Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadWilliam Burkitt Notes and Observations - James 1:4 - 1:4
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
That is, "Let your patience and perseverance under sufferings resolutely continue and hold out to the end;" this the apostle urges, because some persons bore out the first brunt and onset of persecution, but being exercised with diversity and length of trials, they fainted. Now, as if the apostle had said, "If we will be complete Christians, our patience must run parallel with our sufferings: thus shall we be perfect, not with an absolute perfection, but with a perfection of duration and perseverance."
Learn, that afflictions sanctified by God do tend exceedingly, not only to the increasing, but perfecting of a Christian's patience.
Quest. But when has patience its perfect work, making the Christian perfect and entire?
Ans. When there is a strong faith, as the foundation of that patience;
when there is a Christian fortitude and courage, enabling us to sustain trials; when there is an exact knowlege of our duty to bear afflictions with a meek and quiet spirit, with a forbearing and forgiving spirit, yea, with a praying spirit, which includes the height of charity, under the highest provocations; in a word,
when there is found with us an entire trust and dependency upon God's power and promise, and a cheerful submission, and quiet resignation of our wills his most holy, wise, and righteous will, in and under the sharpest trials and heaviest afflictions that can befall us; then has patience had its perfect work, and the suffering Christian, in a gospel qualified sense, may be said to be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.