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Sunday School Lesson: Bible Studies for Life - November 8
Celebrate your trials
By Jim West
11/4/2009

Focal Passage: James 1:2-18

Of all the people on the planet, Christians have the most reason to be joyful. Gifted with salvation, redeemed from sin, destined for heaven, and accompanied through the journey we call life in this world by the Holy Spirit, we nonetheless find ourselves from time to time living without joy. Considering all the blessings that have been poured out for us, our lack of joy becomes plainly wicked. Indeed, even our difficulties can, and according to James, should evoke a response of joyfulness! (vv. 2-4). But how can we rejoice when things are going badly? In the face of disease and disorder and heartache and death? James tells us, “because the testing of your faith produces … .” Faith tested is faith stretched and worked and improved. And the more faith we have, the more mountains will be moved. Until that fine day when there are no more mountains, no more obstacles, no more difficulties and no more trials. Faith tested becomes faith that levels all hindrances. When we reach that stage in our spiritual development, we have become mature and lack nothing because then, finally, we come to realize that we need absolutely nothing besides God.

And how do we gain this wisdom? James – again – tells us (vv. 5-11). Ask God for it! Ask and you will receive. Seek wisdom and you will find it. God wishes us to be wise. But what is wisdom? Wisdom is knowledge applied. Wisdom is knowing and yoking knowing to doing. Doing without knowing is foolishness and knowing without doing is wickedness. Wisdom binds together knowing and doing and it is precisely here that we need God’s help. It does not lie within us to know what to do or how to do it in a way that pleases God, so He tells us. Yet we are warned when we ask for wisdom to avoid the half heartedness that doesn’t really believe or doesn’t really wish for wisdom in the first place. And what is the first lesson wisdom teaches us the moment God grants it to us? That it isn’t what we have that counts, but who we are. This message, this wisdom, is more necessary in these materialistic days than it ever has been before. Too many Christians have fallen for the trick of evil that it’s what you have that makes you who you are. But wisdom teaches the opposite. It’s who you are, in the presence of God, that matters.

And once we know that trials teach us faith and faith seeks the wisdom to do what we know we should be doing, then we are in a position to realize that God really is good, all the time (vv. 12-18). God is the source of all the good we experience in life. He sends from heaven every blessing we ever experience and even in our trials He never tempts us to sin. Rather, trials successfully endured show God our love for Him. And they show us that we really do love God too.

I’ve known people who have endured tremendous trials and who endured them with grace and faith and, as a result, became through suffering outstanding witnesses of the love of God. Does this mean we should seek to suffer simply to become noteworthy witnesses? Goodness no. But if trials come, or rather, when they come, we will be prepared for them. And by enduring them as Christians, we will show our neighbors, ourselves and our Lord that our Christianity was more than just a slogan. It was the core of who we are and will remain the center of our lives as long as God grants us life in this world, and the next.

— West is pastor, Petros Baptist Church, Petros.

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