Day #31 of my Big Thanksgiving Challenge. Excerpted from my 100 Days of Thanksgiving Devotional-Journal which you can order when you CLICK HERE.
Even after years of trying to faithfully follow Jesus, I still fall terribly far short when it comes to patience. My lack of patience makes me even more in awe of God’s phenomenal patience with humanity. In the King James version of the Bible, patience is sometimes referred to as “longsuffering”. This makes so much sense to me because there is a suffering in patiently waiting for something or someone.
In God’s case, He could and should have given up on humanity long, long ago. But in His exceeding love for us, He not only sent His only Son Jesus to the cross to die to pay our sin penalty and to be raised from the dead, but He continues to this very day to give this world more time to repent and turn to Jesus Christ as Lord. This world is running out of time for sure, but as of yet God is still amazingly longsuffering. I believe we as humans are quick to be thankful for our physical possessions, but let us not forget to give God our Thanksgiving for His astonishingly beautiful and powerful attributes. Including His longsuffering.
In addition to being thankful to God for His unsurpassable longsuffering with all of humanity, let us ever be thankful for His immeasurable patience with each of His children as we are continually in need of more of His love, grace, kindness, mercy, help, etc. We don’t deserve any of His patience, do we? But oh, He is so lovingly gloriously mercifully longsuffering!
“The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” 2 Peter 3:9 KJV