You will suffer o!

When the Bible spoke about long suffering in Gal 5v: 22, what did we think? A typographic error?

No not at all.

Long-suffering" is exactly what it says: suffering that stretches long. It's patience with teeth, patience that has been tested and refuses to snap.

Most of us want the fruit of the Spirit without the soil it grows in. But love, joy, peace, patience... they don't fall from heaven ready-made. Long-suffering in particular is forged in the exact situations you'd rather escape: the offense you didn't deserve, the delay that makes no sense, the person who keeps testing you. God isn't asking you to suffer for its own sake. He's saying the suffering you're already in can become fruit, if you let it.

Think about it. You cannot practice long-suffering in a life with no delay, no offense, no disappointment. God does not hand you patience in a bottle. He puts you in situations that require it, and the requiring is the training.

That coworker who keeps taking credit for your work. That prayer that has not been answered in three years. That relative who wounds you every family gathering and expects you to smile through it. That season where the admission, promotion, the spouse, the child, the breakthrough, keeps tarrying. These are not accidents interrupting your walk with God. For the believer who is willing, they are the classroom.

Here is the difference between ordinary suffering and long-suffering that is fruit of the Spirit: ordinary suffering just happens to you. Long-suffering is suffering you have surrendered to God, so that instead of hardening you, it is shaping you.
Joseph suffered long. Sold by his own brothers, lied on by Potiphar's wife, forgotten in a prison cell by a man he had helped. Years of it. But he came out able to say to the very brothers who betrayed him, "You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good" (Genesis 50:20). That sentence was not written by a man who avoided suffering. It was written by a man who suffered long enough to let God finish the work.
Job suffered long. Paul suffered long, and still called his afflictions "light" and "for a moment" when weighed against glory (2 Corinthians 4:17). Not because the suffering was small, but because he had let it produce something in him that outweighed the pain.

So Yes, You Will Suffer O!

But let it be suffering that is going somewhere. Not suffering that just wears you down and leaves you bitter, but suffering that is being converted, day by day, into patience, into character, into fruit that stays on the tree long after the season that produced it is forgotten.

The next time life stretches you longer than you expected, remember: it is not a typographic error. It is an invitation to grow the one fruit that cannot be faked, and cannot be rushed.

Stay in the process. The fruit is worth it.


© Favour Obaseki.