“Only, let your endurance be a finished product” (Moffatt). It comes to that in all great achievements, for the test is endurance. The goal is at the end of the race, where Jesus is the author and finisher of the faith which we possess (Heb. 12:2). “We are become partakers of Christ, if we hold ... firm unto the end” (Heb. 3:14). “But he that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved” (Matt. 24:13). Patience calls for courage; discouragement leads to impatience and failure. There is need of long-suffering (Col. 1:11), if we get the “finished product.” The word for perfect here occurs also in James 1:17, 25; 3:2. The word, like the substantive, has a double usage (cf. _finis_ and our _end_), either limit or aim. So the perfect man may be regarded in the absolute sense, the limit, as the perfect Man Christ Jesus (Eph. 4:13), or as on the way to the goal (no longer a child but a developed man, as in 1 Cor. 2:6; Phil. 3:15). “The perfect” (1 Cor. 13:10) is still to come, but there is “perfect love” (1 John 4:18). We are to aim after the perfection of God himself (Matt. 5:48). Paul’s ambition was to present each one “perfect in Christ Jesus” (Col. 1:28). Compare also Colossians 4:12. Here James has his eye on the goal which is at the end of the long road. He knows full well (3:2) that in many things we all stumble, but we must persevere. Patience must do its “perfect work,” that ye may be “perfect.” But James takes a latitudinal look at the work of patience, not merely the longitudinal view—the view that ye may be “entire, lacking nothing,” “complete, with never a defect” (Moffatt). This word for entire (cf. _integer_) means complete in all its parts, whole, not unsound anywhere. At the end of the race we are to be fully developed and sound to the core in heart and limb. The word is used of stones untouched by a tool (Deut. 27:6), of a body without blemish. Epictetus (bk. III, chap. xxvi, § 25) uses the word of a vessel which one finds whole, unbroken, and useful. It is used of a complete or unbroken household. In the papyri Philo uses both words together, as James does here. The substantive is used of the “perfect soundness” of the man just healed by Peter and John (Acts 3:16). This adjective occurs with “righteousness” (Wisd. 15:13) and “worship” or “religion” (4 Macc. 17). The adjective is used by Paul in his prayer for the Thessalonians, “preserved entire, without blame” (1 Thess. 5:23). This is what Jesus does for his glorious church, which is to be without “spot or wrinkle or any such thing” (Eph. 5:27). Jesus, our High Priest, “has perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Heb. 10:14). Alas, Isaiah (1:6) found Israel wholly wanting in this soundness. James’s ideal is that we shall fall short in nothing. Our destiny is to dwell in the family of God and to be like Jesus, our elder Brother (1 John 3:2). This ultimate divine fulness is not the self-sufficiency of the stoics. Shortage in Wisdom (1:5)