Consider how patience comes, and especially how it arises from a study of the Scriptures, and what the nature of it is.
I. First, patience is a distinctly human quality, for it is a state of waiting, expecting, looking out, and thus implies periods and distinctions of time. Patience has no place in eternity. As man's love, and pity, and justice, and truth, and holiness, and wisdom are mere reflections of the corresponding attributes in God, so patience also can only find its perfect archetype in Him. How can we reconcile the facts that God is almighty and yet declines to act; that He is perfectly just, yet leaves His justice still unsatisfied? By what other attribute can we describe Him who seems to contradict Himself but by the attribute of patience? This thought reconciles the difficulty.
II. Notice illustrations of God's patience given in Holy Scripture. (1) Conceive the love of the Almighty manifesting itself in creation. Weigh well the sense of the words, "God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good," and then the disappointment and overthrow of this plan of infinite benevolence, the ordainment of new plans for the punishment of sin, with mercy for the mitigation of pain, for the ultimate recovery of man's first estate. What a state of waiting, expecting, looking out, is here! (2) Again, imagine the patience which waited from the hour of the first promise of the Saviour, made before the gates of Paradise were shut, until those "last days" when the Eternal Father "spoke unto us by His Son." (3) Revelation gives us one more signal instance of the patience of the Eternal God: His "suffering the manners" of the Christian world for these eighteen hundred years, during which Christ has waited for the gathering in of His elect.
III. It is by looking into the face of this patience of God that we can become like-minded with Him. Not only will it make us hate our sins and love Him more, but we shall have grace to be patient also. But indifference is not patience. The patient soul is that which feels acutely, but waits on, expecting the perfect end. The suspense before enjoyment is patience. The bride waits patiently for the bridegroom's voice, because she has faith and love; she is sure that he is coming. So does the soul look out in patience for that which faith and love anticipate in Christ.
C. W. Furse, Richmond Sermons,p. 1.
References: Psalms 7:12. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. ii., No. 106; F. E. Paget, Sermons for Special Occasions,p. 247.