“…he who endures until the end shall be saved” (Matthew 10:22, KJV). “We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first” (Hebrews 3:14, NIV).
Any sound teaching about faith must also include the reality that faith is not enough. What?!? I didn’t stutter. In fact, often when believers feel like their faith has failed in something they were believing God for it wasn’t their faith at all. The culprit was a lack of patience or perseverance. The person who endures to the end, perseveres, practices endurance, won’t quit or give up, who goes all the way shall be saved or tap into God’s various dimensions of soundness.
Patience is word-based confidence that God will come through if we do not faint or give up. It is steadfastness under provocation to quit or give up. Patience means to be consistently constant while we rest in faith for the “end of our faith” (the realization of what we are believing). If we are not excited, expectant, and at rest in our hearts, we have not added patience to our faith and most likely we will fail to see the manifestation.
Galatians 6:9 exhorts us to “not be weary in well doing, for we shall reap if we faint not.” If we are truly in faith we will be tempted to get weary. Weariness in the fight of faith does not make you a freak or a second class faith person. Due season is always later than our flesh wants it to be. Faith will get results if we don’t quit and the key to not quitting is developing the force of patience to support our faith. Most people do well for a while believing God but then they get tired, weary, frustrated, confused and then they quit. We need to realize that if we believe strongly for a few months and then quit we will get the same results as if we did not believe God at all. When our patience runs out, our faith runs out.
Receiving from God requires believing God and his Word but it also requires that we add patience to our faith. The Scripture teaches that we receive the promises through faith and patience (Hebrews 6:12). The force of patience is standard equipment that is required for the believer to receive by faith. Patience is an anointing or force of the born again spirit that brings that stability to our faith during a period of faith-filled waiting. The passenger jet is equipped with a horizontal tail stabilizer that keeps the plane flying straight and prevents the plane from pitching up or down (that’s the job of the elevator found on the back of the stabilizer assembly). Patience can be described as a force of the spirit that stabilizes our faith while we are waiting for the manifestation. Without our stabilizer we’ll never get to our ultimate destination.
The Scripture warns us not to throw down our confidence but to persevere so that we can receive the promise (Hebrews 10:35-39). The key to not shrinking back on our faith is patience. Many times the believer will allow the passing of time beyond some artificial faith deadline (that God did not give you) to discourage them from continuing to press in and believe God. When the hour of our expectation passes we need to remember that the Word did not suddenly change. Heaven and earth will pass away but his Word will not pass away (Matthew 24:35). In fact, the key to maintaining our faith during challenging and tough times is to fix our eyes on Jesus (and Jesus and the Word are one), the author and finisher of our faith, and not on the clock, the challenges, the problems, or the circumstances (Hebrews 12:1-3). As we focus our attention on the Word like a laser beam we become oblivious to the passing of time and more conscious of the reality of God and his promises to our hearts. Remember that there is a cloud of witnesses pulling for you and they have already proven that if we will add patience to our faith we will receive the promises.
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