Patience is based on assurance that the promises of God are sure and reliable. ‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on’, assures us that whatever we face in this life, we will lose no part of the good things that God has kept in store for us. He can turn man’s greatest disaster and loss into the greatest gain. Death is our great enemy and before we come to Christ for salvation, we spend our whole lives in the fear of death. But for the believer Christ has transformed this loss into great gain. He has personally vanquished death and broken its bonds. Having cornered death into binding him, the strong man, he has burst those bonds for himself and for us. Death has taken on more than it could cope with in trying to hold him in its power. So now he promises us that life shall follow death. For us, death is the entrance into heaven, into eternal life. By faith we must banish the fear of death if it tries to creep back. There is a natural fear of dying present in our hearts, but faith in the promises of God is more than enough to meet and subdue this. Each one is given a shield which is able to keep him from the fear of death. In a sense the whole of life is a preparation for death and the Christian wisely thinks of death often. We must not consider it in isolation from our Lord’s victory, for then its dreadful terrors will overwhelm us, but we allow it to teach us what is the only real source of comfort to our souls, the unbreakable promise of God.
Knowing this we are able to face the worst that the world is able to do to us. This promise is proof against persecution and loss for the sake of Christ. It can even arm us for the greatest cost that we can pay, for it can make us able to follow him through death itself. The martyrs had this assurance, that though the world could take their lives from them, it could not take their eternal inheritance.
Biblical patience is closely related to faith. It is faith that is able to see the things that we do not yet have and which we wait for. Those are the things that we receive from God at the end of this life as our heavenly reward. Of course, although this patience is greater than the patience of the unbeliever, it certainly includes patience in the day-to-day affairs of this life, nit it has a far stronger incentive to be patient even in minor matters. Because he can wait for the great things at the end of life, he can certainly wait for the small things of this life.
Patience is needed because God has caused his people to make a choice between the things which are seen and the things which are promised, which are not yet seen. The things which are unseen are obtained in righteousness, but the things which men take for themselves now, are obtained in unrighteousness. Our treasure is not on earth but in heaven. We wait for our best things to come later, while the worldling wants all his best things now, as Bunyan so graphically states in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Faith makes a calculation which convinces us that our heavenly treasure is worth waiting for. It knows that we cannot have both worlds, so a choice must be made. It knows that God cannot be cheated in this matter. Christian patience is unique in that it is so heavily reliant on faith. The patience which unbelievers exercise is not a patience that must wait until after death to receive its reward. It is merely a patience that must wait for a little time in this life. Often the indication that the reward is coming is obvious. The farmer plants his seed and he waits for the grain to appear. He has seen it happen many times before and so has every reason to expect it to happen again. But the Christian has never been to heaven; he has never seen the world to come; he has never seen God face to face. He waits for things that he has tasted by the Spirit, but never yet seen.