1 Mar 2024
When I reached the age of 70, I thought about what the Bible said about most individuals reaching the age of 3 scores and 10 before expiring. I knew then that I was living on “borrowed time”, and I felt the burden to do what the Lord desired of me diligently before He called me home.
This year, I reach the age of 75; and the sense of urgency becomes more intense, as I realise I have little time to share the goodness of God and what He has been teaching me.
Over these 75 years, the Lord, in His grace, brought me through many situations and circumstances with important lessons accompanying, which will take me a great deal of time to share.
But allow me to share one important lesson that helps me through all these situations as a follower of the Lord Jesus.
This has to do with endurance – both passive (patience) and active (perseverance). Perhaps this can be summed up as “Be right and persist” or “Be right and endure”.
Patience, the passive mode of endurance, whereby pain, grief, suffering, and disappointment are handled without inner collapse and crumbling is a major theme in the Bible. But this is not a natural endowment – I must say that I struggle a great deal to allow the Spirit of God to teach me this ‘virtue’, and I am still struggling. Patience is in fact a grace of character that God imparts to those whom He is transforming into the likeness of His Son, and you can imagine how difficult it must have been for one as wretched as me to imbibe this which God seeks to endow.
But what I like to share is that this is developed in situations where human speaking, it is impossible for one to do so, but for the grace and mercy of God. To love the unlovely and unloveable for Jesus’ sake, to love those who have done much harm to your life and your service for God; to rejoice even in trying situations, being sure of God’s sovereign providence, and to stay calm and collected instead of panicking or getting out of control – all these, surprisingly, can be developed only in such painful circumstances.
Patient endurance is most apparent when we stand steady under pain and pressure instead of cutting and running, or crumbling and collapsing. But hanging tough in this way is a habit that takes some learning, as one godly individual said – many of us have hardly begun to tackle it as yet.
Integral to our holiness, our maturity and Christlikeness, however, is this habit of enduring.
Over these 75 years, the Lord reminds me that if I truly desire to follow Him, to become holy and mature in Him, I need to develop this habit and to relearn and reinforce it again and again in my life. After all, the Lord Jesus did not retreat in the face of spiritual and physical opposition; He did not turn away from the cross, even in the most intense moments in the garden of Gethsemane; for the joy set before Him, He endured the cross, for you, for me, for all those who believe.
If God was willing to condescend, to become a man, born in a manger, worked as a carpenter, and be mocked, beaten, stripped naked, and be hung on a cross, reserved for the worst of criminals of the day, and still persisted until “It is finished”, not for any wrongdoing or sin on His part, but because of love for the Father and for sinners like you and me, how dare I ask for less, if I truly desire to be His disciple!
I do not know how many more years the Lord God will give me to learn this again and again, in deeper measures, but I trust that you will pray for me and for all those in their golden years, that we would never be guilty of putting the name of God to shame, and to grieve His Spirit, when He has done (and is still doing) so much (beyond our understanding) for us who deserve to be condemned and be treated as His enemies. May God use this sharing to bless you.