PEACE, PATIENCE, SELF-CONTROL

As we prepare to launch out into mission, we have done a number of things. First we looked at the map provided to us by the ancients...the Apostle's Creed. Next we talked about training our crew with the spiritual disciplines. Now we turn to stocking the ship with the fruit produced by those disciplines...what Paul calls the "fruit of the spirit." We talked about those nine things as a group last week, remembering that we can't just manufacture spiritual fruit on our own. The fruit is grown in us as we engage in the spiritual disciplines, staying rooted in spiritual soil, reaching up to take in the sunshine, and drinking in the living water.

For the next several weeks we will be looking at the individual fruits of the spirit that Paul names, and today we come to the first three. They are not the first three he names, but are three that I think tie together...peace, patience, and self-control. First let me say that I hate preaching on patience. Every single time I plan to preach on patience, God seems to want to prepare me for the sermon by asking me to practice it.

With some things I have enormous patience, but with mechanical things I have a zero tolerance policy. When I get in the car and turn the key, it needs to work. I don't get freaked out by dents in the car or a lack of horsepower, but if turning the key doesn't start the car, I am neigh-well inconsolable. God knows this, and here I was getting ready to preach on patience. It was a set-up.

It wasn't the car this week, it was the door out at the cabin. Since I was having company this weekend, I was trying to get the sermon written early. On the day set aside for this, Barbara calls me from the cabin. "I'm stuck," she says. "The door won't open, and I can't get out!" She had an appointment, so she sliced through a screen and climbed out a window. Doors are another thing that are supposed to work. You turn the handle, the door opens...a relatively simple procedure, but my dolt of a door was having difficulty with it.

So, instead of writing a sermon, I went and bought a new doorknob and went out there to see if I could replace it. Let's be clear. I don't run home improvement seminars. I have never, ever changed a doorknob. Simple, say the instructions, just unscrew the old one and put in the new. Well, this one has no screws, at least none that I can see.

I could give you a blow by blow account for the rest of the sermon, but I'll spare you. Let us just say that I did finally replace the doorknob. My knees and legs are all bruised from climbing through the window, and there are screw holes in many more places than there are screws, but the door now works, and I have threatened to call down fire and hail should it fail on me again. I hate preaching on patience.

And yet, that is the way that it works. If I am to become a more patient person, I will need to get experience being patient. That means that, if God is to help me become patient, God must send me frustrating circumstances so that I may practice. Patience is a fruit, it doesn't appear fully formed, it is grown from a tiny bud to ripened fruit.

I chose three fruit of the Spirit to discuss together, and I believe they are related. In this instance, I think the beginning stage of the fruit is patience. This word is translated in the King James as "longsuffering," and my Greek dictionary also translates it as "endurance, constancy, perseverance, and slowness in avenging wrongs."

As I try to learn patience, it happens in fits and starts. You can't call what I did with the door "longsuffering." It was more like "short-suffering." I wrangled with it a bit, then got mad and stopped and considered going home. Then, remembering that would mean another knee-bruising climb through the window, I would start again, get frustrated again, and so forth. Over time, I could stick with the task a little longer, and eventually got clear-headed enough to go to the computer and look up "door knob replacement" on Google.

As I work to make my "short-suffering" into "longsuffering," I am at the same time learning self-control. When I want to drive the screwdriver through the heart of the doorknob manufacturer and restrain myself, I am inching toward self-control, and as I gain more control over my actions, I am able to be more patient.

When those two things come together...when I have enough control over my actions and emotions to keep me patient and focused on the task at hand, lo and behold, I have peace. I am able to control myself, deal with the fact that there are things beyond my control, and as a result, there is nothing to disturb my peace. The three things are interwoven and interrelated.

I have said that the fruit of the Spirit are grown through practice of the spiritual disciplines. Again using the example of the doorknob, there were three aspects of the spiritual disciplines that helped me complete the task. The first that came into play was the practice of giving. I could have let Barbara just go back that night and climb back in the window and try to figure it out herself. But I didn't want her to have to do that. I didn't want my company this weekend to have to do that either. Because the practice of giving has taught me to give up some of myself for others, I gave time I didn't have and was willing to mash up my knees and legs to help.

Once I was in and committed to the task, help from two other disciplines came to the rescue. One was prayer. "God fix this blasted door" is perhaps not the most sophisticated of prayers, but it reminded me that I was not alone in my struggle and that whatever I am doing, God is there doing it with me. I prayed all the way through the project.

The other discipline coming into play was Bible Study. I have been immersed in Scripture for 45 years now, and that has certain benefits. First, I knew that things were not always easy for the people of God, and in fact they got a whole lot worse than broken doorknobs. Remembering the struggles of Daniel being thrown to the lions, Joseph being sold into slavery, and ultimately Jesus on the cross, put my doorknob in perspective.

A more subtle influence came from the interaction of all three of those disciplines. Over the years as I have practiced giving and prayer and Bible study, I have come to realize that God can be trusted. If I gave up sermon-writing time to help someone else, God would somehow help me find another time. If I prayed, God would hear me and would answer...even if I didn't particularly like the answer I got. And as I looked at God's revelation in Scripture, the steadfastness and trustworthiness of God is plain from beginning to end. Even if I couldn't fix the doorknob myself, God would make a way. "When God closes a door, somewhere he opens a window" came to mind, although that sounds much more poetic when you're not in the process of trying to fit through it.

I play a lot of role-playing games on my computer. In those games you create a character with certain attributes and as they go through the game they gain experience through the things that they do. Every time your character solves a riddle, kills a vampire, or rescues a child from a band of marauding cave trolls, you get experience points. Once a certain number of experience points are gained, the character "levels-up" which means they get stronger, wiser, and can now perform certain feats that they couldn't before. Well, that's sort of the way that the spiritual disciplines and the fruit of the spirit interact. I got experience points for changing the doorknob. When enough of those build up, I will suddenly find that my patience level has moved up from a 5 to a 6, and I will be able to glide through at least some situations that previously would have left me angry and frustrated.

I was able to change the doorknob because I have learned to use some of the spiritual tools given to me...prayer, Bible Study, giving in this case...and sticking with the task of changing the doorknob got me just a bit closer to being a more patient person.

I would encourage each of you to think about these three areas of your life. How patient are you? Most of us are patient with some things and not with others. Where are you impatient? Be sure that when God presents you with those frustrating circumstances, it is not a punishment. It is God's way of helping you grow. In what areas of your life can you exercise self-control? In what areas do you fall to temptation every time? What percentage of the time do you feel at peace? How often are you agitated?

I believe it helps to take this sort of self-inventory from time to time, and when we find the places where we always have trouble completing the exercise God gives us, then it is time to go back to basics...to become more rooted in Scripture, to turn to God more often in prayer, to practice giving up more of ourselves and our possessions.

In case you hadn't noticed, none of this is easy. The concepts are not complicated, but they are very hard to put into practice. Growing is hard work. No child likes to have tests in school and, like I said, I hate preaching about patience. To actually pray for patience is practically the kiss of death...because God will grant your prayer, and you will find yourself immersed in whatever situations frustrate your patience the most. Not that every bad situation is caused by God. I don't believe that, and I don't believe that God causes truly bad things to happen so that we might learn. I do have a feeling that God might have broken the doorknob, but I don't believe, for example, that God killed my father.

The point is that the fruit of the Spirit is different from the gifts of the Spirit. I was given the gift of preaching. I have honed the skill to make it better, but it started out at a pretty good level without any real effort on my part. The fruit of the Spirit, those attributes of character that reflect the character of God are not gifts that we one day discover in ourselves. They are fruit which are grown in us over a lifetime of experiences ONLY IF we are intentional about nurturing our spiritual lives.

Some people endure a lifetime of difficulty and end up miserable and bitter. Others endure much worse and end up shining like a polished diamond. The difference is that the first person refused to truly be planted in the soil of her life. The second person decided to plant herself in the soil she had been given and to find what nourishment was there. And what the second person discovered is that all soil belongs to God, and that God can work with any of it to grow the fruit of righteousness in us, if we are willing to join in the effort. Our job is to stay planted, the harvest belongs to God. Amen.

Sermon ©2004 Anne Robertson

Return to AnneRobertson.com