Bearing With One Another
August 14
Bearing With One Another
Matthew (Tolu) Olowoyeye
Founder · The Berean
Ephesians 4:2
with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love.
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Paul gives patience its most practical and demanding form: bearing with one another in love. This is patience worked out not in the abstract but in the friction of real relationships, with the people whose habits irritate us, whose weaknesses wear on us, whose personalities rub against ours. "Bearing with" is honest language; it admits that others can be hard to bear, and calls us to bear with them anyway, in love, rather than giving up on them or grinding them down.
Notice the company patience keeps in this verse: "lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering." Impatience usually has pride underneath it, a quiet sense that others should be as quick, as capable, as right as we imagine ourselves to be. Lowliness pulls that root. The humble person, aware of how much they themselves need to be borne with, finds it far easier to bear with others. Patience is not mainly a technique for managing irritation; it is the natural fruit of a lowly heart that remembers its own faults.
Someone will need to be borne with today, and so will you. Bear with them in love.
Take Into The Day
Identify the person whose ways most test your patience, and resolve today to bear with them in love rather than grinding them down or giving up. Let humility about your own faults soften your patience toward theirs.
Prayer
Lord, give me grace to bear with others in love, the very ones whose ways wear on me. Pull up the pride beneath my impatience, and make me lowly, remembering how much I too must be borne with. Make me patient and gentle today. Amen.
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