Patience with Grace

I wonder if any of you as parents have ever left your children in a room whilst you went out to prepare dinner or get something ready, and you’ve asked them to play nice and just to wait until you return to them. And then as time passes, the noise from the room gets louder, and then voices start to get louder as well, and then finally there’s banging, screaming and crying. You rush into the room and the children are red, dishevelled and crying, and they stop, look up at you, and then point at their sibling.

Well our short passage this week in James has a little of this going on. Now I don’t want you to misconstrue this as a theological picture of how God operates with us. Our God doesn’t just leave us to our own devices without any care or supervision, ready to storm back in judgment. But as we consider our journey through James (which is almost done!), James as he usually does, helps us to consider a few important ideas in this short passage which are practical for us. One of these ideas is patience, a word that is repeated a number of times, so James is obviously highlighting this as one of the main ideas he is hoping to convey. But what are we to be patient for? Well it seems quite explicit in this passage that we are to wait patiently for our Lord.

It’s not always easy when in our day to day lives, we experience strained relationships, or if we have to endure pain and suffering, it’s not easy if we experience loss. To some degree every one of us struggles with something not to our liking, or sometimes even worse, we see our loved ones in pain. James recognises this, in fact he highlights Job as an example of one who has endured pain, suffering and loss. Not many of us have even come close to what Job had endured, and yet James sees Job as blessed in his perseverance. Even in our times of harshest trials, there is grace that is extended to us, and it’s expected of us to extend grace to others. James I think reminds us that if we consider the one on whom we wait, then even despite our circumstances, we might not be so reluctant to withhold grace.

Take a moment to sit in James 5:7-12, we are almost there, let us endure to the end, well the end of James at least, but God willing, we all endure to the very end!

Josh