Finding the Patience of God

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:07

   Gretchen Ronnevik

   Why don't we start out with a little prayer? Christ Jesus, thank you for everyone gathered here. Lord, this afternoon and evening, would you just teach us to be patient? Teach us what it means to long suffer. Teach us what it means to endure, that we might be a reflection of you and be a light and a balm to the world around us struggling in their sufferings. In your name. Amen. So we all know what it means to pray for patience. You're probably all nervous right now. Like, how long are you going to talk exactly, Gretchen? What's God gonna do? I have a complicated relationship with patience, or as some translations of the Bible say, long-suffering.

2. 01:10

   Gretchen Ronnevik

   I want patience, yet I hate being patient. I want others to be patient with me, but I don't wanna be the reason that that patience needs to be drawn out of others. I don't want to be the problem person. I want people to see me as patient, but I also don't want them taking advantage of me and to see how much they can get away with. Mixed up with this whole idea of patience is this tension I have within myself between patience and justice. Basically, the question is, when do we endure something that happens to us, and when do we stand up for ourselves and fight? When do we fight a righteous fight, and when do we wait and see what God will do? I feel like this is a very difficult question. It's the question of the age. I struggle with this, especially as a mother.

3. 02:08

   Gretchen Ronnevik

   When do I correct my kids, and when do I just endure them being wrong so I'm not exasperating them and just overcorrecting them all the time? For me, I'm patient until I'm not, and then my patience is just gone. So I can't begin to tell you the fear and trembling I have in preparing to talk on patience. I actually wouldn't naturally choose to study it. It started a few years back. I was asked to speak at a women's retreat where they wanted to talk about what it meant to live in hope. And so I started researching every passage in the Bible about hope and the surrounding context to try to understand what hope meant. And as I was going through the Scriptures, looking for this thread of hope, I found this other thread right alongside it. I never found hope without this other thread.

4. 03:10

   Gretchen Ronnevik

   And that was the thread of patience, or at least waiting, enduring, long-suffering. That idea was right next to hope every time. It went by several names. And I began to wonder if my struggle to have hope was linked to my resistance to studying patience. Because I want people to be patient with me, but I don't want to ask God for patience because I have enough suffering going on. I asked God to teach me something I wasn't sure I wanted to learn. I'm not a patient person. You can ask any of the people who live with me.

5. 03:51

   Gretchen Ronnevik

   My husband once joked that, as I'm half Irish and half Norwegian, I just got the Norwegian stubbornness and the Irish temper, like, in one little package. And if my temper has waned at all, it's not from a method of patience I have mastered, but due to the sorrow I feel and seen the impact of my lack of patience has on people. That sorrow has washed over me over the years, like waves smoothing out all my rough edges, and I'm slower to respond, more cautious to react. And I wonder, is that what patience is? And I look for tools to manage my patience or the lack thereof. When researching it, it just looks like stress management, like get enough sleep, take deep breaths, eat something. But patience has to be more than stress management. When you look at patience in the Bible, you don't say, they were so patient because they arranged their life in such a way that nothing ever bothered them.

6. 04:55

   Gretchen Ronnevik

   They were just very orderly in how they ran things. No, patient people endured some horrible things. Perhaps my desire for patience manifested for years through the obsession of parenting books when my kids were little, looking for the magic bullet that would help me raise my kids so well-behaved that I wouldn't need to be patient. And yet sometimes I felt pushed to the edge and unseen and unheard and ignored. And at peak frustration, parenting feels like no one's helping and no one's listening, and there's whole comedy routines of moms just going through the house yelling at everybody. And I erupt, and I lose my patience, and I justify in my mind that I'm just speaking the truth. I tell myself that people need to see how their actions actually affect other people.

7. 05:52

   Gretchen Ronnevik

   I have no wish to be a doormat or train my kids to take advantage of others. Isn't it right to say something is wrong when it is in fact wrong? And I struggle with knowing where that line is. It seems correct to say what is true, and it seems less correct to scream it. Is patience then just a matter of tone or volume? Again, you can ask my family, and sometimes my softest tones are the scariest ones. My sin is like a virus that will create new variants around any new rules I contrive to contain it. It will find a way to make itself known. I wrestle to justify my temper, the nemesis of my patience. The wrestling cries out in my soul when I struggle to see that line of where does telling the truth cross into being angry and sinning.

8. 06:57

   Gretchen Ronnevik

   And I'll pick apart my conversations and try to justify myself and justify my actions and justify my attitudes and try to figure out who's actually to blame and what measures I could do to prevent it. What does it mean to be patient? Or what the Bible calls long-suffering? Do we dare ask? Will it hurt us? Does God have our best interest at heart? Will asking that question make calamity come down on us as God teaches us how to be patient? I watched a movie a while back. It was called The Answer Man, and the main actor was Jeff Daniels. And in this movie, he plays this kind of spiritual guru who had written a bestselling book about a conversation he had with God. And in the opening scene, you see him in his home sitting cross-legged, meditating, and trying to find his center of some way. And the mailman outside his front door starts ringing his doorbell over and over and over again as he's sitting there trying to meditate and find some center. And he's trying to ignore it, and he's trying to be present, and he's trying to get in the zone, and the doorbell keeps ringing. And finally, he jumps up and marches to the doorway shouting expletives the whole way, and finally faces the mailman who's preventing him from any kind of inner peace.

9. 08:33

   Gretchen Ronnevik

   And I think it would be easy to be patient if it weren't for people. In our quest for holiness, we can study what is good and beautiful and true all we want, but to achieve it, we somehow think we must get rid of everything that is bad and ugly and wrong, which is basically how we view other people. Wait long enough and every person with a sin nature will disappoint you. This is how cancel culture starts. We're trying to be holy. You're not holy, so we're going to get rid of you. In this equation, we are the holy ones, and we obtain our holiness ourselves, and we need to prevent contamination. Anger is a virtue in our culture. If you're not angry at the state of the world, do you even care? Patience is not a product of perfect circumstances.

10. 09:31

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    It's an attribute of love. This is what is so confusing and countercultural and counter-legalistic and counter-everything that we feel. And in a larger sense, patience is holiness enduring unholiness. Or to put it differently, patience is love unmoved by hate. More specifically, which we'll get into, patience is the willingness to suffer or even be uncomfortable for the sake of another. And sometimes this patience isn't enduring the sin of others. For instance, if my kid is taking a really long time learning how to tie his shoe, that's not his sin that we're dealing with. That's mine, because I want the world surrounded around me and my timetable.

11. 10:24

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    My sin is exposed, and I don't like it, and I need patience. So in this session, we're gonna look at three things. What is patience? How is God patient? And how does he make us patient? Patience is not a process of being toughened up. It's a process of being humbled down. One morning, one of my kids was in a homeschool kindergarten class, and his tutor told the class that the word of the day was patience. And she asked the kindergartners what it meant to have patience. And one kindergartner said, "It means we wait without complaining." And I thought, that's not a horrible definition.

12. 11:07

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    It's a little surfacey. It's what we like to communicate to kids: be patient. When we tell our kids to be patient, we're usually saying be quiet. We get the word patience from Latin, and the actual translation is long-suffering. So there's that element of long and that element of suffering. In the Greek New Testament, the direct translation has more of an undertone of faithfulness. Something is going to be faithful for a long time in difficult circumstances. If hope is an anchor for the soul, then patience is the rope or the chain that is holding onto it through the storm.

13. 11:50

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    So we can pull from that for our definition of patience. Hebrew is my favorite way to look at patience. That language can be very poetic or pictorial. It's kind of a metaphoric language. To be patient in Hebrew is to have a really long nose. You see, in English, how the seat of the emotions is the heart. If we say someone has a big heart, that means that they love really big. And in Hebrew, you would say someone had a really big nose if they were patient, because just like the heart is the seat of love, in Hebrew, the nose was the seat of anger.

14. 12:31

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    And you can kind of see it, 'cause when you're angry, you kind of breathe in and you kind of hold it in. That's the Hebrew picture of patience. It's sometimes translated slow to anger. To have a long nose means that you hold your anger well. It doesn't mean that you're never angry. It's that you are wise to breathe it in and breathe it out at the right times. Slow to anger. There was a fascinating book I read a while ago called The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, and it showed that when the early church started writing theological works, before they started addressing any other theology, everyone was writing on patience.

15. 13:16

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    That was the virtue. Patience was considered the defining Christian virtue. Patience was also their strategy for evangelism. The world knew that Christians knew how to suffer well and suffer for the sake of others. And that was the fire that was poured on church growth. Reading through some of their documents on patience, you see the Church Fathers tying patience directly to the cross of Christ, to God himself. They were asking the questions, why are we suffering, and where is God? How are we to be patient with someone who is feeding our children to the lions? The best definition I can come up with to summarize their works is patience is the willingness to suffer. It's the, I don't care if I have to run into a burning building to save you.

16. 14:15

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    If I get burned, I get burned. But it wasn't just that heroic aspect. This willingness to suffer was also tied to humility. Like, I don't care if I have to be your slave. If that's what you need to experience the love of God, then I'll be a slave. There were several elements of patience, or discussions that they were having, that was under this early church umbrella of their definition of patience. One of the ways they defined patience was letting people leave the church in peace, or being willing to lose out on business deals and letting the other person benefit, letting yourself be slandered and loving them anyway. In today's world, where anger is a virtue, patience looks really apathetic, maybe even pathetic, and maybe even evil to the world, and sometimes to us.

17. 15:13

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    Patience is the willingness to suffer. So our next question, then, is how is God patient? You see, in this definition of patience being the willingness to suffer, I kept looking for loopholes that would make allowances for my limitedness in this real world we live in of abuse. I feel like the willingness to suffer, especially with my ministry to women, needs like a million disclaimers. And all my loopholes were inconsistent, and I soon realized that I was looking at it through the lens of me and through the lens of us. But when I hold it up to the character and nature of God, what do we see then? As I studied that question, I got the most confusing hodgepodge of responses from modern scholars. God is the most patient, but don't try his patience. God's love is everlasting, but don't push it.

18. 16:15

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    God is a well of patience, but one day his patience will end. And I wanted to know, what are the boundaries of God's patience? When does God say enough is enough? You go through the Old Testament, and God sometimes feels unpredictable. Sometimes he seems generous with really stupid people, and then it feels like he will just randomly smite someone down. And I was trying to understand it. I started asking some scary questions. Is God's patience everlasting? Can we depend on it? Have I fallen out of favor? When is he going to get sick of my excuses for my sin? Because frankly, I'm kind of already sick of my excuses for him, on his behalf. A friend of mine pointed me to Exodus 34 as a picture of the God who is slow to anger.

19. 17:12

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    And it's where God reveals himself to Moses, and God's description of himself is then a refrain that gets repeated throughout Scripture. To set the scene, previous to this chapter, God had given Moses the Ten Commandments, or the Ten Words, on two tablets. Moses went down from the mountain, and he saw that the Israelites had made a golden calf, and they were worshiping it, and he threw the tablets down and broke them. And then he has to go back up the mountain, tell God that he had broken his law, both literally and figuratively, in every way, by every definition. And could we get another set of tablets, please? We'll do better this time. So Moses cuts out two new tablets by God's direction. He's ready to get God's law again. And this is what God does.

20. 18:07

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    Starting in verse 6, it says, the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Let's stop and take a moment and let that sink in. Moses asked for God to give his law again, and God shows Moses who he is. I'm a God who's merciful and gracious. I have a long nose, and my covenant promise, love, is truth. It's an awkward, literal rendering. At the lowest moment for the Israelites, probably in all of their history, the first words out of God's mouth isn't, I forgive you because you deserve it. I'm merciful because you guys didn't know any better.

21. 19:03

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    He doesn't say, I'm patient because you guys are just slow. He doesn't say, I guess I have to be merciful 'cause you guys can't get your act together. He says, I'm merciful and forgiving and slow to anger because that is who I am. I am who I am. Our God is patient. In my study, I went down the rabbit hole of how that could be and the doctrine of God. And I found myself in Augustine and the Athanasian Creed and the Nicene Creed and trying to figure out who God was. And I came to this stunning realization that God isn't just patient.

22. 19:45

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    He is. He is his attributes. God isn't just loving; he is love. He isn't just patient; God is patience. His patience does not take away from his glory; it reveals it. Let me be clear when I say this. When we are praying for patience, we aren't praying for God to bring calamity in our lives. We aren't praying that God would toughen us up by getting us used to horrible things happening.

23. 20:14

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    We aren't praying for our muscles to get pumped up. When we're praying for patience, we are praying for God himself to be with us. He is patience. I like the definition of willingness to suffer here because the Godhead does not suffer, but he willingly sent his Son to incarnate in the flesh and suffer and die for our sake. That enduring love of the Trinity will be revealed to us in Christ. Christ is the revealed patience of God. Now we come to the next part of Exodus 34, which sounds a lot like the "yeah, but what about the justice part" arguments floating around in your heads.

24. 21:03

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    It says, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and their children's children to the third and fourth generation. So his righteousness will rise up. His patience does not negate his righteousness or his steadfastness. On the contrary, it reveals it. So what does this mean? Does it mean he's going to forgive but he's going to punish? Is it trying to split hairs between discipline and punishment? I'm trying to figure out—God says two things about himself that feel contradictory. It's interesting, this phrasing that God uses: a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. You'll see that repeated over and over again, especially in the Psalms.

25. 22:01

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    King David liked to use it a lot. We can use Scripture to interpret Scripture here. Psalm 103 is one of my favorite examples. David brings up what God says to Moses in Exodus 34. He says, God made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel. The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever.

26. 22:32

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is the steadfast love toward those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him, for he knows our frame. He remembers we are dust. That word compassion that God uses here—a friend of mine, a Hebrew scholar, said this is another built-in metaphor in the Hebrew language. To have compassion is to bring someone into your womb. It means to womb someone, to surround them with yourself.

27. 23:21

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    That made me think of Nicodemus. Should I crawl back into my mother's womb to be born again? No, to be born of God, we must first be wombed by God, be compassioned by God. The death of Christ on that cross was our birth. It is said there is pain in childbearing, which I can attest to, but I didn't understand that what Jesus did on the cross was his pain for our birth. It's where God the Father sent God the Son to incarnate and then die in our place. Then the Father and the Son sent the Spirit to uphold us and teach us the way of the cross, which is the way of Christ. You see, Christ was not diminished through his sufferings.

28. 24:12

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    His sufferings ripped open the veil and revealed the glory of God. For Martin Luther, becoming a theologian of the cross was another term for suffering. It's pointing to the pain of new birth, and it was horrible. This is the third point: how does God make us patient, or how does he make us willing to suffer? Luther wrote about how we much prefer what he called the theology of glory. I'll use patience as an example on how to explain the difference between the theology of glory and theology of the cross. In the theology of glory, he categorized that as our natural tendency. The theology of the cross is how he categorized God's work on us. Under the category of theologian of glory, I want people to think I'm a patient mother.

29. 25:09

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    I will be kind to my kids in public, but when we are in private, I will let it rip. I will smile at the lady in front of me in the grocery store paying with coins, and I will give an understanding grin, but inside my heart, I'm grumbling and angry. In the theology of glory, I want people to see me as patient, and yet I will avoid suffering, even if that means that that suffering falls on other people instead. That's seeing patience as a theologian of glory. It's being a person who displays their patience for their own benefit. A theologian of the cross, on the other hand, goes through the most painful of humblings. They undergo a process of being patience-ed. I made up a word there.

30. 25:58

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    I turned patience into a verb. It's having the reality of what Jesus did on the cross be pressed into you. They come to understand that we don't just have to repent of our bad works. We have to repent of thinking our good works were enough. We need to repent of our self-righteousness. Luther used to say that Satan is the essence of self-righteousness in all its fury. You see, the Roman Catholic Church and many Christians today will see repentance as a turning, because it means turning. But they see it as turning from bad works to good works.

31. 26:36

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    Luther said that repentance is turning from trusting in our works to trusting in Christ's works. That is what repentance is. It's not me. This is going to be all God. He's going to have to do all of it. We are continually, daily turning from trusting in our works to trusting in God's. Repentance is dropping justifying ourselves and clinging only to the justification of Christ. And it hurts.

32. 27:09

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    Becoming a theologian of the cross is a process by which the Holy Spirit strips away every single security we have that's getting in the way of our faith until we understand the depths of God's love and faithfulness to us. He's going to graciously take away every illusion. He will take away the false gods until only he remains. And that is a mercy because he's the only one who actually does have the power to save. Becoming a theologian of the cross means that you begin to see your self-righteousness as dangerous, not just the lesser of two evils, but perhaps the greater. It's based on a lie. It's the rich man trying to get into the kingdom of heaven saying, I worked for all this. We are beggars, everyone.

33. 28:04

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    Moses came up on the mountain asking for more law, and God gives it, but he wants to make sure that Moses knows first that it won't be the law that saves. It will be God himself who saves. He is the secure one. He is the faithful one. He is the patience to endure. And part of our problem is we don't understand the active nature of God. We don't understand his active nature, his active attributes. It's not that God is just righteous, or that he just makes us righteous.

34. 28:39

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    It's like his righteousness. He righteousnesses us. Turn that into a verb too. He doesn't just make us righteous. He righteousnesses us. He presses his righteousness into us, and the active nature of his righteousness forgives us and makes us clean. The same is with his patience. I thought God's righteousness was holy and judgy.

35. 29:02

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    I didn't understand that the center of his righteousness was forgiveness and patience. It's not that forgiveness and patience is opposed to God's righteousness. It is the active nature of it. It is the active nature of God's righteousness that sent God the Son to die for our sake, making those who believe in him righteous. God's patience is sending Christ to suffer and die on the cross for our sake, and it was a righteous thing to do. The knowledge of the depth of all his goodness, encountering all the evil in the world, it gets pressed into us and it kills our ego. It kills us, and then it radiates in us.

36. 29:51

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    Moses came down from the mountain radiating, which makes me feel like God's patience is like nuclear or something. I don't understand what was going on there in Exodus 34. Moses didn't come down from the mountain radiating because he just followed God's law so well, but because he was in God's presence. It was a matter of proximity. And that's the thing. God's patience does not end because his patience is shown in Christ. It's the tenacity of his love that will not waver. And when time ends, when Christ returns, it's not going to be a question if God is or isn't patient.

37. 30:35

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    It will be a question of, are you in God's patience or are you outside of it? Are you in Christ or are you out of Christ? But that love endures forever. Patience is the enduring aspect of his love, and it will not stop. God's patience does not enable us to sin. It presses into us as we become theologians of the cross and understand the depth of what the cross actually means for us and what the cross actually means for others. Every birth comes with suffering. It's the most painful thing you could endure, but through it we find something firm, a place for our feet to stand. We don't get patience by getting used to suffering. We don't get patience by working out some kind of muscle.

38. 31:36

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    We get patience in Christ, through Christ, by the power of Christ. He is the embodiment of God's patience. When we see patience as Christ himself through the lens of the theology of the cross, then all of a sudden the willingness to suffer is being conformed to the image of Christ. It helps us sort out what is true patience and what is pseudo-patience. My tendency to people-please and avoid confrontation, that sounds a lot more like the theology of glory, so people will like me. Learning patience has meant that I've had to have the hard conversations with people when I'd rather be silent. It's meant being silent when I have the absolute perfect zinger of a reply that would feel so good. It's clinging to the justification of Christ instead of trying to constantly justify myself and my actions.

39. 32:38

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    Being patient has meant that I apologize a lot more than I used to, let my ego experience some suffering. In the last two years, my husband's dad died. We remodeled our 120-year-old house that was falling apart. All of our family dynamics changed as our kids started moving out. Our pastor died of leukemia. We had to move my husband's mom off the farm. We have teenagers constantly in our home, both ours and the ones that just drop by for supper, that are full of strong emotions and drama. But we love them.

40. 33:15

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    We stopped homeschooling after 14 years as I hit burnout. We struggled to cope with the stress of the farm, and just as we were coming up for air and coming to a good place, my abusive alcoholic dad died. And as I'm trying to figure out how to write his eulogy, in the midst of planning his memorial service, my brother's house burned down in LA. [Audience member: "Oh my God."] And then the very next week we had to put our dog to sleep. And it's gotten to the point in our home where we're in a stage of laughter. Don't get me wrong, there's been plenty of tears, lots of weeping, but it gets funny. My oldest child calls it the dark humor at funerals when all the tears have been shed and there's only laughter left.

41. 34:09

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    It's joyful, this laughter, when you face dark times. I don't remember a time in our family when we laughed so much. Sometimes it feels like delirium, but for real, you reach a point of laughter and joy when you realize that Satan is grasping at straws. And there is nothing, literally nothing, absolutely nothing that can separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. I have access to his patience because I have Christ, and he will not fail. No amount of suffering can loosen his grip. Satan has nothing on the steadfast love of God.

42. 34:54

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    It's gotten to the point where it's funny to me when he tries. Being a theologian of the cross is calling a thing what it is. There's no need to pretty up suffering or put a pretty bow on it. We can boldly call things what they are and speak in truth because his grace looks suffering in the eye. It looks right at it. We don't have to diminish talking about our suffering. The reality of the cross gets pressed into you, and you say with humility and joy, yeah, that was all God. Every drop of grace and truth is him.

43. 35:41

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    Poor Satan! He thought God would leave us through trials. Trials only revealed how firmly he was holding us. When we're brought down to the pit, God is there. When we are in our darkest hour, he is there. When we are living in a nightmare, he is there. Poor Satan, he must be frantic. Paul said, to live is Christ and to die is gain. Our pastor preached last week that we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.

44. 36:21

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    And in the context of the book of Philippians, that doesn't mean we can accomplish all we want to accomplish. It means we can endure whatever suffering Satan throws at us, because Satan doesn't have anything stronger than God's love. It's not that my patience will save me. The patience and glory of God was revealed on that cross, and nothing is stronger than the steadfast love of our God. I'll end with this from Romans 8: Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written, for your sake we are being killed all day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. No, in all these things we're more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

45. 37:40

    Gretchen Ronnevik

    Amen. Thank you.