Lesson 32: Enduring Trials and Tribulations
Consider it pure joy when you suffer trials of many kinds, for this testing of your faith builds patience, and patience must complete its work in order to make you mature and complete, not lacking in anything. If anyone lacks the faith to accept his trials with joy, he must ask God for it. But when he asks, he mustn’t doubt because one who doubts is like a wave of the sea cast about by the wind. A person like that should not feel that they will receive anything from God, because he is double-minded and unstable in all that he does. Poor Christians should take pride in their high position as believers, and wealthy Christians should take pride not in their possessions, but in the fact that God has humbled them and given them a Godly outlook.
Blessed is the man who stands up under the temptations that test his moral strength and his ability to resist sin – he will be blessed by God. We are tempted when, by our own evil desires, we are carried away and enticed; and when desire has fully conceived it gives birth to sin, and when sin is fully matured to death. The human heart is deceptive beyond all things and impossible to cure; who can know it. We need to remove all filthiness from our lives and cling humbly to the word of God which is implanted in us. But when we read the word we need to be careful to do what it says, because one who reads it and doesn’t put it into action, is like one who looks into a mirror and, when he turns away, forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and doesn’t forget what he has heard but does it; he will be blessed by God. The perfect law that gives freedom is the commandments brought to perfection by Christ. Contrast the man who cannot escape his sinfulness without God with the man who lives by the moral and ethical principles of his Christian faith. He will have the glorious freedom to be all that God intended that he be.