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Galatians 5:22-23 But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!
On the Rise and Shine show today, Susan and I talked about 2 of the most difficult fruits of the spirit to get a handle on, they are: Patience and Self control....
Deep breath, we can get through this.
Patience enables us as believers to exercise self-restraint...
We get into a rush and then can feel a bit out of control because we didn't want to take our time and make sure all is in order or ready.
It's like when dinner is ready and we can't wait to eat because we are starving and so we take a bite of food and burn our entire mouth.
We didn't practice patience or self control. Because wanted in now and didn't want to wait for it so we jumped on in and got burnt.
We can also go through life on autopilot and when changes come we can feel overwhelmed which can bring feelings of losing control and we can become impatient with those around us. This probably happens more often than we like to admit, but it happens.
In those times are you able to catch yourself? In those times are you able to adjust or it is just to overwhelming? This is where we can learn to garner self control a bit. We don't have to spiral or even feel like we are spiraling.
It takes prayer and practice to be able to take a deep breath and say, "it's ok that this happened, I can handle this because it must be what needs to happen," for this reason or that.
Another thing we need to learn is to be patient with ourselves. I think we might set expectations for ourselves that we shouldn't. Like why did I do that, I knew not to do that. I know that, that was not necessary but I did it any way and that was so stupid!
We are able to have a deeper set of patients with others before we have it with ourselves and those closest to us.
Look at the Bible, we are given a lot of opportunities to read about patience and self control.
In Colossians 3:12-13, Paul is talking to them and he tells them, "Since God chose you to be the holy people he loves, you must clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others."
He was instructing them that now, as followers of Christ, they needed to put away their sinful ways and put on the ways Christ teaches about.
We also strive for these things, and because we are human and not perfect, we will continually learn how to be better with patience in different aspects of our lives. This way, we can learn to demonstrate what God has done in changing who we used to be by His love for us.
Let's look to the Word of God to teach us patience and self-control because there is no better place to learn these difficult tasks.