God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)
We must understand that patience is both a command and a gift from God… As a command, patience arrives at the Christian conscience as a matter of accountability. At the same time, patience is a divine gift. Christians are not able, in and of themselves, to demonstrate true patience as a fruit of the Spirit… [Patience] comes only to those who have been redeemed by Christ and in whom the Holy Spirit is calling forth the fruit of the Spirit.
How does every Christian start out? In repentance. We finally admit that we’ve been completely wrong about everything every moment of every day throughout our entire lives, because we’ve been wrong about God, and God is omni-relevant to us at every level of our beings all the time. But from then on, for too many of us, we’re never wrong again. That’s amazing. The first of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses was, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said ‘Repent,’ he intended that the entire life of believers should be repentance.”
