RUN WITH PATIENCE

HH Sir Godfrey Gregg D.Div

“Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,” (Hebrews 12:1).

O run with patience is a very difficult thing. Running is apt to suggest the absence of patience, the eagerness to reach the goal. We commonly associate patience with lying down. We think of it as the angel that guards the couch of the invalid. Yet, I do not think the invalid’s patience the hardest to achieve.

There is patience which I believe to be harder–the patience that can run. To lie down in the time of grief, to be quiet under the stroke of adverse fortune, implies a great strength; but I know of something that implies a strength greater still: It is the power to work under a stroke; to have a great weight at your heart and still to run; to have a deep anguish in your spirit and still perform the daily task. It is a Christlike thing!

Many of us would nurse our grief without crying if we were allowed to nurse it. The hard thing is that most of us are called to exercise our patience, not in bed, but in the street. We are called to bury our sorrows, not in lethargic quiescence, but in active service–in the exchange, in the workshop, in the hour of social intercourse, in the contribution to another’s the joy. There is no burial of sorrow so difficult as that; it is the “running with patience.”

This was Thy patience, O Son of man! It was at once waiting and a running–waiting for the goal, and a doing of the lesser work meantime. I see Thee at Cana turning the water into wine lest the marriage feast should be clouded. I see Thee in the desert feeding a multitude with bread just to relieve a temporary want. All, all the time, Thou were bearing mighty grief, unshared, unspoken. Men ask for a rainbow in the cloud, but I would ask more from Thee. I would be, in my cloud, myself a rainbow–a minister to others’ joy. My patience will be perfect when it can work in the vineyard.

So today I am asking you to exercise that same patience that our Lord did when He was here on earth among men. It is a patience that we will have to exercise in order to run the race and be victorious. Oh, brethren this race is not for the swift, but for those with endurance to reach the very end of the journey.