Therefore do not cast away your confidence, which has great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise (Hebrews 10:35-36).
Now the just shall live by faith; But if anyone draws back, My soul has no pleasure in him (Hebrews 10:38).
Endurance or patience is an important ingredient of faith. It’s faith and patience that inherits the promises. The Greek word for endurance is hupomeno and it means to remain when under pressure. It’s the ability to keep your chin up when things aren’t going well. It’s the ability to remain joyful and expectant when it looks as though nothing you believe is coming to pass. It’s the ability to remain unmoved and unshaken by circumstances.
The very nature of what faith is makes patience so necessary in the faith fight. Faith is for what you don’t have in the physical realm yet. Faith takes the place of what God has promised you until it arrives in the physical and you can see it. Faith is the substitute for the thing God has promised you until you can physically see or feel it.
The Word promises healing, so you have prayed and exercised your faith. The pain increases and the symptoms worsen. Patience enables you to stand your ground in the tough times while the pain may even increase. Patience or endurance enables you to look away from the symptoms and look at the promise of God, knowing that God is faithful to fulfill His Word.
The faith life is very challenging to the flesh! So many think that walking by faith means you receive instantly, but that is just not true! Abraham waited 25 years for the child of promise to come! And his patience enabled him to keep going strong when the impossibility of what he believed weighed on him.
Faith and patience are the twins of success! Patience keeps you from letting go of your faith! We believed God for years for this new building we have been in for 8 years! It seemed that obstacles manifested every hour to keep it from happening. We had prayed as a congregation, and we were believing that we received the answer to our prayer, which was the manifestation of a bigger piece of property for our future growth.
And We have had to exercise great patience during the process of getting permits on a new children’s ministry building. It took 3 years just to get the permits! At times I had a barrage of thoughts that would come to me saying that we would never get the building permits and the building would not happen. But, here we are in the process of building right now! Faith and patience work together to bring to pass God’s will!
At times I would get so tired of resisting the circumstances over the years. They just kept compounding! But it was the hupomeno, the ability to keep on going when the chips are down, that refused to let me quit. I gritted my teeth and praised God for honoring His Word!
Don’t quit if you’re in a faith battle. Rest in the promises of God. He is faithful that promised. He watches over His Word to make it good. Heaven and earth may pass away, but His Word never will! Allow patience to undergird your faith today. Keep your eyes on God’s promises and not the unmoving circumstance. You will receive if you just don’t quit!