If you’ve ever read a translation like the King James Version, you know when you get to the word “patience,” the older English translation will use the word “longsuffering.” This is because the Greek word for patience literally means to suffer a long time, which doesn’t sound very promising. What it’s saying is that patience is the trait by which you are able to bear up under difficulty without giving up or giving in to bitterness. There are two kinds of patience: there’s patience under difficult circumstances and there’s patience with people. And Romans 12 is a remarkable passage
