I have learned that if I do not write down my goals and check regularly on my progress to achieve them, it’s unlikely I will achieve them. This seems to be why the Apostle Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 13:5, “Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves!”

      Abiding in the Lord or growing in the fruit or gifts of the Spirit requires spiritual discipline and a means of measuring progress. There are biblical teachings or exhortations about most of these, and for the others we should ask our Teacher, the Lord, for wisdom about how to proceed. Let’s look at a couple examples.

      According to John 15, if we’re abiding in the Lord, we will bear fruit. Anything that is really happening can be measured, so there are ways to measure the fruit of our life. This may be subjective to some degree, but aren’t most things spiritual? We don’t need to complicate it, or get too detailed, but we should be able to measure if we’re growing. The point is to make continual growth a main purpose in our life.

      I was told by the Lord that impatience was costing me greatly, especially in ways the Lord wanted to use me that I was missing. I was missing divine connections He wanted me to make, even miracles He wanted to do through me, because I was so focused on my own agenda, which I was doing for Him but not with Him.

      I have other flaws, too, but He let me know this was the costliest in my life at this time. I asked Him to help me with it, to send the Holy Spirit to convict me of this sin whenever I let impatience direct me. I became resolute in doing all I could to work on this, because the Holy Spirit is the Helper, not the Doer. We must do our part for Him to do His part.

      I started to recognize when impatience would rise in me when standing in a line, in traffic, or in conversations with people who would practically tell me their life stories before answering my questions. Even though I became keen to recognizing these opportunities to grow in patience, and started thanking Him, I can’t say I really felt thankful. Then, one day I recognized that I really was thankful for how He was helping me correct this flaw in my character. I noticed that situations that would have typically caused me frustration weren’t doing this to me. When I started seeing the Lord in people and situations I was not seeing Him in before, I got very excited about growing more in patience.

      Now, I am a long way from being a perfectly patient person, and it seems to me that one life is not long enough to do this like I need it. However, “with the Lord a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day” (see 2 Peter 3:8), so He can do in us in one day what we may think would take a thousand years. He can speed things up, but when He’s working on our patience, He usually doesn’t want to do that. So, when I started getting impatient with my progress of growing in patience, I had a stroke that left me paralyzed on my left side. Suddenly, the patience I needed to do even the most menial tasks was multiplied.

      Maybe your theology does not allow for the Lord to do things like that to us. I don’t think He did, but He did allow it, just like He allowed the devil to afflict Job. Actually, I don’t think it was the devil that caused this stroke, but I did it to myself. I was impatient to get off a blood pressure medicine, so I just stopped taking it. When the doctors couldn’t find any cause for the stroke I had, one of them asked me if I had quit taking any prescription medicines. It turns out that a danger to just stopping that medicine was that it could cause a stroke! So, foolishness caused by my impatience to get off that prescription did it!

      When we allow impatience to direct us just to save a little time, it can cost us more time than we can imagine. However, I have grown measurably in patience through all of this, and the benefits of seeing and hearing the Lord much better are worth it many times over. But if you’re wiser than I was, you’ll disciple yourself to become patient so He doesn’t have to make you.

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