YOU KNOW HOW it goes. Someone you love — perhaps your spouse or one of your children — is doing something to aggravate or annoy you. You know that they’re not necessarily doing it on purpose. Still, you think to yourself, How many times have we been over this? Why don’t they get it? Why aren’t they listening to me? You’re trying to be your better self, and don’t want to snap at them. So first you grit your teeth, and then you sigh and utter a silent prayer in your mind: Lord, give me patience!

And then, whatever they were doing to annoy you, they do it again.

As the saying goes, be careful what you pray for. If you pray for patience, God may give you homework. After all, it would be something of a contradiction to pray for patience and then expect an immediate transformation.

Better yet: don’t pray for patience, at least not at first. Start by praying for the humility to remember how patient God has been with you. Because that, I think, is where Paul begins with his teaching about love.

“LOVE IS PATIENT,” Paul says, “love is kind” (1 Cor 13:4, NIV). As mentioned before, those two words, “patient” and “kind” are not adjectives in the original Greek — they’re verbs. Paul isn’t describing what love is in some static sense, but what it does in relation to others. And in Paul’s mind, patience and kindness describe how God himself relates to his people. In his letter to the Romans, for example, he tries to break believers of the stubborn habit of hypocritically passing judgment on one another:

So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment? Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, forbearance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance? (Rom 2:3-4)

Here, he mentions God’s kindness twice, which is inseparable from his patience, the long-suffering way in which God restrains judgment to make room for repentance. Patience and kindness should therefore characterize those who serve this God. Indeed, Paul describes himself this way in Second Corinthians 6:6, holding together patience, kindness, and love as characteristic of his life in the Holy Spirit. The same should then be true of all Christians, of everyone whose life is marked by the Spirit, as he says in his letter to the churches in Galatia:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Gal 5:22-23)

Here, the New International Version translates Paul as mentioning “forbearance” and “kindness” together — but that word “forbearance” is the same word that we’ve discussing as “patience” (though this time it’s a noun). When he speaks of the “fruit of the Spirit,” Paul isn’t making a laundry list of distinct Christian virtues; the word “fruit” is singular, not plural. The idea is that these are all various ways in which we can see the outgrowth of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life, the outward manifestation of an internal reality, expressed through how people relate to one another.

And to shift the metaphor, we might think of all these qualities as facets of the same gem, together reflecting and refracting the light of God’s character as we consider first one and then the next. Here again, patience and kindness are linked with love, which heads the list. But we shouldn’t try too hard to draw distinctions between the various qualities. We wouldn’t want to separate kindness from gentleness, would we? And who learns to be patient, to be slow to anger, without self-control?

Trust me, I can tell you from experience that that’s not how it works.

Thus, God is patient and kind toward us. Through the cross of Jesus, he has lovingly saved us from our sin. But that doesn’t mean that we’re done sinning. Nor does it mean that we no longer need God’s patience and kindness. As the passage we read from Romans suggests, when we are tempted to stand in judgment of someone else, we should remember instead that we too stand under the judgment of a holy God, who is nevertheless rich in patience and kindness toward us.

How could we not do the same toward others?

DOES THAT STILL sound a little too abstract? After all, if Paul is describing what love does, we may still feel at a bit of a loss for what we should do. One step in the right direction, as I’ll suggest shortly, is that we may have to admit first what we need to stop doing. And again, whatever changes we make in our behavior need to be grounded in the proper attitude and motivation of humble, grateful obedience to the God who treats us with undeserved patience and kindness.

But if you want one concrete suggestion, here’s one from the letter of James:

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires. (James 1:19-20)

The phrase “slow to become angry” here is not the same as the word for being “patient,” though James does use the word later to describe patience in the face of suffering (James 5:7, 10). Importantly, though, he says this in part to correct the way believers were grumbling and complaining against each other, as he reminds them of the compassion and mercy of God (vss. 9, 11).

But the verses we read from James 1 teach us a crucial and practical lesson. Although James says that we should be “quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry,” we typically get this backwards: we are quick to become angry, quick to speak in anger, and slow to listen — if indeed we ever get around to listening at all.

So, if you want some simple advice as to how to learn patience and kindness, here’s what I would suggest. Again, don’t pray for patience; pray for humility, the humility to recognize just how much you depend on the patience and kindness of God. And then, learn to listen attentively and compassionately before you speak, particularly when you feel anger and resentment rising within you.

Because sometimes, when you do, you’ll find that there really wasn’t that much of a reason to get angry in the first place.