The Blessing Behind the Trial

The Apostle James begins this epistle by saying: “...James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the 12 tribes that are scattered abroad, greetings...” It is a greeting that he gives before beginning his letter; that was a very typical custom in the ancient world, where at the beginning it is like saying, dear so-and-so, I am sending you this letter hoping that you are well and that Mrs. So-and-so and the children are also well, etc. This is a greeting from James.

James was Jesus Christ’s brother, Jesus’ flesh-and-blood brother. And yet, how interesting, he says:

“James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.” He identifies himself as a servant of Jesus Christ, even though he is his brother. It makes me think of what Second Corinthians 5:17 says, I believe it is: “And even if we knew someone according to the flesh, we no longer know him that way.” If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Behold, all things have become new. It says:

“...From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh, and even if we knew Christ according to the flesh, we no longer know him that way...”

That is, here the identity James assigns to Jesus is not that of his earthly, flesh-and-blood brother, but that of his Lord. And that is how we must always identify Jesus: as our Lord, and ourselves as his servants. No matter how important you may be—whether you are a pastor, an evangelist, or the pastor of a very large or very small congregation—we are all servants of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And this letter was written to the Christian Jews who were in the Dispersion. It is a letter that actually has some Hebrew touches, and we will see that later. It is a letter written to the 12 tribes that are in the Dispersion, referring to the Hebrews who had been scattered from Jerusalem and were in every part of the world where they might read his letter. The Dispersion, the Diaspora—all the Hebrews who had been taken to different parts of the earth—was called the Dispersion, the Diaspora; that is, the scattering. The Jews were scattered everywhere.

But James specifically addresses his letter to believing Jews, Christians who are in these different places, and says, “Greetings”—that is, blessing, health, and so forth, prosperity.

So here is the first point among the many subjects James addresses, and perhaps I will continue the next time we are together on Wednesday, perhaps next Wednesday. But we are going to talk about a word found here. Verse 2 says:

“...My brothers, count it all joy when you encounter various trials...”

I want to talk a little about that, about the Lord’s desire for us to understand trials. How many have gone through a trial or are going through one? I think all of us have, haven’t we?

I believe we have to learn how to face trials. Sometimes churches do not speak enough about trials, especially Pentecostal and charismatic churches like ours. We speak more about triumph and victory, and that is beautiful and necessary, but it is also good to focus on the role of trials in the believer’s life.

It says, “...Rejoice exceedingly when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its complete work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing...”

How interesting that James begins by speaking about trials. It is the first thing he writes about. Why? Because many of these Christians were in different parts of the Middle East—in Palestine, Syria, Greece, and Rome—and they were being persecuted, sometimes by their own Jewish brothers, who viewed them as traitors to the Mosaic religion. Some were living in poverty; others were suffering in various ways for being Christians; and still others were simply struggling with life, with the difficult life that I imagine people lived in the first century.

And James, guided by the Holy Spirit, writes first of all to these people who need comfort and strength, and... he tells them something that might be surprising if you look at it carefully: count it all joy when you encounter various trials.

Was James a masochist or what? He gives some very strange advice. If you find yourself in a trial, consider it a reason to rejoice—and not merely to rejoice in some ordinary way, but to rejoice exceedingly, to rejoice greatly. Either he knows something we do not know, or there is something hidden in all this, or he is crazy. But there is indeed something very important here.

But I am interested in this phrase: when you encounter various trials. Why various? Because there are many of them. Because life has many trials. What did the Lord Jesus Christ say? He said, “In the world you will have affliction.” That is the nature of human life. We live in a place riddled with trials and difficulties. That is the nature of the world: it is difficult; it is dangerous. Every day I become more convinced of it; the longer I walk through this world, the more convinced I become that it is dangerous and that we are like defenseless animals walking through a forest full of wild beasts that are watching us from the underbrush. We see their glowing eyes stalking us in the middle of the night, wanting to destroy us. It is a difficult and dangerous world.

That does not mean that we should fill ourselves with negativity and live in complete paranoia, always seeing threats in everything. No, I believe Christians can rejoice greatly. No one has more reason to enjoy life than a child of God. But we must also know that the world is dangerous and that there are difficulties and dangers of every kind.

That is why, with each passing day, I understand Jesus’ prayer more and more: “But deliver us from evil,” or “deliver us from the evil one.” What the Lord actually said was “from the evil one,” meaning the devil, who produces evil. I was preaching in Puerto Rico this weekend, and God gave me a word for the congregation where we preached. Meche was also there and preached on Saturday, by the way. They really loved Meche’s sermon, and I felt very jealous, but I prayed and God healed me.

I rejoiced greatly; the people really enjoyed her teaching. I spoke about Jabez on Friday night. Jabez also prayed and said, “Oh, that you would bless me, that you would enlarge my territory, that your hand would be with me, and that you would deliver me from evil so that it might not harm me.” To be delivered from evil.

The world is dangerous; the world is full of afflictions, trials, difficulties, and dangers. That is the world in which we live. And Christians must know how to face the nature of this world in which we live. Trials will come into your life whether you want them to or not, at some point. No matter how well you are walking, how well you behave, how much you pray, or how much you fast, you will never leave this world without having tasted difficult times. Get used to that now and take courage from that fact.

Because the important thing is that, in the midst of all these things, God will bring you through. That is why Paul says, “Rather, in all these things we are more than conquerors.” Not above them, or in spite of them—no: in all these things we are more than conquerors. Christians need to understand and arm themselves with the knowledge and clear understanding that before we leave this world, we will go through a good 10 or 20 serious scares and find ourselves up to our necks in water.

And the question is, how are we going to get through it? By believing that God will always deliver us from all our troubles and all our struggles. “Seven times the righteous falls, but from them all he will rise again,” says the word of the Lord.

So it is not a question of whether they will come. We are warriors; we are soldiers; we are in a world riddled with evil. Trials will come. The point is that the word of the Lord has many teachings to give us about how to make our way through the difficulties, trials, and tribulations that come in this world.

I am going to take some time to work through this, and I will stop wherever I have to stop, wherever my time runs out, but I want to continue.

So the first thing to notice is that: various trials. Many different trials will come, and the important thing is that the word of the Lord always calls us to an attitude of hope and an expectation of victory in all the tribulations in which we...

Trials have a purpose, they have a use, and they have fruit that they can produce. Many times God designs them to bring about a positive result in us. And I will speak a little more about that later: trials are often God’s scalpel for removing something from us that does not serve his purposes, because he wants to use us, and that does not serve us either, because it will cause us harm.

So trials are sometimes God’s interventions in our flesh, in our minds, and in our emotions, which bring about a result in us. How does God work in the human soul? I do not believe that God necessarily just comes in—although sometimes he does; he can act sovereignly and, through his grace, make a change in us—but many times God works through circumstances, through human relationships, and through experiences that shape us. Because God does not violate human nature, the way he has made us.

He does not come in and manipulate the wiring of the human personality. What he does, in accordance with the nature he has given us and with the laws he has instilled in us—in our nervous system and our spiritual system—is place us in a series of dramas or psychodramas. Psychologists and psychiatrists use these too: many times they have a person act out and develop a drama in front of someone, or in a group they have one person say one thing and another say something else, so that a person can, as it were, rehearse certain situations and let the mind pass through them, causing an inner change. Because a psychologist or psychiatrist cannot climb inside you and cut something out with a little spoon or a pair of scissors. No, no; what he does is work through those psychodramas.

Well, God does the same thing, except that God has far more resources at his disposal. He can develop an entire drama throughout your life and allow certain things to happen. And sometimes the devil also comes and wants to harm your life and destroy you, and God is there watching and allows it... but then he takes that and directs it.

There may also be situations in your life; the world has its own laws, its own dynamics, and God is also there, I believe, in a mysterious way. And he uses all those different dynamics, laws, circumstances, and experiences of life, channeling everything toward a beneficial purpose for you.

Say amen, if only to let me know you are there. That is why the Word says that all things work together for good for those who love God—that is, for those who are called according to his purposes.

That is the wonderful thing: everything that happens in the life of a child of God—everything—is in some way at work, and God channels it. It is like different rivers, different currents: God takes everything and carries it toward an end. The Bible says that God’s end is always good. That is in Hebrews; I do not remember the passage, but you can look it up later. Hebrews says that God’s end is always positive, always good. And now I am obsessed with where it says that. That is my problem: sometimes you get into these things and cannot rest until you find them... but believe me, it does say that God’s end is good.

So that is how these processes are. At first, the sufferings of God’s children are serious, but God uses everything; God directs everything toward good. God uses all these things to guide us, and that is why James is trying, here in coded form... I want to take you through all these different moments that point this out to us.

We must count it all joy because there is a purpose in it. God allows all these things because he has a positive end in view. Somehow, he is not talking about rejoicing emotionally; he is saying that we should have... “Lord, what can I learn from this?” When you go through a difficult situation or a trial, always ask yourself: “Lord, what good thing do you have behind this? What are you saving me from? What are you preparing me for? What are you teaching me? What are you cutting out of me? What are you cultivating in my life through this psychodrama that you are putting me through right now? And how can I find joy in the midst of this difficulty?”

The last thing I am going to tell you in this process is that the foremost expert in suffering, trials, and tribulations is our Lord Jesus Christ. Sometimes we believe that if a person is very powerful, very wise, and very holy, he will not go through tribulations. But we must understand that the great, great expert in suffering and sorrow is named Jesus Christ.

That is why Paul said that he wanted to come to know Jesus in his resurrection and in his sufferings. Many people want to know Jesus only in his resurrection, in his power, in his most victorious moment, which was when God raised him from the dead. But what about his sufferings?

Paul knew that he could not know Jesus fully, deeply, and completely unless he knew him in that dark dimension of his person and his ministry: his sufferings and his sorrows.

And if we want to have true intimacy with Jesus, we too must go through our own trials. That is why the Lord said, “Take up your cross every day and follow me, if you wish.”

Look, and I will leave you with this, Isaiah, chapter 53:7. Again, remember, when you go through situations of tribulation and difficulty, in some mysterious way you are entering into fellowship with the Son of God, who suffered so much in the world for us, for our sins, through tribulations, and who, it says, was made perfect. God perfected him through afflictions in his human nature—that is, the human part of Jesus; he was perfected through various afflictions and difficulties.

But Isaiah 53:7 tells us, it says:

“...He was oppressed”—that is the suffering servant, the famous portrait of the suffering servant. Prophetically, the prophet Isaiah, hundreds of years before Jesus, spoke about the nature of his life and ministry. In fact, look at verse 3; it says:

“...Despised and rejected among men, a man of sorrows...” It was as though his very nature was sorrow. “...A man of sorrows, acquainted with grief...” Then in verse 7 it says, “...He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb he was led to the slaughter, and like a sheep before its shearers, he was silent and did not open his mouth. By imprisonment and judgment he was taken away, and who will recount his veneration? For he was cut off from the land of the living, and for the rebellion of my people he was wounded. His grave was appointed with the wicked, yet he was with the rich in his death, although he had never done evil...”

His sufferings were not because he was in sin or because he had done something wrong—no, although he had never done evil... There are people who say, “You are going through problems because you pulled some dirty trick somewhere, and now you are paying for it. Ah, this illness—yes, you brought it upon yourself. This illness you have means that you are not praying enough, or there is something for which God is...” Brothers and sisters, stop that foolishness. Many times, a trial or a difficulty may come during the times of greatest blessing and growth in our lives. The trial may come during the times when we are following the Lord most faithfully.

“...Although he had never done evil, nor was there any deceit in his mouth, nevertheless, Jehovah desired to crush him...”

It was not the devil who led Christ to the cross and to his suffering—no. For some reason, God, in his lordship, his sovereignty, and his knowledge of who Jesus was, desired to crush him. Of course, because there was a very great cosmic drama that God was carrying out.

“...Subjecting him to suffering. When he has offered his life as an atonement for sin, he will see offspring, he will live for many days, and the will of Jehovah will prosper in his hand. He will see the fruit of the affliction of his soul and be satisfied...”

Do you not also see an implication here for us? When we go through a trial, God puts us through the wringer, and we come out smelling of smoke, twenty pounds lighter from the terrible fright we endured, and the drought, the hunger, the fear, and the difficulties. Listen, we come out with our skin fresher and more radiant; we feel lighter. We have learned a few things, and then God gives us blessing.

“...He will see offspring, he will live for many days, and the will of Jehovah will prosper in his hand...”

Many times, trials and difficulties result in blessing for us. If we go through them as God wants us to, we live for many days, we see offspring, and God’s purpose prospers in our lives. So, like Christ, we too will have our difficulties. The first teacher, our patron saint in these matters, is named Jesus.

If you are young, brace yourself, because several such moments are coming. If you are older, you will look back and see times through which God has brought you, and perhaps we still have a few more ahead of us. But whatever the case, we need to know that trials play a role; they are part of it.

Now, the good thing is that when we are walking in the ways of the Lord and are under his administration, no matter what happens, the devil gets away with nothing. God compels him to do God’s work for the benefit of his children; everything will work out for good. So trust in the Lord. No one wants to go through a trial, and when we are in the midst of one, we must ask him, “Lord, may my faith not fail; may I bless you; may I kiss your hand; and although I do not understand why, may I know that you have something in mind in this process I am going through, and that if I stand firm, submit myself, swallow that bitter drink, and bless you, in the end I will emerge strong and blessed, more radiant and more powerful than ever.” Amen.

So, brothers and sisters, tonight let us receive that blessing from the Lord, and may God help us to regard it as a kind of mysterious joy when we find ourselves in various tribulations, and to believe that God has a purpose for them and that, if we give him time, we will see the fruit; we will see the result. God never sleeps or slumbers. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. He is never asleep.

When we are going through tribulations, he is there with us in the trial and in the difficulty. He says, “Do not worry. I am with you every day. I am the one who strengthens you; I lift you up; I defend you. We are going to get through this together, and we will emerge stronger than ever.” May God bless you tonight, and may that assurance remain with us at all times. Amen.