The Greek word Paul reaches for is makrothumeō. It is built from two pieces. Makros means long. Thumos means temper — or, more literally, anger, passion, the heat that rises in a man when he is crossed. Put the two pieces together and Paul’s word is, in flat English, long-tempered.
We have no single word for it, but we have its opposite. Short-tempered is universally understood. The short-tempered man has a fuse that lights and reaches the powder in a hurry. He goes off. He erupts. The smallest spark sets him in motion, and everyone in the room knows to step back.
A long-tempered man is the opposite. His fuse takes its time. The spark lands and he does not move. The provocation comes and he absorbs it. He is not numb. He is not slow-witted. He has the same fuel inside him that a short-tempered man has — the same anger, the same justified reaction available — but something in him does not light. Or lights only after a great while, and not without good reason.
That is the word Paul puts at the head of his list. Before kind, before not jealous, before bears all things, the first thing he says love is, is long-tempered. If you cannot get this one right, the rest of the list does not have a foundation to sit on.
What was happening in Corinth
To feel the force of why Paul names this attribute first, you have to remember that he is writing to a church that could not wait for each other to eat dinner.
The Corinthians had been gathering for the Lord’s Supper, and the gathering had become chaos. Two chapters before he writes the love chapter, Paul addresses what was happening:
Therefore when you meet together, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper, for in your eating each one takes his own supper first; and one is hungry and another is drunk.
1 Corinthians 11:20–21 (NASB)
The wealthier believers were arriving first and eating their fill. The poorer believers — the slaves, the working men whose work ran later — were arriving to find the table empty and their brothers already drunk on the wine. Paul’s instruction to fix it is one sentence:
So then, my brethren, when you come together to eat, wait for one another.
1 Corinthians 11:33 (NASB)
Wait for one another. Four words. The simplest instruction in the letter. And it was so obvious, and so unfollowed, that Paul had to write it down.
That was the Corinthian church. A church that could not wait for each other to eat. A church where the gift-proud were impatient with the gift-less, where the strong were impatient with the weak, where the knowledgeable were impatient with the ignorant, and where, when the most sacred meal of the church was set on the table, no one would even hold a plate until the slow brother walked in the door.
The same impatience was on display in the chapter just before this one. The Corinthians had received a wide range of spiritual gifts, and rather than wait their turn or yield the floor, they were clamoring all at once. By the time Paul gets to chapter 14 he is laying down rules for orderly speaking — two or three at most, one at a time, and let the others discern. Rules he should not have had to write, except that the gift-proud could not wait for the gift-less, and the believer with the loud gift would not pause to make room for the believer with the quiet one. Impatience in the worship service was the same disease as impatience at the supper table, breaking out at the place where the church was supposed to look most like itself.
Now you can hear what Paul is saying in 13:4. Love is patient. You said you had love. Your meetings show otherwise. Whatever else you have learned, you have not learned to wait. And until you learn to wait, the love you claim to have is not the love I am writing about.
The God who is long-tempered
The reason Paul can demand patience of the Corinthians, and of us, is that patience is the way God Himself has dealt with His people from the beginning.
When the LORD passed before Moses on the mountain and named His own character — the most concentrated place in Scripture where God Himself names the moral attributes of His own being aloud — patience was in the second clause:
Then the LORD passed by in front of him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth…”
Exodus 34:6 (NASB)
Slow to anger. The Hebrew is erek apayim — literally, long of nose. An ancient Hebrew idiom for the slow burn. The picture is of nostrils that take a long time to flare. Hebrew’s way of saying what Greek would later say with makrothumeō. The same idea, translated across two languages over a thousand years apart, applied to the same God: long-fused. Slow to ignite. The fuel of righteous anger is present, but it takes time to reach the powder, and most of the time the powder never goes off at all.
That self-description of God is repeated more times in the Old Testament than almost any other description He gives of Himself. Numbers 14:18. Psalm 86:15. Psalm 103:8. Psalm 145:8. Joel 2:13. Jonah 4:2. Nahum 1:3. Israel learned the phrase the way a child learns his father’s voice — by hearing it again and again, in every kind of weather, until he knew it was the truest thing about the One who said it.
And the New Testament makes plain that this divine patience is not a feature of an old covenant that has now passed. It is the very reason any of us is still here:
The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.
2 Peter 3:9 (NASB)
The end has not come yet. The Lord could have ended history yesterday. He could end it today. He has not, because His patience is making room for sinners to turn. Every breath you have taken is a gift His long fuse purchased.
And to make sure no one missed the personal application, Paul wrote about it in his own case:
Yet for this reason I found mercy, so that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life.
1 Timothy 1:16 (NASB)
The man who writes love is patient in 1 Corinthians 13:4 is the same man who once stood by approving as Stephen was stoned, who hunted believers from house to house in Jerusalem, who breathed threats and murder against the church. And the Lord he was hunting did not strike him down. The Lord waited. The Lord was long-tempered with him on the road outside Damascus, met him, knocked him down, and called him by name. Paul knew the patience of God from the inside. When he wrote that love is patient, he was not theorizing.
What patience is, and what it is not
Before we go any further, we have to clear away a misunderstanding that ruins this attribute in most modern hands.
Patience is not passivity. Patience is not weakness. Patience is not a personality trait that some people are born with and others are not. Patience is not the disposition of the man who has no spine to react with, and patience is not the resignation of the man who has given up on his situation ever changing.
Patience is the active restraint of a justified reaction.
Look at the picture Scripture paints. God is slow to anger — which means there is anger to be slow with. God’s fuse is long, but His fuse is real. The reactions He is restraining are not imaginary. The sin is real, the offense is real, the wound to His holiness is real, and the judgment that could justly fall is real. And yet — for now, for our sake, for as long as His mercy continues to make room — He waits. The reaction is being held. The reaction is not absent. It is restrained.
That is the patience we are called to. Not the absence of feeling. Not the absence of a justified reaction. The restraint of one.
The person you live with said something tonight that cut you. You felt it. The reaction is real. Your mom, your dad, your sibling, your friend, your classmate, the brother in the church who has wounded you for the fourth time this month — none of these encounters lacks justification for a sharp response. Patience does not mean you did not feel it. Patience means you felt it and did not light.
A long-tempered Christian is not a man with no temper. He is a man whose temper is long. The fuel is the same fuel any short-tempered man would have. The fuse is what is different. And the fuse, in the believer, is being made longer by the same Lord whose own fuse extends to the end of history for the sake of sinners.
What it looks like
Patience looks like a high-school student who has been asked the same question by his younger sibling for the fifth time today and answers it a sixth time without sighing.
It looks like a teenage girl whose closest friend has canceled on her three times in a row this semester with a half-sentence excuse — and who, when the next text comes through with another suggestion, holds her resentment back and answers her warmly anyway.
It looks like a teenager sitting with a grandfather whose mind has started to slip, who has just been accused of taking something he never touched — and who, instead of defending himself, says he is sorry the thing was lost and changes the subject, because the grandfather will not remember the accusation in an hour, but he will remember being argued with.
It looks like a teacher who has explained the same point to the same student in the same class for the third time, and who is preparing, without resentment, to explain it a fourth.
It looks like a teenager kneeling down to tie a little brother’s shoes because the little brother’s hands are not yet quick, and the bus is coming, and the teenager could have done it in three seconds and saved everyone the trouble — but instead the teenager guides the small hands through the loops once more, slowly, because the little brother will need to learn this, and patience is the only thing that teaches it.
It looks like a teenager whose father has just come through the door tired and short, and snapped at him about something small — and who, knowing the father is exhausted, does not snap back, does not roll his eyes, does not retreat behind a closed door. He answers calmly and lets the tone go.
It looks like a high-school boy on a project team with a classmate who works far slower than he does, and who, instead of taking over and finishing the work himself, sits down beside the slower student and walks him through it, because the grade matters less than the brother.
It looks like a teenager whose teammate, after a botched play, has whipped around and snapped at her in front of the whole bench — and who, instead of snapping back, hands her the water bottle and waits for the next whistle.
It looks like Christ.
That is who taught patience to His people. He sat with twelve disciples who misunderstood Him repeatedly. He explained His parables more than once. He let Peter make the same mistake several times. He answered the same question from different angles when the same heart needed to hear it differently. He bore with Israel through forty years of grumbling in a wilderness He did not have to put up with for one day. He has borne with the church for two thousand years now. And He bears with you and me, His current generation, exactly as long as His Father has ordained, so that the people His Son died for can be gathered in.
The patience He showed His disciples on the road is the patience He shows you today. The patience He showed Saul of Tarsus is the patience He shows the slowest learner in any Bible class. The patience He has shown the world for two millennia is the patience by which you and I are reading these words instead of standing at the judgment.
The world’s impatience, and ours
The world’s love is impatient. It has always been so, and the present generation has only sharpened it.
The world ends a friendship over an inconvenience. The world quits a hard class at the first low grade. The world ghosts a relationship the moment it stops being fun. The world scrolls through people instead of waiting on them, and a generation has grown up not knowing how to wait at all.
That impatience reaches into the church. The Christian who cannot wait for an answer to prayer, and concludes the answer is no. The Christian who cannot wait for a brother to grow, and writes him off as unteachable. The Christian who cannot wait for his own sanctification, and decides the gospel must not be doing its work in him. The Christian who cannot wait for a slow elder to think through a hard question, and bypasses the elders to do what he wanted to do anyway. All of it is the same disease. The fuse is short. The reaction lights and goes off. And whatever is built next is built on the rubble of what patience could have preserved.
A Christian who is becoming patient is becoming, by that much, more like the One who saved him. There is no other way for it to happen, because patience is not a virtue we naturally possess. It is a virtue we receive from being long borne with by the God who has been long-tempered toward us, and we learn slowly to extend to others as we have received it.
So, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.
Colossians 3:12 (NASB)
Put on patience. It is something you put on, the way you put on a coat in the morning — deliberately, every day, knowing the weather of the day will demand it. It is not an inheritance you receive once. It is a garment you reach for daily, because every day you will encounter someone whose pace, whose weakness, whose repeated failure, will offer your short-tempered self the chance to ignite. And every day, the long-tempered Lord whose name you bear will offer you, in His Word and in the renewing of your mind through it (Romans 12:2), the option to put on, instead, the long fuse.
A note for the reader who is not yet in Christ
You are reading this chapter because patience interests you, or because someone you love handed you this book, or because the title pulled you in. Whatever brought you here, see one thing before you turn the page.
The world will tell you patience is for the weak. The world is wrong. Patience is the strongest restraint in the human heart. It is the harness on the wildest horse. The man or woman who can absorb an insult and not return it, who can be wronged and not strike back, who can wait — really wait — for what is right rather than seize what is convenient, is stronger than the man who explodes. The world has it backwards. The fuse is power. The fuse is not weakness. And the fuse comes from one place: the One who has been long-tempered with you for every year of your life so far.
He has waited for you. Every day you have been on the earth has been a day His patience purchased for you. Every breath has been borrowed from a Lord whose long fuse is the only reason you are not already standing at the great judgment. That patience is not infinite. It is doing its work now — making room for you to turn, before the day His patience gives way to the verdict that has always been just.
The chapter you are reading is not first about how to be patient with the people in your life. It is first about a God who has been patient with you, and who is waiting for you to come home. The walking out — yours to do — comes only after the coming home. You cannot live this patience until you have first received it.
Where this leaves us
Patience is the first attribute in Paul’s list because it is the floor every other attribute stands on. A man who cannot wait cannot be kind for long. A man who cannot wait cannot avoid jealousy for long. A man who cannot wait cannot keep a ledger closed, cannot believe well of his brother, cannot hope through a hard season, cannot endure to the end. Patience is the foundation. The rest of 1 Corinthians 13 is the house that sits on it.
We will spend the chapters that follow walking through the house.
But before any of that, the floor has to be there.
THINK
Name one person in your life right now whose pace, weakness, or repeated failure most tests your patience. Not the stranger in traffic — that is amateur. The person you live with, work with, share a name with, see at church every week, who you have every justified reason to react to. Now sit with this question: What does it tell you about your understanding of God’s patience toward you, that you have so little for them? The answer is not a verdict. It is a starting place. The Lord who has been long-tempered with you for every day of your life is willing to grow that same long fuse in you, one provocation at a time. The next one is probably already on its way. What will you do with it?