1 Timothy 6:11 – Patience As Salve to Our Own Scrapes
But you, O man of God, flee these things and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, gentleness. 1 Timothy 6:11, New King James Version
My wife and I got to attend a wedding over the weekend. To no one's surprise, 1 Corinthians 13 was also in attendance. This chapter of Paul's letter to the train-wrecked church at Corinth in the Bible is trotted out as a description of what love looks like at its freshest and most ready to inspire both optimism and disillusionment.
Interesting, then, that Paul's first descriptor of love, or charity in the King James Version, is that it is patient. Interesting that this descriptor also comes up prominently in the home version of the ministry game which Paul modestly mails to Timothy as he equips his young disciple with closing words to battle for the church at Ephesus. If love is the ideal, the lofty, the Other Than The World, why might we need patience so quickly on its heels, which is where it follows in 1 Timothy 6:11?
We need patience as an unusually attentive handmaiden on love because love, practiced precious little in a selfish world, nevertheless comes loaded with soaring expectations. We have no sooner plugged our ears, momentarily, to the world's offers of material satisfaction or pride in our wisdom, no sooner tottered through the very beginnings of righteousness, it's humbling comparisons to godliness, the uplifting gust of faith which keeps us going, than we expect to practice love perfectly.
Before patience applies the check of realism to our vain imaginations, we anticipate that in one instance our words will be offputtingly bitter, and in the next exceptionally sweet. In what our deeds accomplish, we expect to go from decades of serving self and to instantly have available a practiced, timely expertise at putting others first. When ministry of word or deed doesn't begin to play out like it did in our heads, when it doesn't begin to pay off like we remember the pursuit of worldly goals did, we want to give up. Thus, Paul pre-applies patience with self before we close his letter.
The unlikely tandem of Gloria Steinem and Timothy Keller pair up to help us realistically see ourselves as imperfect instruments of slowly maturing ministry. Steinem coaches through the Abigail Jones profile "Sense of a Woman" in the March 9, 2018 issue of the New Yorker, "Don't worry about shoulds," she insists. "Get up in the morning and do what you can."
She may not have a full Gospel view of the ways in which our "can" can change by the grace of God, but Keller does, and he is forthright in showing us the alternative. If the works of love we undertake we undertake for self-fulfillment and self-realization, he cautions in Every Good Endeavor, we are slowly crushed in the process.
And that crushing of condemnation, that sense that love isn't worth the effort begins even before what we intend as love leaves our mouths or escapes our fingertips. Once it does, even more patience is required. For, compounds of Charles Spurgeon in his math of the flesh in Morning and Evening, we are ready to turn our own ounces of goodness into pounds. That is, because our efforts required a change in our nature of which we are acutely aware, we dramatically overcompensate with our sense of how much they will be appreciated by the outside world.
Without patience broadly applied there also, those to whom we have been placed to minister become one-dimensional props in our play of under appreciation. We become like the first year cadets in West Point professor Elizabeth Samet's memoir Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature through Peace and War at West Point. "Surrendering a great deal," she writes of her charges and may well be writing of newbies in some Christian virtues, "plebes cultivate a compensatory aura of martyrdom."
Patience is the heart's ointment, however, to tamp down the impact of the infection of pride. When others don't appreciate the hot struggle we have gone through to be just a little west selfish, patience reminds us that Christ is coming, and His reward is with Him.
Patience reminds us, in the interim like little oases before we finally reach the end of the desert altogether, that we will, by God's grace, get SOME intermittent affirmation in community. Waiting for it, and content without it because Jesus is our consolation, feeling our love called love and sometimes returned, is all the sweeter.
My wife and I got to attend a wedding over the weekend. To no one's surprise, 1 Corinthians 13 was also in attendance. This chapter of Paul's letter to the train-wrecked church at Corinth in the Bible is trotted out as a description of what love looks like at its freshest and most ready to inspire both optimism and disillusionment.
Interesting, then, that Paul's first descriptor of love, or charity in the King James Version, is that it is patient. Interesting that this descriptor also comes up prominently in the home version of the ministry game which Paul modestly mails to Timothy as he equips his young disciple with closing words to battle for the church at Ephesus. If love is the ideal, the lofty, the Other Than The World, why might we need patience so quickly on its heels, which is where it follows in 1 Timothy 6:11?
We need patience as an unusually attentive handmaiden on love because love, practiced precious little in a selfish world, nevertheless comes loaded with soaring expectations. We have no sooner plugged our ears, momentarily, to the world's offers of material satisfaction or pride in our wisdom, no sooner tottered through the very beginnings of righteousness, it's humbling comparisons to godliness, the uplifting gust of faith which keeps us going, than we expect to practice love perfectly.
Before patience applies the check of realism to our vain imaginations, we anticipate that in one instance our words will be offputtingly bitter, and in the next exceptionally sweet. In what our deeds accomplish, we expect to go from decades of serving self and to instantly have available a practiced, timely expertise at putting others first. When ministry of word or deed doesn't begin to play out like it did in our heads, when it doesn't begin to pay off like we remember the pursuit of worldly goals did, we want to give up. Thus, Paul pre-applies patience with self before we close his letter.
The unlikely tandem of Gloria Steinem and Timothy Keller pair up to help us realistically see ourselves as imperfect instruments of slowly maturing ministry. Steinem coaches through the Abigail Jones profile "Sense of a Woman" in the March 9, 2018 issue of the New Yorker, "Don't worry about shoulds," she insists. "Get up in the morning and do what you can."
She may not have a full Gospel view of the ways in which our "can" can change by the grace of God, but Keller does, and he is forthright in showing us the alternative. If the works of love we undertake we undertake for self-fulfillment and self-realization, he cautions in Every Good Endeavor, we are slowly crushed in the process.
And that crushing of condemnation, that sense that love isn't worth the effort begins even before what we intend as love leaves our mouths or escapes our fingertips. Once it does, even more patience is required. For, compounds of Charles Spurgeon in his math of the flesh in Morning and Evening, we are ready to turn our own ounces of goodness into pounds. That is, because our efforts required a change in our nature of which we are acutely aware, we dramatically overcompensate with our sense of how much they will be appreciated by the outside world.
Without patience broadly applied there also, those to whom we have been placed to minister become one-dimensional props in our play of under appreciation. We become like the first year cadets in West Point professor Elizabeth Samet's memoir Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature through Peace and War at West Point. "Surrendering a great deal," she writes of her charges and may well be writing of newbies in some Christian virtues, "plebes cultivate a compensatory aura of martyrdom."
Patience is the heart's ointment, however, to tamp down the impact of the infection of pride. When others don't appreciate the hot struggle we have gone through to be just a little west selfish, patience reminds us that Christ is coming, and His reward is with Him.
Patience reminds us, in the interim like little oases before we finally reach the end of the desert altogether, that we will, by God's grace, get SOME intermittent affirmation in community. Waiting for it, and content without it because Jesus is our consolation, feeling our love called love and sometimes returned, is all the sweeter.
Comments
Post a Comment