Practicing Patience

This episode contains portions from the following programs:

"Love Is Patient"

"Love Is Patient, with Bob Lepine"

"Avoiding the Big Zero"

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Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: How do you respond when people annoy you? When they pull out in front of you in traffic? When people are unreasonable or unfair? Do you have patient love?

Dannah Gresh: Ouch! Did that just step on your proverbial toes? That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, and I’m Dannah Gresh. Welcome to Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

We’ve been on a month-long journey walking through one single verse in First Thessalonians that’s packed with a whole lotta “lesson.” Hey, if you missed any of those other episodes, you’ll want to check 'em out at ReviveOurHearts.com/Weekend, or go to the Revive Our Hearts app. 

Song:

And we urge you brothers,
Admonish the idols
Encourage the fainthearted,
Help the weak.
Be patient with them all.
Be patient with them all.
First Thessalonians 5:14.¹

So, here’s 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, verse 14:

And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all.

Today we’re finally to the last phrase: “be patient with them all.” Ah . . . patience. 

I can’t say it’s one of my fortes. I like to finish things quickly. I’m a fast-paced worker, a multi-tasker, a type-A girl. That means I can forget that people’s hearts are part of the day! If you can identify, you might need this program as much as I do, so stick around.

Being patient does not come naturally to many of us . . . especially in today’s fast-paced society. I mean, all you have to do is take a drive somewhere. Between traffic, other drivers, and road rage, it doesn’t take much for our patience to be tested. 

So what is patience, really? My friend and cohost of the True Girl podcast, Staci Rudolph, and I dove into the topic of patience. Now, True Girl is a podcast we created for girls aged seven to twelve and their moms, but I usually find that the stuff we’re saying ministers to the girl at heart in me. I think it will you too. So, what’s it look like to live out patience? Let’s start by looking at a passage in First Corinthians. Here’s Staci.

Staci: 1 Corinthians 13:4–5 says,

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged.

Dannah: Okay, let’s go back to the original language of the New Testament Bible. It was originally written in . . . do you remember?

Yes, Greek! I knew you would remember. Looking at this language is going to help us understand what does it really mean to be patient?

In Greek, the word for patient was used to talk about something (here it is) boiling slowly rather than quickly. Are you ready for this? If we read it in its original form, maybe it would sound something like this:

“Love is slow to boil.” 

Staci: Ah, so the opposite of “boiling mad”! And those people in those news articles were “quick to boil.” I get it now.

Dannah: Yep! Now picture that you're that woman who gets stepped on by the blind man. First, you focus on how much your big toe hurts. Suddenly, you feel a little bit like everything inside of you is starting to boil. If you keep fuming, you'll find that before long you're screaming like a steaming kettle of boiling water.

Staci: But the Bible says that true love isn't like that. True love is slow to boil. 

Dannah: Yeah, to learn what that means, let’s read the rest of these verses again. They say “Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged.”

So, to be slow to boil includes not demanding things go your way. It means when they don’t go your way, you do not get irritated. And when someone really does something that could irritate you, even then, you forgive rather than keeping a record of the wrong or making a big deal out of what they did to offend you.

Staci: I actually found a news story of a boy named Joshua. Now that you’re describing this Dannah, I’m starting to think Joshua was “slow to boil.” For the record, this also really happened. True story.

Joshua had one of his best days ever. When he got a brand-new bike for Christmas, he loved it so much that he rode it every single day. But then this awful thing happened. He actually saw an older man steal his bike! 

Joshua cried out for that man to stop, but the man just turned and looked at him. Then, he stuffed Joshua's bike into his truck, jumped into the driver's seat and drove off. 

Joshua was heartbroken. His bike was gone; he loved that bike. But he was a slow boiler. He asked his mom to help him send a message to the thief. Together, they wrote these words on a poster board and put it at the end of his driveway.

“To the person who stole my bike,

You really hurt my feelings when you took it, but I'm a Christian. And because Jesus forgave me, I forgive you.” 

Dannah: Wow! Now, that's what it's like to be slow to boil. Joshua forgave his enemy. He demonstrated Christ's love by being patient. 

Let’s be honest, I think we would all be “boiling mad” if it were not for Jesus’ love in us helping us to be “slow to boil.” Without Him, it’s not possible.

Staci: But let me tell you this, the story isn’t over. 

Dannah: Oh?

Staci: Guess what? When Josh's father left for work the next day, the sign was face down in the yard. And at the end of the driveway, believe it or not, was the bike!

Dannah: Wow!

Staci: Right? They brought it back. 

True girl, you can choose to react like the rest of this world with mean words and by defending your rights or you can react to mean girls like Jesus suggests, by being patient and forgiving. Be slow to boil.

Dannah: A true girl knows that true love is patient. 

Staci: Am I slow to boil? 

Remember, that’s another way to ask, “Am I patient?”

Take the rest of this week to practice the slow boil way of responding to problems in relationships. If you have trouble, ask Jesus to help you. He will. You cannot do this without Him.

Dannah: It’s true, we can’t be patient without God’s strength.

Dannah: That was me talking with Staci Rudolph on the True Girl podcast.

It might be easier to have patience for some people more than others. But as First Thessalonians 5:14 says, we are to “be patient with them all,” or “be patient with everyone” (CSB). That includes your spouse, your neighbor, your siblings, your kids, the person at the grocery store who’s slowing you down—everyone. 

And when you show patience, you are actually showing love. I got to talk with radio veteran Bob Lepine, also the author of the book Love Like Your Mean It, on a Grounded episode. We discussed the correlation between love and patience and how it translates to our relationships. This is one of my favorite things I’ve ever learned from Bob, so lean in! We’re going back to First Corinthians 13 again. Here’s part of my conversation with Bob Lepine. 

Dannah: Well, let's start at the beginning of this chapter. Love is patient. What do we need to know?

Bob: It is interesting that that's the first descriptive term. Because if I sat down with a room of 100 people and said, fill in the blank love is ______. I don't think that patient would be the first thing that would come to most people's minds. And yet, it's where the apostle Paul starts. The word for patience in, if you've got a King James Bible, you read, “love is long suffering, love suffereth long.” 

Dannah: Oh, no.

Bob: What a place to start by saying, here's what real love looks like: you're going to suffer. And it's going to be for a long time. I don't think what the Bible is suggesting to us is that in a marriage, or in any kind of a relationship, the goal should be suffering, or that we should enable someone who is causing us to suffer. That's not what the Bible is talking about here. 

But in the reality of life, as we're with other people, we're going to face things that are going to be a struggle for us. It's going to be hard for us. We're going to get annoyed. We're going to be provoked. We're going to have unpleasantness as a part of the relationship. We're gonna get crossways with one another. And so, here the Bible starts by saying if you love someone, you persevere. Even when those things are true.

In fact, you go to the end of this passage, or the end of these character qualities, and it says, “Love bears all things, endures all things.” That's really what patience is. It’s bearing and enduring, even when things are unpleasant. Dannah, I’ve got to stop just long enough to say, I'm not talking about bearing or enduring physical abuse.

Dannah: Right.

Bob: Because the Bible is clear elsewhere. When somebody is abusing you physically, spiritually, emotionally, financially, you should not enable that. If you see a brother continue in, you're supposed to restore that brother, you're supposed to call that out and help that brother or sister grow. But I am saying that in the day-to-day realities of our relationship, we're gonna face things that cause us to have to endure, to have to bear. Real love will do that and will say, “I'll with you in the midst of that.”

Dannah: That was a real eye opener for me. I mean, I've read the love chapter, as we call it so many times. But as I was reading your book, you kind of expanded on this love is patient thing. It really was an eye opener for me. I'd gotten married and said, “Hey, I'm signing up. I want some romance, some babies. I want grandbabies and rocking chairs.” I didn’t sign up for, “I really hope I get a nice couple of years of long suffering. That'd be really nice if we could have that too.” Like, that wasn't in the works, right. But there have been some of those moments in your marriage, Bob. What have those moments looked like for you and Maryann, where the suffering pops in and love has to take over?

Bob: I think the darkest season of our marriage. This was back. We'd been married for four or five years at this point. We had a three-year-old. Maryann was pregnant with our second child, and I got fired from my job.

We had just moved into a new house. Everything was trucking along and all of a sudden, I'm out of work. I start looking for where am I going to work. I found a job. We were living in Tulsa, Oklahoma at the time. The job I found was in Phoenix. Well, Maryann had grown up in Tulsa, her family was in Tulsa. It's where she had roots and where she had relationships. She's pregnant with her second child, I leave for a month to go start a new job in Phoenix, while she stays behind to try to sell the house. While I'm out in Phoenix, one of my jobs is to try to find a place for us to live in Phoenix. I found a house and bought a house without her seeing the house that we were buying. This is a rookie mistake I don't recommend.

Dannah: Uh oh. This was before you could take her on a FaceTime tour. I suppose. 

Bob: You didn't do a virtual tour. She was at home, and we couldn't fly her out to come see houses. I remember being on the phone and saying I'm gonna put an offer on this house. And she kind of swallowed and said, “Okay, and then she came out to Phoenix. She did not like the house I had picked out. 

Dannah: Oh no.

Bob: It’s July in Phoenix. She's pregnant. We've got a three-year-old. She's got no friends. I'm trying to start a new job and get everything here. I will tell you that I came home from work most days to find a wife who was . . . I don't know if she was clinically depressed. But if she wasn't, she was showing all of the symptoms of depression . . . and understandably so.

Dannah: Yeah. 

Bob: But after about three weeks of coming home to a wife who was not communicative, who doesn't have motivation to do much. I remember one night being out in the backyard in Phoenix, kind of kicking the dirt and looking up at the stars. I just had this thought. I said, “I'm not going to get a divorce because I know I'm not supposed to get a divorce. But I understand why people want to.”

Dannah: Oh, wow.

Bob: In those moments, love has to endure and persevere and say, “I'm not going anywhere. It's hard right now. Our marriage is not pleasant. Right now, I'm not enjoying where we are right now. But I will persevere and endure because I'm committed to you. And we're gonna find a way out of this together.” 

One of the things I've learned over the years . . . There was a survey done in the state of Oklahoma many years ago, where they went to couples who had filed for divorce. And for whatever reason, these couples had not gone through with their divorce. They asked these couples five years later, how is your marriage today. The couples who had filed for divorce five years earlier now rated their marriage on either a four or five on a five-point scale. 83% of them said it's either a four or five, when they pressed through the hard times, when they found a way to come together and to say, “Okay, I'm committed to you; you're committed to me. Together, we're gonna find our way out of the pain or the problem or the challenge we're in.” God meets you there, and God leads you to a better place. It just happens. I've seen that happen over and over again.

Dannah: Bob, could you just talk to the woman or maybe man who's listening and they're about to file for divorce, or they’re determined to take a friend's phone number out of their digital Rolodex. It's not just about marriage; relationships are being tested right now. We're wanting to write things off and take an easier way. Don't take the easy way out. Talk to that woman right now. What advice would you give to her?

Bob: Well, again, I want to be careful here because there are people who are in dangerous situations. And to protect yourself, you need to get godly help and support around you. I always tell people who are wondering what to do in a relationship, don't make that decision in a vacuum. You need community. You need pastoral guidance and support. You need godly people speaking into your life. So, get that. 

But I would say to people who are in difficult circumstances and life is unpleasant and you're unhappy, this is where you've got to run to Jesus. You've got to say to Him, “Lord, You know where I am. You know what I'm feeling. Meet me here. I need joy from You. I need peace from You. I need not to look to my circumstances, or to my relationships, to be my source of strength and hope and life. I need You to be that. I need You to give me the strength so that I can persevere and endure. 

Then I would take them to 1 Peter 3. I would say after Peter has talked about wives having gentle and quiet spirits, and husbands loving their wives, he says now, “All of you, you’ve got to be compassionate. You've got to be patient; you've got to be humble.” And then it says, “And don’t return evil for evil, but return a blessing instead.” So practically, I would say, ask yourself this question: “How can I proactively bless my spouse who I don't feel like blessing? I'm not inclined to want to bless today? How can I do something that will be a blessing for my spouse today?”

Dannah: Patience is an extremely important factor in marriage, as Bob Lepine just explained. But he also highlighted the fact that no matter if you’re single or married, we will always have opportunities to be patient with people. 

And if—or when—you find yourself struggling to be patient, when it’s difficult to love, sometimes all you need is a little perspective. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is going to give us a new mindset for those times by reminding us of the patient love God has for us. She’s taking us to First Corinthians 13, the love chapter, once again. We’ve referenced it a few times today, but let me just read you verses 4 through 6 before she begins:

Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not arrogant, is not rude, is not self-seeking, is not irritable, and does not keep a record of wrongs. Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth.

Here’s Nancy.

Nancy: We begin with the first quality of love: Love is patient. "Love suffers long" some of your translations say. That's actually a good translation because love does require suffering. Sometimes it requires suffering not just for the short-term, but for a long time. This kind of patience—this long-suffering—speaks of a capacity to be wronged and not to retaliate even when it's in your power to get back.

This kind of patience is speaking of being long-suffering with people who really try your patience, people who get on your nerves. Does someone come to mind?

This kind of patience is the opposite of anger. A loving person is slow to anger. He refuses to pay back evil for evil. There's no retaliation. It’s a kind of love that's willing to be taken advantage of. It's a love that is concerned more for the welfare of others than for how they affect my life.

If you want to have God's love and if you pray for God's love, expect that God will probably put some people in your life who are really hard to love.

But true love—this long-suffering, long-tempered, slow-to-be angry love—doesn't look out for how they affect me. It looks out for, "How can I really help that person and be committed to that person's best interests?"

This kind of long-suffering love is not just gritting your teeth. It's not just enduring, though there is endurance involved. It's active, aggressive, long-suffering. It's investing in the very lives of the ones who've hurt me the most.

Some of us get a little uncomfortable when we read, particularly those Old Testament passages, about God wiping out whole groups of people who have sinned. We think, Oh, that seems so harsh a judgment!

What astounds me more than that is the fact that there are so many groups of people that God never wipes out. It astounds me that God hasn't wiped me out, because every one of us deserves the wrath and judgment of God.

But more often than not, God withholds His judgment. He withholds His anger. And Peter tells us why. He doesn't want any to perish. He wants all to have opportunity, time to repent, to come to the knowledge of the truth. God is holding back His righteous anger against sin. He withholds judgment—not forever—but for now, so that we can have opportunity to repent.

He calls us to endure, to suffer long in that way. So in the big things of life and in the little everyday things, God says, "Love as I have loved you with a love that is patient, a love that is long-suffering."

• Do you have that kind of love?
• How do you respond when people annoy you?
• How do you respond when they pull out in front of you in traffic?
• How do you respond when people are unreasonable or unfair?
• Do you have patient love?
• Are you willing to be taken advantage of?
• Are you genuinely concerned for the welfare and the best interests of those who have wronged you?

That's God's kind of love, and He wants to fill our hearts with long-suffering, patient love, the love of Christ.

Dannah: When you recognize just how much God loves you and the patience He extends to you, to all of us, doesn’t that change your attitude toward the people around you? It’s humbling, right? With the Lord’s help, we can be patient with everyone. 

Song:

Love is patient, love is kind.
Love is not envious, boastful, or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way.
It is not irritable or resentful.
It does not rejoice in wrong doing
But rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things, 
Hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.

Now faith, hope, and love abide.
Now faith, hope, and love abide. 
These three, these three,
And the greatest of these is love.
Love never ends.²

We’d love to send you this book right now when you make a donation of any amount. We are so grateful for your support of this ministry. And sending you this book, plus a bonus discussion guide, is just one way we’d like to thank you. 

You can make your gift by calling 1-800-569-5959. Be sure to ask for your copy of Heaven Rules. That number is 1-800-569-5959, or go to ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend and click on today’s episode. 

Well, one aspect of patience is the whole idea of perseverance. Not giving up, even when we feel like it. That’s what Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth will address this coming week on our daily program, Revive Our Hearts. And it’s also what we’ll talk about next weekend on this program. We’ll hear from a wife who persisted in prayer for more than two decades, asking God to work on the heart of her alcoholic husband.

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time, for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

Revive Our Hearts Weekend is patiently calling you to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

¹Mark Altrogge. "1 Thessalonians 5:14." Through the Waters – Hide the Word 8. ℗ 2008 Mark Altrogge.

²Jon Anderson. "Love Is . . . (1 Corinthians 13:4–7)." Love Is (Songs from 1 Corinthians–Ephesians) 8. ℗ 2020 Faith Inkubators.

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