The relationship of wisdom and patience

Proverbs 19:11 (NIV)

A man's wisdom gives him patience; it is to his glory to overlook an offense.

“Patience is the companion of wisdom” (St. Augustine).  Proverbs 19:11 declares that wisdom gives patience.  Wisdom and patience go together.  You really cannot have one without the other.  Think about someone you believe is wise.  Is not that person also patient?  Or, think of someone you believe has patience.  Does not that patience make you believe that person is wise?  Is it possible to be wise, but not patient?  Is it possible to be patient, but not wise?  Is it possible to have either without great faith?  Think about it. 

Patience mainly comes from enduring trials in life.  James 1:3 says that trials/troubles test your faith and this will give you patience.  If you too think of yourself as impatient then perhaps you too have not suffered enough.  Oh, you think you have, but perhaps not really.  Have you had faced near death experience?  Have you experienced the death of a close loved one?  Have you lost everything and had to start over?  Have you suffered one major disappointment or failure after another?  These questions relate to harsh examples of trials people face in life that, in turn, develop patience.  James 1:4 says that patience will make you perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.  Wow, that’s quite a promise. 

The specific patience that this proverb is referring to is the kind of patience that enables you to control your temper.  The Hebrew word used for patience here is “aph” that means, interestingly, “nostril, nose, face”.  When you get angry and lose your temper, think about what happens to your face.  It gets red and nostrils flare due to vasoconstriction of your facial blood capillaries.  Wisdom enables you to control that temper and tendency to get angry.  And what makes you angry, what tests your patience?  What is the Bible saying here?  It’s when you are offended.  It’s when someone sins against you.  It’s when someone curses you, gets angry at you, lies to you, treats you terribly, ignores you and does not do what you ask………whatever might cause you to lose control of yourself. 

Wisdom will enable you to develop patience so that you are not so easily offended.  Where does wisdom come from?  Again, refer to James, this time James 1:5:  “If you lack wisdom, ask God for it”.  Think about it.  If someone offends you, if someone commits a transgression against you, your human reaction is going to be anything but wisdom and patience.  But, if you ask God to give you wisdom, what happens?  Something supernatural happens such that you do not react impatiently and say or do something that you will later regret.  Both wisdom and patience are supernatural---spiritual---gifts from God and the fallen human beings do not naturally have these gifts.  They come from God and it takes time for these spiritual gifts to become part of your Christian personality.

The next time you say to yourself, “I wish I had more patience”, remember to ask God for the wisdom that enables you to learn patience.  Note that you do not ask for patience from God, you ask for wisdom.  Also remember that it takes faith to ask for wisdom because James 1:6 says that you must ask for wisdom in faith without any doubting.  May you have the faith to ask for wisdom and may the wisdom you receive produce a divine patience that makes you a beautiful person to those around you.  Indeed, it is to your glory—your beautiful inner character that faith and wisdom produce—when you are patient and overlook an offense.  

Forgetting God

Deuteronomy 8:11 (Message)

Make sure you don't forget God, your God, by not keeping his commandments, his rules and regulations that I command you today.

I have been reading Kent Hughes 1992 book Disciplines of a Godly Man (Crossway Books, 2006; original publication 1991).  In his chapter on “Discipline of Purity”, he quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Temptation, SCM Press, 1961, p 33) that I have not quit thinking about:  “When lust takes control, at that moment, God loses all reality……Satan does not fill us with hatred of God, but with the forgetfulness of God.” 

Forgetting God is a characteristic of wickedness.  Indeed, God would consider a person wicked who never thinks about Him.  Wicked moments in our lives are a result of forgetting God.  There are many passages in the Bible that speak about the tragedy of forgetting about God.  Human pride in the form of self-sufficiency causes people to forget God (Deuteronomy 8:12-14, Hosea 13:6).  When people backslide, God is forgotten (Jeremiah 3:21-22).  When you start following other gods (money, pleasure, human achievement, etc.), you forget about God (Deuteronomy 4:23, II Kings 17:38).  Indeed, the cycle of sin and confession (sin—sorrow—confession--repentance—forgiveness/ restoration—sin again) written about throughout the Old Testament is fundamentally the result of forgetting God in everyday life. 

James 1:14-15 gives the “LSD” of sin:  “Lust-Sin-Death”.  Note that verse 14 says that you can be “carried away” or “dragged away” by lustful temptation(s).  Lust is simply the desire for things forbidden by God and His Word.  Lust lures you away from the safety of self-restraint to sin and when you sin you are separated from God.  Being separated from God prevents you from remembering Him and His commandments; you simply forget about Him.  The most common sin committed by men is sexual lust; the most common sin committed by women is pride (according to a 2009 Vatican survey).  If you are a man reading this and you start thinking about sexual lust, why might you continue to think about this subject?  Because you have forgotten the presence of God in your life.  The same is true of women when entangled by pride and envy.   

The Bible commands that you not forget God.  You are not to forget His works (Psalm 78:7, 106:13), His benefits (Psalm 103:2), His Word (Hebrews 12:5, James 1:25), His commandments (Psalm 119:176), and His past deliverances from whatever sin you committed (Judges 8:34, Psalm 78:42). 

One approach you can make to keep from forgetting God is simply to resolve in your heart never to do so.  Psalms 119:16 and 93 simply proclaim that “I will not forget Thy Word”.  Another approach, of course, is to keep feeding yourself spiritually by daily reading and meditation of the Bible.  Evangelist Joseph T. Larsen wrote in the Moody Bible Institute Monthly (July 1993) that America is progressing toward forgetting God “by largely banishing the Bible from schools and by misinterpreting it in universities, criticizing it in theological seminaries and colleges, and scoffing at it among the infidels and atheists of the nation.”

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown.  But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.  Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to God that made us! It behooves us, then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”--Abraham Lincoln, Proclamation for a National Day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer, April 30, 1863.

Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other

James 5:16 (Message)

Make this your common practice:  Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed. 

I don’t think that this verse is practiced much at all in the Christian community.  I don’t think small groups, even those who have been meeting together for years, confess sins to one another.  We pray for one another, but we don’t confess our sins to one another.  Very few married couples confess their sins to one another.  Only when the sin becomes so big and/or so public will a person confess his sins to others.  This not what Scripture teaches. 

You are to acknowledge your sin to others.  Not all sins to others, just sin(s) that you have committed against another.  It is not sufficient to confess your sins to God and not to another that you know you have wronged.  Jesus taught this principle in Matthew 5:21-24.  You first must confess and be reconciled with the person(s) you have wronged, then you can confess and make your offering to God.  Humility before God is not complete unless there is also humility before man. A true test of your willingness to humble yourself is being willing to share with others the weaknesses you confess to God.

It’s one thing to confess certain sins that might be relatively easy to confess to others---bad temper, profanity, impatience, forgetfulness, ignorance, jealousy, etc.  It’s a far more difficult thing to confess sins like lying, cheating, deceit, slander immorality, and the like to others.  Indeed, it takes the humility of Christ to confess the more serious sins to those you have harmed by those sins.  Humility takes enormous amounts of courage, self-confidence and personal security.  People who need to confess sin against others likely lack these strengths.  And so the vicious cycle continues. 

Perhaps the most important application of this teaching lies in the context of family life.  Confessing your sins to each other and praying for each other will result in living together whole and healed.  A father who confesses to his children that he has been wrong to them.  A son or daughter who confesses that he or she has been lying to his/her parents.  A husband or wife who confesses an affair before being caught.  These or many other examples of confessing wrongs to others you have wronged, then asking for forgiveness from others and the Lord, will result, according to this passage, with the family being whole and healed again. 

If there is something in this devotional that speaks to you, please react positively to it.  Ask the Lord for humility to confess your specific sin(s) to those you have hurt and expect the healing process to begin.

Seeking God

Lamentations 3:25 (AB)

The Lord is good to those who wait hopefully and expectantly for Him, to those who seek Him [inquire of and for Him and require Him by right of necessity and on the authority of God's word].

Seeking God is a commandment found throughout the Scriptures (112 references in the Old Testament;  16 references in the New Testament).  Seeking God is a discipline that His true followers must do, and this verse, among many others, promises that the “Lord is good to those who wait for Him and seek Him”.  However, if you were asked what does seeking God really mean, how would you answer?  It’s a tough question, yet understanding and practicing the answers can make a huge difference in your outlook on life, especially as you start a brand new year where you want your life to be different, to matter to others and to be pleasing to God. 

If you look up some of the 128 verses in the Bible that command the need to seek God, here are examples of what seeking God really requires, what seeking God means and what is promised when you seek God:

·  To seek God is your top priority in life (Matthew 6:33

·  You are to seek Him with your whole heart, you have to be diligent about this and, if so, you will be greatly blessed (Psalm 119:2,10)

·  Indeed to seek Him takes great effort, you cannot be half-hearted about seeking Him (Proverbs 2:1-5)

·  The Lord is good to those who seek Him (Lamentations 3:25)

·  To seek the Lord is to desire to be in His presence (I Chronicles 16:11)

·  To seek God is longing to have fellowship with Him (Psalm 63:1)

·  God created you to seek Him (Acts 17:26-28).

·  God promises that those who diligently seek him shall find him (Deuteronomy 4:29; Jeremiah 29:12-14; I Chronicles 28:9; Proverbs 8:17, Matthew 7:7)

                                                                          

God promises His goodness to those who seek Him (see also Psalm 107:9 and Hebrews 11:6).  What might His goodness include?  I think it includes anything that you long for to give your life purpose and meaning.  Here are other benefits---joy (Psalm 70:4; 105:3), peace and rest (II Chronicles 14:7; 15:12-15), understanding in the ways of God (Proverbs 28:5, Jeremiah 33:3), strength to face anything (I Chronicles 16:11; Psalm 105:4; Isaiah 40:31; 41:1), prosperity and provision (I Chronicles 26:5; Psalm 34:9-10, Matthew 6:33) and security (Psalm 27:4-5).  Is there anyone reading this who would not like to have all these benefits for the rest of your life?

People have great “wants” in their lives, wants that are seen visibly and immediately.  Yet, deeper, even if you don’t realize it often if at all, is a longing for an intimate relationship with the Almighty.  We long for Him because we were created for Him, and when we honestly and humbly recognize the importance of this need, we are then ready to seek God.  We must devote ourselves wholeheartedly to finding Him.  Is your most fervent hope entering into His presence and enjoying His fellowship? 

We tend not to seek God when our lives are comfortable.  If our temporal needs are met, we imagine that we can take care of ourselves and we forget about God. For this reason, God lets us suffer some deprivation. The needs that go unmet may differ from person to person, but each of us will have our hearts broken in some ways.  The world and its value system will never give you what you deeply long for, what you were created to be satisfied with.  Only a relationship with God that exists when you enjoy His Word, live by it and enjoy praying, praising, fellowship with other believers, and talking about the Lord to others will bring fulfillment in your life.  Only God can perfectly satisfy your hunger and thirst for fulfillment in this life.  He is always leading you, whether you realize it or not, in the direction of satisfaction in Him.  Over the course of a lifetime, many people learn that a relationship with God is the only thing that you cannot do without.

Are you fulfilled with your life as it stands right now?  Most will admit “no”.  Some might say “yes” now, but it only takes something bad to happen to change that position quickly.  Lasting fulfillment, even in the face of adversity, only comes through seeking and finding God.  Are you seeking Him as genuinely as you can?   

Announcement

At this time it is uncertain that I will continue posting meditations on this blog site.  Main reason is that I have now published a book containing all 732 meditations I have written over the past 6 years.  You can access the book in several ways and order either the print copy or download an e-book copy.  Access websites include:

1.  http://www.morningandeveningmeditations.com

2.  http://www.amazon.com/Morning-Evening-Meditations-Word-Encouragement/dp/1490829199

3.  http://www.cornerstonechristiansupply.com/product.asp?sku=9781490829197

Thank you for your readership over the years.