The transcript of a Sermon on 1 Thessalonians 5:12-15 has been lightly edited.
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Please turn with me in your Bibles to the book of First Thessalonians. We’re going to be in First Thessalonians chapter 5. We’re going to look, we’re going to read verses 12 through 15, but we’re really going to focus on one particular command of Paul there.
Two things before we read though, I do want to, and it’s good to be back. It’s good to be here. Vacation was good. It was restful for the most part, but it is always good as I entered the pulpit after the announcements. It’s always good to be here with y’all and to stand before you and to be asked by God to be your minister. So it’s always good to be here.
The other thing is, as we read through these verses, we’re going to see kind of a bullet list of commands that Paul is giving to the Thessalonian Christians.
But let’s keep in mind that as we do this, Paul never just gives commands. He never just tells us what to do without having already told us what has been done for us in Christ. We don’t do all of these things that Paul is going to command here in order to obligate God to save us. We do these things because God has already worked in Jesus to save us. He has applied that work to us by the Holy Spirit and then tells us how saved people are to live.
And so keep that in mind as we go through this, as we continue through the discussion of patience today, and on through the rest of our discussion on the fruit of the Spirit.
Our scripture today comes to us from 1 Thessalonians 5, beginning in verse 12:
“We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you and to esteem them very highly and love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves. And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the faint hearted, help the weak. And this is where we’re focus will land today. Be patient with them all. See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone.”
Let’s pray. Father, as we look at this word today, we do ask that you would teach us what you would have us to know, shape us in the way that you would shape us and remind us that even when we’re convicted by your word, that conviction is part of the process of you renewing us day by day in the image of our Savior, Jesus Christ. It is in his name that we pray. Amen.
INTRODUCTION
Well, there are two things in the life of the church that a lot of people will tell you definitely don’t pray for that. One is humility, and the other one is what we are going to talk about today, which is patience.
Now, I think that’s bad advice. I do think we should pray for patience. We should pray for humility, and we should thank God when he answers that prayer, even in hard ways.
But our focus today is on what is patience. J.I. Packer says that patience is “the Christlike reaction to all that is maddening in this world.”
The Christlike reaction to all that is maddening. It’s a great definition, because if we think about that word, all that is maddening in this world, you know, we can think about circumstances of our life, things that happen to us in our lives that demand a patient or a long-suffering response.
Our patience is often tested by the circumstances of this world. Health issues, especially long-term health issues, can test our patience. Hardship and difficulty in this world can test our patience. Traffic can test our patience. Do we react Christlike to those maddening things?
But there’s a flip side to that as well, because people also test our patience. We get into arguments with people. We have conflicts with others. We talked about traffic earlier. We get angry at those other drivers in those other cars when they don’t act in traffic the way we think they should act in traffic. People are part of our maddening life.
So today we are going to look at both sides of that. We’re going to see how long-suffering should lead us to patience in the circumstances of our life, where forbearing should lead to patience in our dealing with people in our life. And then we’ll consider five areas where patience should grow before we come to a conclusion. And through all I do want us to see that we must grow in patience, because God has been exceedingly gracious and patient with each and every one of us.
LONG-SUFFERING
First, I want to look at long-suffering. In the King James Version of Galatians 5:22-23, in that list of the Fruit of the Spirit, when you come to patience in the King James Version, it actually says “long-suffering.” Does anybody know what long-suffering means? Well, it means you suffer for a long time.
And that’s the idea of patience when it comes to our circumstances. We are to be long-suffering when we think about patience related to our circumstances. Jonathan Landry Cruse defines long-suffering as
“The ability to endure trials and hardships with joy without losing faith in God or his good purposes.”
I’ll say that again. Long-suffering is the ability to endure trials and hardships with joy without losing faith in God or his good purposes. We’re going to pull this definition apart just a little bit.
To endure trials and hardships. Endurance, like patience, means to bear up under hardship, even if that hardship or that trial or that struggle lasts for a long time. But beyond just merely enduring, when we think about enduring, we think about, “OK, I’m just going to sit here and I’m going to bear up with this weight. I’m going to hold this weight up for a long, long time until God removes the weight from me.”
But endurance is active. It’s not just sitting there holding the weight, waiting for God to do something about it. Endurance has an active component to it, to where we are moving through the hardship. We are not merely sitting there and waiting. We are working with God through the hardship, seeking, “What are you trying to show me in this hardship, God? And how do you want me to grow through it? How do you want me to become more holy? How do you want me to become more like you through this hardship?”
We’re not just gutting it out. We’re not just gritting our teeth. We are working with God, admitting sometimes that, yes, the hardship is difficult, admitting where the hardship causes grief, that that we need to weep tears of grief, admitting where the hardship might be causing anger, that we take that anger to God, not responding to that anger in a sinful way, but going to God and maybe asking like David in Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Or like the psalmist in Psalm 88, “God, I’ve borne up under this difficulty, this disease, this health problem for so long that I feel like my entire world is nothing but darkness. What are you trying to do with this so that I might work with you, oh Lord, and find relief?”
And so we endure trials and hardships, but we endure trials and hardships with joy. Remember that great satisfaction in who God is, that great enjoyment of who God is in his person, in his works, in his words, suffering, enduring without losing that joy.
Think of Job. At the very beginning of Job’s trial, what did he say? He said, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
We don’t know how long it was, but after he had borne up under that hardship for a time, he’s going, “God, I don’t understand and I demand an explanation from you right now.” He lost his joy in who God was.
We are called to endure with joy, maintaining that satisfaction, not faking the smile, but maintaining that satisfaction and knowing that God is good, that God is faithful.
And finally, we endure without losing faith in God or in his good purposes. Romans 8:28, a lot of us could say this from memory, but Romans 8.28 says, and we know that for those who love, we know that for those, oh, I’m in the wrong place.
“And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose.”
Long suffering is enduring hardship and trial without forgetting that God will work all things for good. Might not work it today, might not even work it tomorrow. He might not even work it for good in the next year, but he is working those things for good in your life.
Let me rephrase that. You may not see it for up to a year, but he is working those things in your life. And so we are called to be long-suffering, but we’re not only called to be long-suffering.
We are given the power to be long-suffering because we are united to Christ who was perfectly long-suffering in his life. Philippians chapter two, beginning in verse five, it talks about Jesus’ equality with God being something that he didn’t feel like he needed to hold on to, but he emptied himself and took on the form of a humanity.
There is a sense in which from the moment of his conception where that divine nature was joined with the human nature, Jesus suffered. And he suffered for those 30 some odd years until he came to the cross where he really suffered. He suffered the displeasure of God against the sins of humanity that he had placed upon himself. He suffered the wrath of God.
He suffered the physical torment of his beating and of his crucifixion. And out of that suffering comes your salvation and my salvation. When we talk about being long-suffering, we think, “Okay, I’ve just got to, I got to toughen myself up so that I can suffer longer the next time God brings a trial my way.”
No, you are long suffering if you are united to Christ, because your lack of long-suffering, your lack of patience in your circumstances, in your hardship and in your trials has been put to death in him. And a long-suffering human being has been raised to life in him. And so the part of patience that deals with our circumstances, we call it long-suffering.
FORBEARING
But the other part of our patience that deals with people is called forbearing. And forbearing, relying once again on Jonathan Landry Cruse, forbearing is:
“The loving tolerance shown toward the weaknesses, the failures and the sins of others against us, responding in compassion and mercy and not retaliating in judgment or vengeance, no matter how warranted that may be.”
I’ll read that again. The loving tolerance shown toward the weaknesses, the failures and the sins of others against us, responding in compassion and mercy and not in retaliating in judgment or vengeance, no matter how warranted that may be.
Weaknesses, failures and sins against us that others have. You know, each and every one of us have weaknesses and it’s easy for me to get frustrated with the weaknesses of other people.
And if you notice in yourself, or maybe this is just me, I don’t know, but oftentimes it’s the weaknesses in others that I most hate in myself that I get the most frustrated with. And here’s the thing. Rather than getting frustrated with them because of the weaknesses that exist in them that are mirrored in my own life, I need to treat them the same way I treat myself.
Because what do I do with those very same weaknesses in my own life? I say, “That’s no big deal. Y’all just got to deal with it.” That’s what we should do with weaknesses in other people. Rather than getting frustrated or angry with weaknesses in other people, we should give them the same grace we give ourselves. The same loving tolerance that we give ourselves.
C.S. Lewis says that’s the essence of the command to love your neighbor as yourself. Cover with grace and love in others what you would cover with grace and love in your own heart and in your own life.
Failures. Every single one of us have been failed by somebody else. It might be a promise broken. It might be a time where you showed up at a coffee shop or at a diner for lunch or for a snack and a conversation, and you ended up sitting there by yourself because they forgot and didn’t show up. Everybody has failed us.
But here’s the flip side. We have failed everybody. I have failed you. You have failed me. And we need to respond to those failures with love and grace and tolerance.
And then every single one of us has been sinned against by another human being. Sometimes it’s a gross sin. Sometimes it’s a small sin. But we are called to lovingly tolerate the sins that that person in spite of their sins against us.
It doesn’t mean that we don’t call out or confront sin where that is necessary. Yes, there are times when the lovingly gracious response to somebody else’s sin, if it’s minor enough, is to say, “You know what, I can forgive that and move on and it’s okay.”
But other times those sins are so deep, so heinous that they need to be confronted. But we don’t confront in order to judge. We don’t confront in order to seek revenge. We confront in order to show love and compassion and grace and really our patience with other people.
What we call forbearing or forbearance, is rooted in a choice that you and I have to make. Do I seek revenge and judgment for failures, weaknesses and sins done against me? Or do I walk into them with loving tolerance and grace for that other human being?
Because here’s the reality. We have been forgiven far greater weaknesses, failures and sins by God than we could have done against us. Matthew chapter 20 or 18, beginning in verse 21, Peter asks a question and it is a patience question. It is a forbearing question. He says:
“Then Peter came up to him and said, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As many as seven times? And Jesus says to him, I do not say to you seven times, but 77 times”
Or some translations say or 70 times seven. Jesus is telling Peter, “You need to forgive him as many times as it takes for it to stick.” And then he tells a parable of the unforgiving servant and the unforgiving servant starts out as one who has a great debt upon his shoulders. You know, you and I can imagine a hundred dollars. You and I could probably even imagine, let’s say a hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars.
But as we start to get into the realm of billions, our imagination and ability to comprehend what a billion is, is being stretched. And then when we get to a thousand billion, which is what we call a trillion, humans can’t conceive of a trillion of anything, much less 38-ish trillion dollars worth of debt. That’s the picture of this unforgiving servant as he approaches the king.
He has trillions upon trillions of dollars of debt that he will never hope to repay, but he goes to the king and he says, “I’m going to do everything I can to repay you.” And the king says, “No, I forgive that debt.”
And then he walks out and he runs into a friend of his who owes him a hundred bucks. And he says, “I will never forgive that debt of a hundred dollars that you owe me. I’m throwing you in prison until you pay it.”
When we refuse to treat people with loving tolerance, even because of their weaknesses, because of their failures, because of their sins against us, when we fail to enter those situations with love and grace, we are like that servant who has been forgiven trillions upon trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of debt. And yet we are unwilling to let a hundred dollar debt slide.
God comes to us and he says, “I call you to forbear with your brothers and sisters, to be patient with every single one of them.” As we read in 1 Thessalonians 5. “I call you to be patient because I have been patient with you.”
Think about your life before God. We talk about weaknesses. We talk about failures. We talk about sins done against us. But think about the sins done against God and not just that generic, as important as it is, not just that generic, “Lord, forgive me of my sins.”
But if you go through the Larger Catechism and you look at its exposition on the Ten Commandments, where it gives us hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds requirements in the Ten Commandments and sins that we commit in relationship to the Ten Commandments, and you begin to realize the depth of the sin in your life even today.
And then you are struck by the glorious reality that no matter how deep that sin goes, no matter how particular we can get in thinking about and confessing those sins, God’s forgiveness and grace goes far, far deeper than we could ever plumb the depths of with our sin.
And then we go out there and we’re unwilling to forgive a betrayal. We’re unwilling to forgive being cut off in traffic. We’re unwilling to forgive being lied to. What do you think God thinks in that moment?
Do you really care about the grace that God has given to you if you are not willing to extend grace to others? I’m not talking about the salvation of your soul. I’m just talking about do you really care about what God has done for you if you are not willing to extend grace to something infinitely less important?
When we talk about forbearance, we are talking about what God has already done to us and for us in our sin and in our rebellion. We are called to lovingly tolerate those weaknesses, those failures, and those sins in others.
GROWING IN PATIENCE
So we’ve seen long suffering in the circumstances. We’ve seen forbearance with the people in our life.
Jerry Bridges gives us five areas that we really should focus on as we think about growing in patience. So if you’re going to pray for patience, these are five areas that you can pray specifically for.
And the first is suffering mistreatment. Think about Joseph in the end of the book of Genesis. He is kidnapped by his brothers. He is sold into slavery in Egypt. He is mistreated by his first master. He is forgotten by his second. And finally, once he raises to a position of prominence, there before him are the ten brothers who started this whole mess in his life.
And he looks at them as he reveals himself to them as they are worried about what how he’s going to respond as he has the power of all of Egypt behind him. He looks at them and he says, “What you meant for evil…” he called them out. He said this was an evil act.
“But what you meant for evil, God meant for good for the salvation of many.” Sometimes we will suffer mistreatment and need to leave that mistreatment to God’s justice and to God’s faithfulness. It doesn’t mean we don’t confront it if we can. It doesn’t mean that we don’t lament over it if we should. But it means it may come to a time, even if we perfectly repent of our giving into that problem, that a reconciliation cannot be met. But we need to leave that in God’s justice, in God’s hands.
Secondly, how do we respond to provocation? Exodus 34:6-7, I encourage you to look at it at some time because it shows us that patience truly is an attribute of God. It’s not merely something God does, but it is an attribute of God. It says there that God is “slow to anger.” Every sin that you and I commit provokes God to anger. And he is slow to that anger. How do we bear up when we are provoked? Sometimes mistreatment happens by accident, but sometimes people try to provoke a response out of us.
The third thing is we need to learn is to tolerate shortcomings. We’ve already talked about this a little bit, but God has exercised and continues to exercise great tolerance and patience with you in your shortcomings. And so we need to learn by the power of the Spirit and the power of the cross to tolerate the shortcomings of others.
Fourth, and I think this is where it gets tough, is we need to learn to wait on God. We have all these promises in the Bible. “I’m working all things for good.” Or “Nothing can separate you from the love of God, which is yours in Christ Jesus.” That’s just one chapter, two promises with a whole bunch of others mixed in there. As hardships get long and difficult, we need to learn to wait and to rest upon God.
Grief can be one of the longest, hardest things that most of us will deal with in our life. And yet God is faithful even in our grief to teach us to rely upon him and to find our peace and our hope in him rather than in the things of this world.
And there’s an end to the hardship of grief. The grief never totally goes away, but there is a point to where we can finally see God’s light in our life again. And many times we just need to wait on God to show up.
And fifthly, persevering through adversity. We mentioned this with endurance. Endurance is not just sitting there bearing the weight as long as you possibly can. Endurance is moving forward, seeking to grow in faith, seeking to grow in holiness, seeking to become more like Christ through whatever God brings your way.
And so we grow in patience by focusing on how we suffer mistreatment, on how we respond to provocation, how we tolerate shortcomings, how well we wait on God, and how we persevere through adversity.
CONCLUSION
The last thing I want to mention about patience has to do with God’s patience. And Peter, the second Peter chapter three, beginning in verse nine.
“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.”
You know, if we were to look back in the Old Testament at passages like Nehemiah chapter nine, verse 30, we would see that God gave Israel time. From the time they entered the Promised Land until the time Judah was destroyed was roughly a thousand years. God gave Israel promised prophets who came to them with warnings of what God would do if they did not repent. And Israel ignored the patience of God, and he judged them for it.
Peter, in second Peter 3:9-10, is saying, God is still patient with people, and he is still giving people time, and he is still giving people the prophetic word of the scriptures, and he is still giving people warnings to repent. But God’s patience does have an end. And when Jesus returns, it will be too late.
And so if you have not yet repented, if you have not yet thrown yourself upon the mercies of Christ so that you might be reconciled with God through him, do not wait any longer. Definitely don’t wait too long, because yes, God is patient, but his patience is an opportunity to repent. And the more we ignore it, the more judgment we heap upon ourselves.
Repent, take advantage of God’s patience, and be saved.
Let’s pray. To the great God above, I cannot express enough the gratitude that I have to you for the patience which you have exercised towards me. Lord, may I grow in my patience, in my long suffering, in my forbearance as I deal with the circumstances and the people of this life. And may your glory shine through the salvation of those that you are calling to repentance. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Please take this blessing upon you as you go today, this blessing from our Lord”
“May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.”
He who testifies to these things says, yes, I am coming soon.
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
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