Building Patience While You Have A Profitable Sabbath?

 

The Importance of Patience: Today, our societies are focused on instant gratification. Yet God has a different priority, and we are to develop His perspective (Philippians 2:5). The Scriptures reveal that God places a premium on developing patience (Luke 8:15; Romans 12:12; 1 Peter 2:20), because He is patient (1 Peter 3:20) and patience is one of the fruits of His Spirit (Galatians 5:22; Ephesians 4:2). God uses trials to help us develop patience (James 1:3–4). As part of God’s plan to prepare them for their future roles, Abraham and Sarah waited decades for a promised son (Genesis 12:4; 17:17), Joseph spent years in prison (Genesis 39:20; 41:1, 14), Moses herded sheep for 40 years (Exodus 2:21–25; 3:1), and David endured persecution (Psalm 37:7; 40:1). We need to remember God’s promise that “those who wait on the Lord… shall mount up with wings like eagles” (Isaiah 40:31). Let’s strive to develop real godly patience, because that is what God is looking for in each of us.

Have a profitable Sabbath,

Douglas S. Winnail

Nothing substantial is wrong with the content on patience itself. The verses cited are accurate, the biblical examples are real, and the call to develop patience as a fruit of the Spirit is standard Christian teaching. God is patient, trials produce endurance, and waiting on the Lord is repeatedly commanded. That part is fine.

The problems appear in the source, the framework, and the closing line—especially when measured against the New Testament’s teaching on the New Covenant.

“Have a profitable Sabbath” is not a neutral greeting. In Living Church of God / Armstrongism it functions as a doctrinal marker. It assumes that the seventh-day Sabbath remains a binding covenant obligation for Christians today.  Under the New Covenant that assumption does not hold:

• Colossians 2:16–17 treats “a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath” as “a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”
• Romans 14:5–6 allows freedom of conscience on days.
• Galatians 4:9–11 warns against returning to “weak and worthless elementary principles” that include calendar observances.
• Hebrews 4 presents the true “Sabbath rest” as entering God’s rest by faith in Christ’s finished work, not by weekly calendar-keeping.

Greeting people with “profitable Sabbath” quietly re-imposes an Old-Covenant boundary marker that the apostles said has been fulfilled and set aside. That is the clearest “wrong” element in the message.

LCG teaches that the New Covenant does not do away with “the law of God” (understood to include the weekly Sabbath, annual holy days, clean meats, etc.), that Christians enter it at baptism by covenanting to keep those commandments, and that what we experience now is only a “foretaste” for the firstfruits.  That framework turns even a good topic like patience into something that sits inside a performance-oriented system. Patience becomes one more quality you must “strive to develop” while also carefully observing the right days, the right diet, and the right calendar—exactly the kind of external measuring that the New Covenant was designed to replace with the internal work of the Spirit (Jeremiah 31:33; Hebrews 8:10; Galatians 5:22–23; Romans 8:2–4).

Armstrongism has always been slow on patience. It has a long record of date-setting, urgent timelines, and “this is the final warning” rhetoric that repeatedly failed (1972/1975 expectations under Armstrong, later adjustments in the splinter groups, etc.). Preaching patience while living in a culture of prophetic urgency and tight hierarchical control is inconsistent. True New-Covenant patience rests in the certainty that Christ has already secured the future; it does not need constant recalculations of “how much longer.”

The paragraph on patience is biblically sound. What is wrong is the theological package it comes in: a system that keeps the form of Old-Covenant Sabbath observance while claiming to be under the New Covenant. That package confuses shadow with substance, external day-keeping with the rest that is already available in Christ, and Spirit-produced fruit with law-regulated performance.  

Under the New Covenant, the call is simpler: walk by the Spirit, and the fruit—including patience—will grow. You do not need a weekly calendar check-in to make it “profitable.”

Silent Pilgrim