Introduction to The Pursuit of Patience
An Introduction to the Introduction
Over the past couple of months, patience, or more honestly, my lack of it, has been sitting with me in a way I couldn’t ignore. It kept showing up in my prayers, in my reading, in my self-examination, and in the ordinary frustrations of daily life in ways that made it clear this was something I needed to think through more carefully and more biblically. So I decided to do what I often do when something is pressing on my heart: I started writing.
What began as a personal reflection has grown into something I hope will be useful to others who are in the same fight. Over the next week or two, I’m setting aside some of the other things I’ve been working on to focus on this, striking while the iron is hot, as they say. What follows is a devotional Bible study in eight sessions called The Pursuit of Patience, and this is its introduction. I’m sharing it as I work through it, which feels fitting for a study that is less about having answers and more about being honest about the questions. I hope it meets you where you are.
The Hard Truth Behind Impatience
There’s a moment that happens with some regularity in my life. I’m behind the wheel of my car, going somewhere I need to be, and something happens. A driver cuts me off. Traffic slows to a crawl for no discernible reason. A light turns red at precisely the wrong moment. And something rises up inside of me that I would prefer not to name, something that, if I’m being honest, doesn’t look much like the fruit of the Spirit.
I’ve made something of a running joke about this with friends and family over the years. I am, I tell them, a fairly patient person, except when I’m driving. They laugh. I laugh. And then I go home and think about it, because the truth underneath the joke isn’t quite as amusing as the joke itself.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand: the car is not my problem. The car is my mirror.
The Hard Truth Behind Impatience
I’ve been a pastor for over three decades. I’ve sat with people in their darkest hours, at hospital bedsides, in counseling rooms, across kitchen tables, and I’ve seen what impatience costs. I’ve watched spouses walk away from marriages because reconciliation was taking too long. I’ve seen people abandon their faith because God didn’t answer on their schedule. I’ve observed the slow erosion of character in people who never learned to wait… on God, on others, on themselves.
And I’ve seen the same tendencies, in varying degrees, in the man I see in the mirror every morning.
I want to be clear about something before we go any further. I’m not writing this study because I have conquered impatience and want to show you how it’s done. I’m writing it because I’m in the middle of the fight, and I suspect many of you are too. I’m writing it because a season of honest self-examination recently brought me face to face with how much ground I still have to cover in this particular area of my spiritual life. And I am writing it because I believe that the best guides are not those who have reached the destination, but those who know the road well enough to walk it with you.
This is, in every sense, the confession of a fellow traveler.
What Patience Actually Is, and What It Isn’t
Patience is part of the nine-fold fruit of the Spirit listed by the Apostle Paul in Galatians 5:22–23. It isn’t a personality type. It isn’t a temperamental advantage that some people are simply born with. It’s a fruit, which means it grows. It’s cultivated. It’s produced in us by the Holy Spirit over time, through the ordinary and extraordinary circumstances of a life lived in faithful pursuit of Jesus Christ. And like most fruit worth having, it doesn’t ripen quickly.
What I’ve discovered, both in my own life and in decades of walking alongside others, is that impatience is rarely just impatience. Pull on that thread and you find other issues attached to it. Pride. Entitlement. Anger. A quiet but persistent insistence that life ought to organize itself around our preferences and our timetable. Impatience, it turns out, is often a window into deeper things, into what we truly believe about God, about ourselves, and about who is actually in charge of our days.
Impatience Lives Everywhere
That’s what this study is about. We’re going to look at patience from multiple angles, not because the topic is complicated, but because impatience shows up in so many different parts of our lives. It lives in our cars and in our marriages. It lives in our prayer closets and in our workplaces. It lives in the long seasons of suffering when God seems silent, and it lives in the five-minute wait at the checkout line when we’re already running late.
Sinclair Ferguson once made an observation that has stayed with me. He noted that a person who claims to be patient but has never been genuinely tested has not yet discovered whether they are patient at all, only that they haven’t yet met their test. Real patience, he argued, only reveals itself under real pressure. Which means that the daily friction of ordinary life, the difficult people, the unanswered prayers, the slow progress, the plans that fall apart, isn’t an interruption to our formation. It is our formation.
Eugene Peterson called the Christian life “a long obedience in the same direction.” There’s no better short description of patience as a spiritual discipline. It isn’t a single heroic act. It’s the accumulated faithfulness of a thousand ordinary moments… the choice, made again and again, to trust God’s timing over our own, to bear with others as Christ has borne with us, and to keep walking the road even when the destination feels impossibly far away.
My Story
I want to tell you briefly where this journey began for me, because I think it may resonate with where it begins for many of us.
Not long ago, I found myself doing what I might describe as a spiritual inventory, a season of honest reflection on the condition of my soul. Not a crisis, exactly, but a reckoning. The kind of quiet but searching self-examination that every serious Christian needs to undertake from time to time. I was asking myself some uncomfortable questions about my character, my habits, and the gap between what I believe and how I actually live.
Patience kept coming up.
The Slower, More Hidden Places
Not just the car, though the car is a faithful and reliable test. But patience in the slower, more hidden places. Patience with the pace of my own spiritual growth, which so often feels invisible and inadequate. Patience with my physical health, which requires a long obedience of its own, the kind of discipline that delivers no immediate returns and demands that you trust a process that is maddeningly gradual. Patience in prayer, when the silence stretches long and the answers do not come. Patience with people I love deeply but do not always find easy. Patience with God himself, when his timing and my preferences aren’t even in the same area code.
What struck me most in that season of reflection wasn’t simply that I struggle with impatience, I already knew that. What struck me was how much of my impatience is rooted in expectations I never examined. I had been assuming that things would go a certain way, that progress would arrive on a certain schedule, that God would work within certain windows of time that I had decided were reasonable, and I had never stopped to ask whether any of those assumptions were actually grounded in Scripture, in wisdom, or in anything more solid than my own preferences.
That realization didn’t fix anything overnight. But it opened a door. And this study is, in part, my attempt to walk through that door more deliberately, with you, and with the help of God’s Word.
How This Study Works
The Pursuit of Patience is organized into eight sessions, each one exploring a different dimension of patience and impatience. We begin with expectations, because that’s where most of our impatience is born. We then move through humility and entitlement, anger, wisdom, and our relationships with other people. In the second half of the study, we turn to the deeper and slower arenas: the spiritual life, the disciplines of gratitude and prayer, and finally trust, which is where everything ultimately lands. You cannot sustain a long obedience without it.
The sessions are arranged to build on one another, so reading them in order will serve you well. But each one also stands alone, so if a particular topic is where you most need to begin, begin there. The Word of God isn’t particular about sequence on this issue. It meets us where we are.
What to Expect in Each Session
Each session is structured the same way, and it’s worth knowing what to expect before you begin.
The Opening Reflection sets the table. It names the theme of that session honestly and personally, not to dwell on the struggle, but to make sure we’re all standing in the same room before we open the Scriptures together. You may recognize yourself in it. That’s the intention.
The Teaching is the heart of each session. This is where we open the Word and let it do its work. We’ll look carefully at what Scripture actually says about patience, not just the familiar verses, but the fuller, richer picture that emerges when we read the Bible as a whole. We’ll also draw from the wisdom of men and women who have walked this road before us – pastors, theologians, and saints whose words have stood the test of time precisely because they were grounded in truth. The teaching is designed to be substantive without being academic, practical without being shallow, and honest about the difficulty of the road without losing sight of the beauty of the destination.
The twelve Study and Reflection Questions are designed to move you from the text into your life. Each question begins in Scripture, with a specific passage to read and consider, and then invites you to bring that text into conversation with your own experience, your own habits, your own relationships, and your own walk with God. These aren’t trick questions, and there are no wrong answers, only honest ones and dishonest ones. I would encourage you to resist the temptation to answer them quickly. Sit with them. Let them ask you something you might prefer not to be asked.
If you’re working through this material in a small group, these questions are designed to generate real conversation, the kind that happens when a group of people trust each other enough to tell the truth. If you’re working through it alone, I would encourage you to write your answers down. There’s something about putting words on a page that has a way of clarifying what we actually think and exposing what we would rather not admit.
The three Walking Points close the study portion of each session with something concrete. It isn’t enough to understand patience better, we must practice it. These walking points are specific, doable, and grounded in the lesson’s theme. They aren’t performance metrics or spiritual report cards. They’re invitations to take a single faithful step in a particular direction. Choose one. Try it for a week. See what happens.
The Closing Prayer is exactly what it sounds like. It’s written in the first-person plural – we rather than I – because this is a journey we’re taking together, and because the posture of corporate prayer reminds us that we aren’t alone in this struggle. Pray it at the end of your study time. Pray it again in the middle of a hard week. Let the words become your own.
The Goal Is Christlikeness
The goal of this study is not to make you a more patient person in the way that a self-help book might promise to make you more productive or more organized. The goal is something far more significant and far more demanding than that. The goal is Christlikeness.
Jesus Christ is the most perfectly patient person who has ever lived. He bore with his disciples’ misunderstanding and failure for three years without losing his commitment to them. He endured the cross, the most unjust and agonizing of all possible deaths, with a trust in his Father’s timing so complete that it became the hinge on which all of human history turns. And he now intercedes for us at the right hand of the Father with a patience toward our weakness and our wandering that is, if we let ourselves think about it clearly, staggering.
We aren’t pursuing patience for its own sake. We’re pursuing it because it’s one of the clearest marks of a life being transformed into the image of Christ, by the power of his Spirit, for the glory of our Father in Heaven. That’s the goal. Everything else in this study is in service of that.
So let’s begin, not as people who have arrived, but as people who’ve decided, by God’s grace, to keep walking.
Soli Deo Gloria,
Dale Tedder
Want more resources like this that aren’t shared here?
Be sure to subscribe to my free Substack newsletter at daletedder.substack.com so you don’t miss new devotions, Bible studies, and tools to help you walk faithfully with Christ, that might not appear here.
If this devotion was meaningful to you, please consider liking, sharing, or forwarding it to others who would be encouraged.
