Welcome Your Trials as Your Friends

Welcome to this new week of blogs. I trust you have had a great weekend and that you had a blessed time worshipping the Lord at your church yesterday.

A number of years ago I was reading through the New Testament using the J. B. Phillips translation. I was reading through the book of James and at the same time was preparing a message called “One of Those Days – Facing the Storms of Life.”

I was fascinated with the way Phillips translated James 1:2-8 and found the verses to be riveted with such amazing truth:

When all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives my brothers, don’t resent them as intruders, but welcome them as friends! Realize that they come to test your faith and to produce in you the quality of endurance. But let the process go on until that endurance is fully developed, and you will find you have become men of mature character with the right sort of independence. And if, in the process, any of you does not know how to meet any particular problem he has only to ask God—who gives generously to all men without making them feel foolish or guilty—and he may be quite sure that the necessary wisdom will be given him. But he must ask in sincere faith without secret doubts as to whether he really wants God’s help or not. The man who trusts God, but with inward reservations, is like a wave of the sea, carried forward by the wind one moment and driven back the next. That sort of man cannot hope to receive anything from God, and the life of a man of divided loyalty will reveal instability at every turn.

Question – when was the last time you thought about your trial as a “friend?” Wow.

Years ago I remember listening to an interview that Larry King did with Joni Eareckson Tada. Towards the end of the interview King asked Joni if she were given the opportunity to re-write the script of her accident and her on-going condition, what would she change?

I was amazed when she responded immediately with saying that she wouldn’t change a thing because of the lessons she has learned being in a wheel-chair. She said that while it was painful and the road was hard, she has learned so much from the chair that she might never have learned without it. She said that the chair had become her friend.

Trials as friends! Think about it. Those trials come to produce in us endurance and to make us men and women of character.

So it you are facing a trial in your life – turn your “stinking thinking” around and welcome it as your friend. Look for the ways that God is building endurance and character into your life. – Bill Welte is President& CEO of America’s Keswick and a regular Freedom Fighter blogger

Team YOU: Jeremiah 3-4; Proverbs 22; 1 Timothy 2

Motivations: If you cannot mould yourself entirely as you would wish, how can you expect other people to be entirely to your liking? Thomas a Kempis

Practice to Remember: Level 1:James 2:12-13; Level 2: James 2:6-13

Powered Up:  Prayer is not a question of altering things externally, but of working wonders in a man’s disposition. – Oswald Chambers