There’s an old saying in evangelical circles that has often been quoted to me:

Never ask God to give you more patience because He’ll just test your patience to the breaking point and you’ll end up more frustrated than ever.

Have you heard that one?

The question is, if God has revealed that you lack patience, to whom else should you turn? The sage wisdom of the impatient offered as a humorous excuse for their own fear of change is a poor substitute for the Sovereign God of the Universe. Truly patient people rarely give such flippant advice.

But, the “joke” is effective because there is a nugget of truth in it. God does push you into a situation where more patience is needed. We are most certainly not ready for it - if we were, why then did we pray for patience? If we are able to fix ourselves, why ask God for help? In these circumstances, our desperation is revealed. Without His sovereign and gracious push, our character would remain unchanged. The grace in this is that the Spirit is the One doing the pushing and is undergirding our will to push us towards real change.

I’ve been asking God to make me a more winsome and humble man. In due course, I have been greatly pressed to exercise humility and respond winsomely with mixed results. I have experienced both great success and great failure… oftentimes within the same situation. I embrace the failure and ignore the success in a process of self-flagellatory torment. I embrace the success and ignore the failure in a process of self-congratulatory excitement. The reality is somewhere in between.

This process sharpens my ability to lean on Him. The contours of this are rightly unclear. The moment we feel we’ve achieved clarity in this battle is the moment where faith becomes unnecessary and, therefore, we’ve again stepped outside of Christ and into ourselves.

God revealed to me my arrogance and self-righteous leanings a few years ago, but I really wasn’t ready to change. I made the half-hearted pleas to God to change me… but I wanted the quick fix: pray, go to sleep, wake up a completely different person. This is not typically how God works.

Recently, I have become desperate to change. Desperate to be conformed more to the image of the Son. Desperate to be a truer reflection of Christ’s humble strength. We cling to our flaws, don’t we? We actually allow our flaws to define the contours of our personality because it’s comfortable. The Spirit of God causes discomfort and we chafe against His leading. And yet, if we follow, He makes us into someone more lovely and more joyful every single time… without fail.

Help me trust in Thee, O Lord
Help me trust in Thee.
Take my wandering heart sweet King
Bind it fast to Thee

Bear me up in Thy loving arms
Fix me to Thy will
Destroy all my selfish hopes and griefs
And in Thee alone take my fill