The Perfect Work of Patience.
I. We can all attain to a certain amount of proficiency at most things we attempt; but there are few who have patience to go on to perfection. In the lives of almost every one there has been at some time an attempt at welldoing. It may have been as the morning cloud, and as the dew that goeth early away, but there was at least a desire to do right, and good resolutions were formed. What was wanted? Staying power. "The gift of continuance," that is what so many of us want. If genius may be described as long patience or the art of taking pains, even so those who have done for a time the will of God have need of patience that they may receive the blessings promised to them who know how to wait. Saints are those who let patience have its perfect work, who by patient continuance in welldoing seek eternal life.
II. As a rule, the time required for the production of an effect measures the value of that effect. The things that can be developed quickly are of less value than those which require longer time. You can weed a garden or build a house in a much shorter time than you can educate a mind or build up a soul. The training of our reasoning faculties requires a much longer time than the training of our hands. And moral qualities, being higher than intellectual, make an even greater demand upon the patience of their cultivator.
III. Let us remember where it is that we are to get patience in the presence of temptations and sorrows. We must go in prayer, as our Master did in the garden of Gethsemane, to the source of all strength. If He would not go to His trial unprepared, it certainly is not safe for us to do so. By a stroke from the sword the warrior was knighted, small matter if the monarch's hand was heavy. Even so God gives His servants blows of trial when He desires to advance them to a higher stage of spiritual life. Jacobs become prevailing princes, but not until they have wrestled with temptations and prevailed.
E. J. Hardy, Faint yet Pursuing,p. 47.
I. Her perfect work patience ever has. Have you ever thought how this is exemplified both in the Divine guidance of the world and in the Divine care under which we all pass in the earliest years of our life? Our young life was hid with God. Our earliest years were Divinely guided. The Lord's protecting care encircled us. He watched over the throbbings of that new life which were the commencement of an immortality of existence. He in every way encircles the young life with Divine care, with a care which is inexpressibly loving and inexpressibly patient. And when the years of infancy have passed by, it may be said of the prattling, observant, eager-eyed, quick-eared little one that patience has done her perfect work.
II. All through the Christian centuries has patience been slowly doing her perfect work. Humanity has been slowly advancing under Divine guidance. Our attitude towards the past should be one of deepest reverence. We should look upon the whole field of past history as the sacred ground of humanity. God's dealings with our forefathers ought to have an undying interest for us. In our inquiries into past history, we should be animated by a desire to discern the traces of God's patience doing her perfect work. We find in reading the life of St. Bernard that he, though ofttimes passing through the midst of the grandest scenery of Europe, though he often passed by the side of that glorious water the lake of Geneva, has left no record of being at all influenced by what strikes the traveller now as being a succession of scenes of marvellous beauty. The Divine Inspirer of humanity with all that is good and noble was revealing to His servant Bernard truths upon which his thought-laden mind pondered as he moved through the heavenly beauty with which the earth is radiant to us. This beauty is discerned by us because God has opened our eyes to see it. This surely is an exemplification in the Divine education of the world of patience having her perfect work.
H. N. Grimley, Tremadoc Sermons,p. 254.
References: James 1:5. J. Keble, Sermons from Advent to Christmas Eve,p. 321; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xiii., No. 735; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. vi., p. 92.James 1:5-7. T. Stephenson, Christian World Pulpit,vol. iv., p. 81.James 1:6. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iii., p. 219. James 1:6; James 1:7. Church of England Pulpit,vol. vi., p. 41.James 1:9; James 1:10. Homilist,2nd series, vol. ii., p. 150.