.

I'm starting to think that mine is too.

But so we're going to talk about patience.

And this word, the way that it's meant in Galatians 5 and 22 is just amazing to me.

We'll discover that biblical patience is God's own long suffering nature, manifested through us toward us and giving us the capacity to endure difficulty, wait on his timing, and to extend grace to people who frustrate us.

So I am going to call this week's main teaching patience, the long breath of God.

So the Greek word here for patience, and I am certain I'm not going to do it any justice, even though I've looked into it a million times, is macrothomia Macrothomia.

And it is spelled M A K R O T H U M I a And that is the word when we see patience in Galatians 5 and 22 that it translates to Greek macrothemia and it actually means long suffering.

Now this word combines two Greek words words, makros, which means long, and thumos, which means temper, passion, or breath.

So makrothumia literally means long tempered or long breathing.

It describes the ability to bear with difficult circumstances or difficult people over an extended period of time without losing your temper or giving up.

In ancient Greek, macrothemia was considered a rare and admirable quality.

It describes someone who could endure prolonged frustration, repeated offenses or extended hardship without retaliating, complaining, or abandoning their commitments.

This person had the capacity to take a long breath through difficulty instead of responding with quick anger or immediate withdrawal.

The Bible uses macrothemia primarily to describe God's patience with humanity.

He constantly bears with our repeated failures, endures our ongoing rebellion, and waits for us to turn to him rather than immediately punishing.

His patience gives us time and space to repent, to grow, and to mature.

When the Holy Spirit produces macrothemia and believers, we receive God's own capacity for patient endurance.

We're able to bear with difficult circumstances longer than our natural temperament allows.

And we can extend grace to people who repeatedly frustrate us.

It also enables us to wait for God's timing even when the delay seems unreasonable.

Patience operates in three primary directions.

Patience with circumstances, patience with people, and patience with God's timing.

Outside of those things, we really don't need patience.

But those three things encompass life, period.

Each requires different expressions of the same spirit given capacity to endure without losing hope or becoming bitter.

Patience with circumstances means bearing hardship, waiting through delays, and enduring difficulty without constant complaining or demands for immediate relief.

It's the ability to live in uncomfortable situations while maintaining your peace and continuing to trust God.

Sounds like a lot, right?

But all of us have done this many, many, many times.

If we're not doing it right now.

Patience with people means extending grace when they fail, frustrate, or disappoint.

It's bearing their weaknesses, forgiving their repeated offenses, and and continuing to love them even when they don't meet our expectations or treat us well.

Impatience with God's timing means waiting for his answers, trusting his delays when they are delays, and continuing to obey when visible progress is not there.

It is believing that God is working even when you cannot see the results, and maintaining your faith when prayers seem to be unanswered.

All three forms of patience require supernatural strength.

We just don't have it.

We have limited tolerance for discomfort, frustration, and waiting.

The Holy Spirit provides unlimited capacity for patient endurance because we're drawing from God's own patient nature.

The Holy Spirit produces patience by connecting us to God's heart.

God has endured humanity's rejection, rebellion, and indifference for thousands of years.

And some of us can't endure for a week.

Imagine what God has endured for thousands and thousands of years.

And he still remains patient.

He still remains loving.

He still remains all the fruit of the Spirit we went over in spite of.

He watches people he loves choose paths that harm them.

He waits for prodigals to Come back home he bears with our slow, slow spiritual growth and repeated failures.

His patience is very vast, and when the Spirit fills us, we gain access to this same divine patience.

We receive God's perspective on the people and circumstances that test our patience, and we begin to see others through his eyes.

The Spirit also gives us hope during seasons of waiting.

Patience requires hope.

My goodness.

Patience requires hope, not hope is a good thing to have.

It is required the belief that current difficulty will not last forever and that God is working toward good outcomes even when progress seems like we're going backwards.

Romans chapter 15, verses 13 calls God the God of hope and prays that he would fill us with joy and peace in believing that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit produces patience by teaching us God's ways.

Isaiah, chapter 55, verses 8 through 9 says, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

When we understand that God's timing and methods are different than ours, life brings us seasons of prolonged difficulty.

The Holy Spirit enables patience with circumstances by helping us live in the present moment.

Patience doesn't mean we enjoy difficult circumstances or pretend they don't bother us.

It just means that we choose to endure them with grace while continuing to trust in God's goodness.

One of patience's most visible expression is the ability to restrain the ability to hold back when an immediate response feels great.

Proverbs, chapter 19, verse 11 says, the discretion of a man makes him slow to anger, and his glory is to overlook a transgression.

Patience gives us the ability to overlook offenses that deserve a response.

We can choose to let minor frustrations go rather than addressing every irritation.

And we can bear with people's weaknesses instead of constantly trying to correct them.

This restraint does require the Holy Spirit's help though, because our natural impulse is is to respond immediately when we're frustrated.

We try to correct everybody that annoy us and to defend ourselves when criticized.

The Spirit gives us the capacity to pause, say la, breathe and choose a response that reflects God's patient nature.

The Holy Spirit produces patience partly by helping us value process by over immediate results.

We live in a world that prioritizes efficiency, microwave fixes and instant gratification.

And God often works slowly, developing character through extended seasons, teaching us through repeated lessons and maturing us gradually over years and sometimes decades.

And when we understand that God values the process of growth as much as he values the outcome, we become more patient with our own spiritual development and with other people's progress as well, because we know that we didn't grow up overnight.

So when we're talking to people, especially people that we see that are stuck in some ways or they have habits, just look at your own life and the things that God has corrected in you.

You did not come out of the womb that way, and God did not make you different in a day, a week, and some years.

And so we just have to extend that same grace to others.

But praise God for the Holy Spirit.

That gives us the patience to be able to endure.

The Spirit helps us approach our lives, our relationships, and our spiritual growth with the same patience as a farmer who plants seeds and waits and waits and waits.

We sow good seeds through our choices and then wait, trusting that God will bring growth in the right time.

I am such a testimony to God's patience.

I always thank him for his patience.

He is not only patient in the big things, he is patient in the little things, even in the conversations.

And I'm just going to use myself that I have with him.

The conversations that he lets you see while you're talking to him that this is absolutely ridiculous.

But he still listens and asks questions because he knows in 10 minutes you're going to realize that this is not even a thing.

But you don't realize it yet.

So he's still talking to you and answering back to you until you do realize that what you're saying is complete madness.

And I just love him.

I love him.

He's so patient.

He's so patient.

So we will move on to our Scripture Spotlight.

And this week it is coming from Romans, chapter 5, verses 3 through 5.

And it says, and not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance and perseverance, character and character, hope.

Now, hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who was given to us.

And this verse reveals the process through which God develops patience in us.

Tribulation.

So glory in tribulations.

Paul says that we can rejoice in difficulties, and this does not mean we enjoy suffering or we pretend that hardships don't hurt because they do.

It means that we recognize that difficult circumstances serve a purpose in our development.

It took me a long, long, long time to do that.

I would always tell God, I really think you could have did this another way.

But in hindsight, he couldn't have because the other way would have been worse than the way that he used so Tribulation produces perseverance.

Easy circumstances do not develop patient endurance.

Prolonged difficulty does.

And as much as we hate to admit that, if you think about the things you've been through in your life, the things that taught you lessons that lasted, it was through difficult circumstances, prolonged difficult circumstances.

Perseverance produces character.

Character is proven quality that comes from being tested over time.

When you've endured difficulty patiently and remained faithful through it, you develop character that can be trusted.

You become someone who is able to remain solid when things get hard.

Character produces hope.

Proving character creates confident hope because you've seen God's faithfulness through past difficulties.

So when new things arise, and they will, you remember that God brought you through before, and so you trust him to do it again and again and again until it becomes second nature to trust Him.

Hope does not disappoint, the Word says, and this hope is not I call it pie in the sky thinking to people that know me or wishful thinking.

It's not pie in the sky or just being optimistic.

It's confident assurance based on God's track record of faithfulness, his proven faithfulness.

This hope never disappoints because it is bedded in God's unchanging nature and the source is love poured out by the Holy Spirit.

All of this, the ability to rejoice in tribulation, the development of perseverance, the formation of character, and the hope that results flows from God's love poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

Oh, I love you, Holy Spirit.

We don't empower ourselves to be able to attain these qualities through our own efforts.

We receive them as gifts from the Holy Spirit.

This passage shows us that God uses difficulty on purpose to develop patience in us.

He's not trying to harm us.

He's using the inevitable hardships of life in a fallen world to produce qualities that will serve us for eternity.

Patience is not produced in comfort.

It is forged through the patient endurance of generally extended difficulty while maintaining faith in God's goodness.

So we will move on to this week's Pause Prompts.

Pause prompts allow us to take inventory of where we are so that we can know where we're going or where we need to be.

So let's go.

Where does your patients typically run out first with difficult circumstances?

What triggers your impatience most quickly?

Can you recall a time when impatience led you to force an outcome or react poorly?

What were the consequences?

How has God demonstrated patience towards you.

And let's not say the obvious here.

Who in your life currently requires the most patience from you and how might the Holy Spirit help you extend even more grace to that person?

Remember that patience is the Holy Spirit producing God's long suffering, his long breath nature in you giving you the capacity to endure difficulty, to wait on him and extend grace to people.

So we will move on into my favorite part of the podcast, the Selah Moments.

So begin by sitting comfortably.

This is our opportunity to receive the Holy Spirit's power for patience and to surrender our impatience to his gracious work.

So take a few slow, deep breaths.

And bring to your mind the circumstances, people, or unanswered prayers that test your patience most severely.

And don't minimize your frustration or pretend you're more patient than you actually are.

Acknowledge honestly where your patience runs out.

Reflect on specific ways that God has been patient with you and let gratitude for his patient love settle in your heart.

Ask the Holy Spirit to produce his patient nature in you.

Request his capacity to endure difficulty, his grace to extend to frustrating people, and his peace to maintain while waiting for his timing.

Let us pray.

Father God, in the name of Jesus, thank you for your remarkable patience towards us.

Thank you for bearing with our repeated failures, our slow obedience and our ongoing struggles.

Thank you for not giving up on us when we've tested your patience.

Thank you for giving us time and space to grow.

Holy Spirit, we need your help with patience.

Produce in us your patient nature.

Give us capacity to bear hardship longer than our temperament allows and help us extend grace to people who test our patience when circumstances remain difficult in spite of our prayers.

Give us patience to endure without complaining.

Help us live in uncomfortable situations while maintaining our peace and continuing to trust in your goodness.

Show us the difference between between patience and passivity.

Help us actively engage with difficulty while maintaining our peace.

Give us wisdom to know when to wait patiently and when to act.

Lord, use difficulty in our lives to develop perseverance, character and hope and help us to revisit.

Recognize that hardship serves a purpose in our development.

Give us grace to endure trials patiently while maintaining faith in your goodness.

Thank you that your patience towards us never runs out.

We thank you that you continue working with us year after year, teaching us the same lessons to until we learn them, forgiving the same sins repeatedly.

Help us extend this same patient grace to ourselves and to others.

Make us a people who bear long with difficult circumstances.

Let our patience reflect your patient nature and draw others to your love.

It is in Jesus, mighty name, that we pray and it is so.

Sam.

All right, y', all, we made it.

Thank you again for listening to Living the Selah Life.

If this moment stirs something in your spirit, please share it with someone who needs to be reminded to pause and listen.

You can connect with me on Instagram, my Facebook group, or YouTube @Living the Selah Life.

Or do email me your story, your testimony, or a Selah moment that you would like to hear right here on the show.

You can email me at Living the Selah Life all one word Proton me that's Living the Selah Life at P R O T O N Me.

Until next time, remember that God is speaking.

He wants to guide you and direct you and give you his wisdom for your life.

Create space to listen.

Be patient with yourself as you learn and trust that the same God who has been patient with you will give you his patient nature to extend to others.

May you go from this place rested, carrying the awareness that his presence is always near.

May you be rooted in the unshakable word of God, the Logos that grounds you and the rhema that guides you.

May you keep rising into the life he designed for you, into purpose, into peace, into the fullness of his calling.

May your life become a living Selah.

An intentional pause that reveals his presence.

In Jesus name we pray and it is so Selah Sam.