You can listen to the Sunday School teaching I did on God’s patience here:
The Patience of God : Michael Coughlin : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Here’s an excerpt from the teaching:
Lack of thoughtfulness about God’s patience is a primary reason I’m impatient. I believe it’s why you’re impatient, and why others are impatient.
As usual, it’s a heart issue. You’re not impatient because you’re late for Sunday school. You’re not impatient because somebody else did something wrong.
You’re impatient because in your heart: you’re not patient.
But if we truly contemplated God’s patience with us—if we seriously considered that the moment we first sinned He rightfully could have struck us dead and sent us to an eternity in Hell, but instead postponed that death for no reason but His own pleasure, and then miraculously saved us from that punishment while imputing His perfect righteousness to us—maybe, if we made that a meditation of our souls, we’d more strongly consider suffering injustice or injury and showing some control over ourselves and our passions in the process.
That’s what it comes down to for me. I don’t have control over my flesh, my lusts, my passions. And because they are semi-justified—since you can actually have some righteous anger when someone really does something wrong—I use that as an excuse to let my patience go. But God doesn’t use it as an excuse. That’s what I want you to understand.
If we would meditate on that, maybe we would actually desire to be like Him in this way, and we would delight in the amazing implications of observing patient people and what they teach us.
