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What Are You Full Of? (Part 5)
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God is patient. This is not merely an attribute—it is His very character. The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 14:33, "For God is not a God of disorder, but of peace." When you give your life to Him, He gives you His peace.
Patience is part of love itself. In 1 Corinthians 13, the passage so often read at weddings, we find: "Love is patient. Love is kind." Since love is patient, and God is love, then by the law of deduction, God is patient. Your Father is patient.
Patience is love that understands the weakness of human nature and refuses to take offense. It is love which sees the potential in people and does not demand instant maturity. Patience is love which continues to desire the best for others even when it is slandered or abused.
Just as love governs your attitude, joy governs your emotions, and peace governs your mind, patience governs your reactions. I will grow in patience if I allow the Holy Spirit to govern my reactions.
The Bible tells us in Galatians 4:4, "When the time had fully come, God sent his son." God waited. He knew His plan for the world and knew He would send His only begotten Son, but He waited patiently for the right time.
Understand the nature of your Father so you don't get frustrated. Your destiny is not governed by 12 months making a year. Your destiny is governed by the timing of the Holy Spirit. The calendar you operate by is not from heaven. God sits outside the circle of time and gives you His spirit. Your destiny will be managed and governed by the fullness of God's timing, not by the Roman calendar.
The Bible says in 2 Peter 3:9, "The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise as some understand slowness." When you look at certain aspects of your life and tell yourself, "I think God is slow," consider this: if you have enough capacity to judge that He is slow, then perhaps He is not your God. God operates in the fullness of time. When the fullness of time comes, no demon in hell can say it won't happen.
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Jesus demonstrated the fruit of patience in His life. He was patient with His disciples. He was patient with sinners. He endured suffering. Jesus said, "The prince of this world came and he found no [nothing] in me." This is our biggest problem in becoming Christian and growing in the Holy Spirit. When you grow in these competencies, you chip away at your humanity so your divinity can be revealed.
Waiting will test your patience. Life is full of waiting—waiting for traffic lights, waiting for answers, waiting for promises to be fulfilled. We ask the question: How long? All through the Bible, people say, "How long, oh God?" Yet God also says, "How long, oh people? How long will you stay in this sin? How long will you worship other gods?"
The Bible says in Psalm 30:5, "Weeping may endure for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning." The key to the question of how long is to trust God's timing. Trust His timing. Every time you find yourself asking why or how long, you are saying, I don't trust God's timing.
You can fret and fume, but it will not move the needle. If your fretting could move the needle and your fuming could move the needle, then He is not God. There is no point. It is part of the discipline of your faith in which you must gain mastery. Don't ask why. Don't ask how long. Say: Lord, I trust your timing. In the fullness of time, what you have in store for me will manifest.
Suffering will test your patience. With suffering, we ask the big question: Why, Lord? The Bible says in Romans 12:12, "Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction." There is nothing wrong with you. The Bible says "Your life is hidden in Christ and Christ in God." Be hopeful, be joyful in hope, be patient in affliction and hardship, and be faithful in prayer.
Seasons come, seasons go. God has a perfect timing for you. To answer the question of why, you must learn to trust God's purpose. The purposes of God for your life must come to pass.
Consider Joseph. God saw that famine was coming to the earth and that He needed to preserve His people. When Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery, it seemed like affliction and wickedness. But Joseph later testified: "You thought you were selling me out, but God was sending me ahead of you." What appeared naturally as affliction was actually God's purpose to preserve a whole generation.
The Bible says in James 1:2-4, "Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be matured and complete, not lacking anything." This is the lack terminator. When you are going through adversity, count it pure joy because the root of lack is about to be terminated in your life.
I once left Nigeria to move to Cyprus. The Lord asked me to do this, and I went. But I ended up working on a farm for a man named Vas Patali, doing work I had never done before. He told me, "You no clever," over and over. It destroyed my confidence and stripped me to bare minimum. But years later, when I returned and walked through that farm, I said, "Lord, I thank you for this adversity. This adversity made me the man I am today." It was not the comfort of my father's house that prepared me to pastor a global church. It was the adversity on that farm that produced the leader I am today.
People will test your patience. We ask ourselves: How on earth did this person make me do this? How do people think like this? If waiting prompts the question how long and suffering prompts the question why, then people prompt the question how.
But we forget that we too are people. It is like complaining about traffic. You say, "Traffic was terrible today," but you were in the traffic. You are the traffic. If you had stayed at home, you would have made one person's life better. But you left your home, drove your car, and now you are part of the problem. Yet you have the audacity to say your traffic was bad.
The Bible says in Colossians 3:13, "Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you." This is the challenge: forgive the way Christ forgave you. Jesus forgives you one million times a day, and He is okay with it. Yet when your own child says sorry the first time, sorry the second time, sorry the third time and does the same thing again, you struggle.
Yet God is saying that to master patience, you must learn to forgive like Jesus. Forgive your wife as God forgave you. Forgive your husband as Jesus forgave you. But if Jesus said something about your mother 25 years ago, you are still talking about it. Your mother is dead, and yet you still bring it up. Forgive like Jesus forgave you.
Remember how incredibly patient God is. Your God is patient, and He has given you His nature. So your nature is patience. You cannot fight your nature. This is your nature. Remember how God is patient with history, patient with humans. That is the expectation.
You are not a patient person. You are patience. Do you understand what I am saying? You are not a joyful person. No, you are joy. You are not a peaceful person. You are peace. You are not a patient person. You are patience. Your nature is the nature of the Father.
Focus on the future. The Bible says of Jesus, "Who for the joy that was set before him," He endured. Focus on the future. The traffic light will turn green. Adversity will come to an end.
We are all waiting for Jesus right now. It feels as if He will never come. But God is not slow in the way we think about slowness. He is waiting for the perfect time. When the perfect time comes, one day there will be a trumpet, a sound heard all over the world. All people will look up and see the Master coming. Those who are saved will be taken away. Right now you don't believe it because God is giving the world a chance to repent. He is patiently waiting. That is your nature.
The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 4:17, "For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is not seen."
Be slow to anger. Psalm 103:8 says, "The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love." This is very tough, but it is what God has called us to.
You have not grown if you accepted Jesus at the maternity ward of the Holy Spirit—at a convention, an altar call—and never left that place. Even if you are 20 or 30 years old in the church of God, if you have not mastered these competencies, you are still an infant. The whole idea is for you to leave the hospital, leave where you gave your life to Christ, and keep feeding and feeding, mastering these competencies, until you come to maturity.
Many have not mastered these competencies. And so today, many are taken advantage of because they have not grown. Your problem is not the devil. Your problem is that you have not grown in the Spirit and the Holy Spirit, which is reflected in your mastery of these nine fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, and patience.
When you grow in these competencies, you become like God and like Jesus. To become Christlike on earth is priceless. It means you are a spirit man on earth. That is what makes you supernatural. This is God's plan for you—to become like Jesus on earth.
Jesus said, "Greater works shall you do because I go to my father." But He is talking to a lazy generation and a weak generation who want things done for them without having skin in the game. Two thousand years after Christ, we are still relying on fake prophets and astrologers. But if you want miracles and a supernatural lifestyle, become like Jesus by developing the competencies of the fruit of the Spirit. You will pray less, focus less on the devil, and keep manifesting the heart of the Father.
When there was scarcity, Jesus had a solution. When there was no bread to feed 5,000, the solution came. He gave the word and things multiplied. He raised the dead. Nothing was dead in His hands. Your career won't die. Your marriage won't die. Your children won't die. Tell me it is not worth the price to gain this mastery.
I pray for you this morning for the grace to mature in Christ. I pray for courage for you. I pray for boldness. I pray that God will give you a heart to embrace His divinity. I pray that God will give you strength to chip away at your humanity so that His divinity will find expression in your life.
