Facing Trials

Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. 4Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. 5If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. 6But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. 7That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; 8he is a double– minded man, unstable in all he does. James 2-8

To live successfully in the world we must know how to face up to trials. James writes on this subject because he appreciates that his readers are going through difficult experiences that they would never have chosen for themselves. He wants to be a good pastor to them. Therefore he must be sympathetic yet honest, and sometimes blunt.

Developing Right Attitudes

Attitudes are all–important. Consider it pure joy… (James 1:2). The kind of people we are and the behaviour we adopt are all determined by the inner attitudes we develop. Our prevailing attitudes to life colour our whole personality and experience of life (Proverbs 15:13, 15). God's concern is that our attitudes should be right (Philippians 2:5) for then our actions, for the most part, will take care of themselves (see Philippians 2:1–4).

To arrive at correct conduct, therefore, we have to be honest and begin with our mind, with the way we think. Part of our essential experience of salvation is the renewal of our mind so that we may be able to test and approve what God's will is (Romans 12:2).

By his use of the word consider in verse 2, James emphasises that there are things we have to look at deliberately in a particular way if we are to arrive at the right conclusions, and this is certainly the case when it comes to trials.

Attitudes are determined by understanding. In verse 3 he writes of something that his readers know. It is the things that we are sure of which influence our reactions as difficult circumstances or crises arise in our lives.

To be well taught in the Scriptures is strategically important because one of the principal purposes of Christian instruction is to provide a foundation of knowledge upon which we can build our lives through the development of proper attitudes. For example, trouble, hardship and various forms of suffering come to all of us at some time or another. The natural tendency may be to feel that such things are a waste of human life and to be avoided at all costs. But not at all! Knowledge informs us otherwise. ‘We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose’ (Romans 8:28).

Facing Trials

There are truths God has revealed about trials which are intended to influence and determine our attitudes. (We ought to notice in passing that the word trial in James 1:2 can also be translated ‘temptation’. It is used in the good sense of God or our Lord Jesus Christ putting us to the test so that we may prove ourselves true, and then in the bad sense – and never of God – of enticement to sin. At this point in James' letter it is right to translate it ‘trials’.)

Trials are inevitable. Trials are an expected feature of ordinary human life and also of the Christian life. James takes that fact for granted. He does not write ‘if you face trials’ but whenever you face trials. To escape trials we would have to escape from this world altogether.

Trials are various in nature. We have to face trials of many kinds. Some trials come according to the age of life we have attained. Young people, for example, know the trials which accompany their development into adulthood and the tests which come through having to learn to keep under control their natural desires and bodily appetites.

Older people are not exempt from these same trials since the battle against sin does not grow easier as we grow older. Furthermore, trials come with old age, when things we used to be able to do we can do no longer.

Seemingly unique trials come also with the various responsibilities of life. Parenthood, for example, is glorious and exciting in prospect, but in reality it brings its own trials if children are wayward and do not respond readily to discipline.

Job promotion is a tremendous encouragement, but the responsibilities it brings may be overwhelming.

Trials are multicoloured – that is the word James uses – and they are as diverse as the colours of the rainbow and all the permutations of shades of colour which are possible. The lovely thing to remember, however, is that just as the trials that come to us are many– coloured so too is God's grace (1 Peter 4:10).

Trials tend to come upon us unexpectedly. The verb face is really the verb ‘fall into’. It is the verb used of the traveller who fell into the hands of robbers in the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30) and of the ship carrying the apostle Paul that ‘struck a sandbar and ran aground’ (Acts 27:41). Both uses imply the unexpected nature of the events.

Trials may be around the next corner. We can seldom anticipate them, which may of course be just as well. At any moment we may meet an old difficulty or a new one. The unexpected nature of trials makes it all the more necessary that we should be prepared beforehand with the knowledge of how to react to them.

Trials test faith. The word faith occurs often without an object, as here in James 1:3, signifying true piety or genuine religion. It means simply being a Christian because being a Christian is all about having faith in God through His Son Jesus Christ. James could equally well have written, ‘because you know that the testing of you as a Christian develops perseverance’.

But besides being a term which sums up what it means to be a Christian, faith is also a Christian virtue (1 Thessalonians 3:6). Faith is essentially our response to God's faithfulness. It begins as our response to God in the glorious revelation He has given of Himself in our Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ Himself is the originator of our faith (‘author’, Hebrews 12:2) because it is as we realise His complete trustworthiness and the perfection of all that He has done on our behalf as our Saviour that we exercise faith in Him and the promises He makes to us in the Gospel.

Faith is intended to grow. The One in whom we trust is greater than we can ever imagine, and no matter how great our faith grows, it can never outmatch the greatness of God as He has revealed Himself in the Lord Jesus.

Trials test faith both from the point of view of proving its genuineness and from the point of view of making it grow. Faith is not simply a matter of words, it is also a matter of deeds. Trials put faith in the refining fire, and pure faith always emerges out of the furnace brighter and stronger. Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661), whose letters from prison are a spiritual treasury, wrote, ‘Praise God for the hammer, the file, and the furnace’. The word for testing is used elsewhere for the testing of metals to prove their genuineness. Even as currency is of use only as it is genuine and stands up to tests men may use to prove its genuineness, so our lives have usefulness to God in the world only as faith is proved to be true faith.

Trials develop perseverance (James 1:3). Perseverance is an important Christian virtue. It is another word for patience, endurance, fortitude or steadfastness. It is the ability to hold on, and to see a situation through to its proper conclusion. It is ‘stickability’ at its best.

An important characteristic of true faith is that it does not collapse when tested. Rather, like the muscles in my arm, it grows through exercise. God knows exactly how much we can take at any time of testing, and He sees to it that our trials are never beyond the power of our faith, at the stage it is, to respond (1 Corinthians 10:13).

We need to be clear as to the practical application of this perseverance. When trials come we tend to feel that there is little point in continuing in the good things we know we ought to do because, on the apparent and deceptive evidence of our trials, we are not being rewarded for the good we do. That is the kind of whispered insinuation we may expect from Satan, the great enemy of our souls. But genuine faith perseveres in doing good, whatever the circumstances. As lifeboat men go out to do what they can for people in distress irrespective of the weather, so faith goes on doing the right thing whatever the moral and spiritual climate.

Physical suffering may become so acute at times that we can scarcely help ourselves being preoccupied with our own needs. When physical hardship occurs on account of our loyalty to Christ, we may be tempted to feel that it is a large price to pay. But genuine faith still perseveres and endures the suffering gladly for Christ's sake (see Acts 5:40, 41).

Obedience to Christ, especially with regard to the service in which He calls us to engage in His name, may bring innumerable hardships (see 2 Corinthians 6:4–10). Faith holds on, nevertheless, counting it a privilege to serve such a Master (2 Timothy 2:10).

Arthur Matthews, a missionary in China, wrote home sharing some of the difficulties he and his family were enduring: ‘These trials of faith are to give us patience, for patience can only be worked as faith goes into the Pressure Chamber. To pull out because the pressure is laid on, and to start fretting would be to lose all the good He has in it for us.’

Trials need to be responded to properly. Perseverance must finish its work (James 1:4). One of the dangers of trials, either when they actually happen or as we see them appear on the horizon of our life, is our tendency to try to escape them in some way or another, or to endeavour to avoid their full force rather than to see them through to God's planned conclusion. We must deliberately let endurance show itself in practice. We must prove to ourselves – as well as to the silent spectators who may be watching to see how real our faith is when it is tested – that perseverance is both possible and profitable.

Isobel Kuhn, in her book, Green Leaf in Drought Time, describes how some missionary friends found great encouragement in Andrew Murray's formula for trial.
1. Say, He brought me here. It is by His will I am in this strait place and in that fact I will rest.
2. He will keep me here in His love and give me grace to behave as His child.
3. Then He will make the trial a blessing, teaching me the lessons He intends for me to learn.
4. In His good time He can bring me out again – how and when He knows. So let me say, I am (1) here by God's appointment; (2) in His keeping; (3) under His training; (4) for His time.
Trials, properly responded to, are always fruitful. Perseverance must be allowed to complete its work so that we may be mature and complete, not lacking anything (1:4).

Three aspects of the fruitfulness of trials are mentioned. First, they make us mature. Maturity is spiritual adulthood; it is our attaining the purposes and ends God has for our life. It is not we who determine what maturity is, but God; and it is God who also chooses the means by which we arrive at maturity – that is to say, trials! Maturity is hopelessly hindered if we try to escape God's purposes in the testings He either permits or sends. We remain spiritual children rather than becoming spiritual adults, and we are then unable to be spiritually useful in the care of new spiritual babes.

Second, trials make us complete. God the Holy Spirit always has a particular goal in view, whatever life may be doing to us, and that goal is Christlikeness. Christlikeness is the completeness at which the Holy Spirit aims in our sanctification. The goal, therefore, of our various testings is that we should become more and more like our Saviour. The whole of Christ's character is to be reproduced in us, and this is possible only as we respond willingly and submissively to God's purposes in our trials.

Third, trials bring us to the position where we are not lacking anything. This expression simply conveys the thought of maturity and completeness in a negative manner. As trials are allowed to do their proper work of leading us on to maturity and completeness, so we are in the happy position of not lacking any good benefit God intends us to possess.

The message James would have us grasp is that solid achievement in the Christian life usually comes about only through the testing of our faith. When God is at work in us He first inspires faith, and He then perfects that faith (Hebrews 12:2). Its maturity is one of His major concerns. To appreciate this basic fact makes sense of many of the unpleasant experiences God permits.
Charles Simeon of Cambridge, whose ministry exercised such a tremendous influence at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries in England, went through some months of dreadful strain and humiliation. In a letter to a very close friend, he wrote, ‘They who are most earnest in prayer for grace, are often most afflicted, because the graces which they pray for, e.g. faith, hope, patience, humility etc. are only to be wrought in us by means of those trials which call forth the several graces into act and exercise’.

Trials, therefore, properly understood, occasion joy. We are now in a position to appreciate James' opening words: Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds (1:2). We are able to consider trials as a source of joy. It would be a sign of a disordered mind to equate trials for their own sakes as a source of joy! But they may be considered as a proper ground for joy when we recognize the fruit that God intends shall flow from them. Perhaps the most important lesson we must learn from what James says is that the benefit we receive from trials depends to a large degree upon how we look at them and the spirit with which we handle them.

When we see trials as a privilege our heavenly Father allows because He wants His Spirit to perfect His work of making us like our Lord Jesus – to make us ‘complete’ Christians – we discover a joy in our trials, a joy the Holy Spirit gives (Romans 14:17). Faith itself gives and knows its own particular joy (Philippians 1:25; 1 Peter 1:8) and it is our faith that is perfected and increased as we submit to God's purposes in times of testing.

Obtaining Wisdom

But to be honest and realistic, it is not always easy to adopt this right attitude, much as we want to do so, both beforehand and as and when trials arise. We lack the wisdom so often to know how to handle the difficulties which come in the course of daily life. The reason we have sometimes made a mess of our handling of trials, so that they have not produced spiritual fruit, is that we have lacked wisdom.

The glorious truth is, however, that we have a heavenly Father who delights to give wisdom to His children. The wisdom Solomon knew, a wisdom that astounded his contemporaries, was bestowed upon him as a result of his request to God (1 Kings 3:9). The reason Stephen's opponents could not stand up against his wisdom was because he was filled with God's Spirit (Acts6:5, 10).The remarkable wisdom Paul displays in his New Testament letters was the consequence of ‘the wisdom that God gave him’ (2 Peter 3:15).

It is, however, a wisdom for which we must ask (James 1:5). There is a basic and simple principle here: we must ask in order to receive – that is how God has purposely ordered things. We do not have to apologise that we tend to think of prayer as principally a matter of asking God for various benefits. If we examine all the Bible references to prayer, the great majority imply that prayer is essentially asking God for things. It is of course much more and prayer is, not least, communion with God.

But our heavenly Father, like all good fathers, delights to meet His children's needs and rejoices in the proper dependence we show upon Him as we come only to Him for some of our foremost necessities. Since He is the source of all wisdom – He is the only wise God (Romans 16:27) – it is no surprise that the wisdom we require to respond properly to our trials is given in answer to prayer to our Father.

We must ask believingly for wisdom. We must believe and not doubt (James 1:6). Acceptable prayer is based on faith, not doubt. Prayer must be our first recourse, not our second or last. Believing prayer has as its basis the confidence that God ‘exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him’ (Hebrews 11:6). Faith enables us to ask God for what He promises, and we are never disappointed.

Not to ask believingly is disastrous. Although the context is quite different, the principle Paul expounded to the Romans applies here also: ‘Everything that does not come from faith is sin’ (Romans 14:23). To pray and, at the same time, not to believe that God either hears or will answer is an offence against God – a dreadful sin. The doubter is a man who prays but then goes out and acts as if he has not prayed. His professed beliefs do not coincide with his actions. He tries to ride two horses at once – faith and doubt – and he is at odds with himself.

Now we may all find ourselves troubled by doubts from time to time, and few of us escape them. But the thing to do with our doubts is to bring them out into the open in our fellowship with God. We may ask God for wisdom to solve our doubts. The answer to most of them is to consider the revealed character of God, to see and to ponder God's glory in the face of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6).

The man, however, who refuses to be honest with both himself and God about his doubts condemns himself by his own behaviour. He becomes as unstable as wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind (James 1:6, 8; James delights to use illustrations from nature, and this is his first).

The tragedy of the doubter – or the double–minded man – is that he receives nothing from God (1:7). His behaviour does not fit in with the behaviour of the God to whom he thinks he comes in prayer. God never wavers or fluctuates (1:17) and He requires that those who come to Him should aim at being the same.

We must ask in prayer, therefore, without double–mindedness. In the particular context of what James writes here, that means that we must ask God for wisdom with the specific purpose and honest intention of responding to our trials in such a way that all of God's purposes in them are fulfilled.

It will not do, for example, to ask for wisdom, and then, when we receive it from God, decide that we prefer to do things our own way. That is a plain form of double–mindedness. If we really trust God, we recognise that His way is best before we even know what it is. If we ask Him for wisdom with this confidence we shall not lack it. Rather we shall receive it in abundance, God will give us generously the wisdom we need (1:5). There is nothing mean or niggardly about God's giving. And so it is that when we receive God's wisdom, we know that we have it, and we move forward with certainty and without hesitancy.

Not only will God give us wisdom generously, but He will also give it without finding fault (1:5). We ourselves may have fallen into the snare of giving help to someone but providing it in such a way that we are saying, in effect, ‘You ought not to have come to me for help again. What an undeserving person you are!’ God does not deal with us like that. He is glad for us to come to Him as often as we are willing to come. And the more we come, the more He pours out His wisdom upon us, so that even when the most difficult trials occur we are able to consider it pure joy because we know He will provide us with the wisdom to enable us to co–operate with Him in them. The wisdom He imparts ensures that we gain the maximum benefit from them, and that His purposes of maturity and completeness in our life move on to further important stages.

by Derek Prime