'Patience and longsuffering with joyfulness' seems at first but a poor
result of such a force, but it comes from a heart that was under no
illusions as to the facts of human life, and it finds a response in us
all. It may be difficult to discriminate 'patience' from
'longsuffering,' but the general notion here is that one of the highest
uses for which divine strength is given to us, is to make us able to
meet the antagonism of evil without its shaking our souls. He who
patiently endures without despondency or the desire to 'recompense evil
for evil,' and to whom by faith even 'the night is light about him,' is
far on the way to perfection. God is always near us, but never nearer
than when our hearts are heavy and our way rough and dark. Our sorrows
make rents through which His strength flows. We can see more of heaven
when the leaves are off the trees. It is a law of the Divine dealings
that His strength is 'made perfect in weakness.' God leads us in to a
darkened room to show us His wonders.
That strength is to be manifested by us in 'patience and longsuffering,'
both of which are to have blended with them a real though apparently
antagonistic joy. True and profound grief is not opposed to such
patience, but the excess of it, the hopeless and hysterical outbursts
certainly are. We are all like the figures in some old Greek temples
which stand upright with their burdens on their heads. God's strength is
given that we may bear ours calmly, and upright like these fair forms
that hold up the heavy architecture as if it were a feather, or like
women with water-jars on their heads, which only make their carriage
more graceful and their step more firm.
How different the patience which God gives by His own imparted strength,
from the sullen submission or hysterical abandonment to sorrow, or the
angry rebellion characterising Godless grief! Many of us think that we
can get on very well in prosperity and fine weather without Him. We had
better ask ourselves what we are going to do when the storm comes, which
comes to all some time or other.
The word here rendered 'patience' is more properly 'perseverance.' It is
not merely a passive but an active virtue. We do not receive that great
gift of divine strength to bear only, but also to work, and such work is
one of the best ways of bearing and one of the best helps to doing so.
So in our sorrows and trials let us feel that God's strength is not all
given us to be expended in our own consolation, but also to be used in
our plain duties. These remain as imperative though our hearts are
beating like hammers, and there is no more unwise and cowardly surrender
to trouble than to fling away our tools and fold our hands idly on our
laps.
But Paul lays a harder duty on us even in promising a great gift to us,
when he puts before us an ideal of joy mingling with patience and
longsuffering. The command would be an impossible one if there were not
the assurance that we should be 'strengthened with all might.' We
plainly need an infusion of diviner strength than our own, if that
strange marriage of joy and sorrow should take place, and they should at
once occupy our hearts. Yet if His strength be ours we shall be strong
to submit and acquiesce, strong to look deep enough to see His will as
the foundation of all and as ever busy for our good, strong to hope,
strong to discern the love at work, strong to trust the Father even when
He chastens. And all this will make it possible to have the paradox
practically realised in our own experience, 'As sorrowful yet always
rejoicing.' One has seen potassium burning underwater. Our joy may burn
under waves of sorrow. Let us bring our weakness to Jesus Christ and
grasp Him as did the sinking Peter. He will breathe His own grace into
us, and speak to our feeble and perchance sorrowful hearts, as He had
done long before Paul's words to the Colossians, 'My grace is sufficient
for thee, and my strength is made perfect in weakness.'