The tests of faith
(originally preached as "Life under pressure – faith")
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James 1:1-4
(NB this talk uses some material from Million Leaders Mandate by John C Maxwell and available from EQUIP at www.iequip.org)
When I was a student I used to supplement my income by doing a small amount of commercial diving for an oil company based in Milford Haven in Wales. My contact for this was an amazing man called Alan Osborne. Alan was to British diving what Jacques Cousteau was to French diving – held in awe by his fiends and certainly by me!
One day, we were working on an oil jetty doing some inspection work. The water was about 30 meters deep and very gloomy at the bottom. We were packing up at the end of the day when I noticed that I had lost my diving knife, it must have fallen out of its sheath and dropped to the bottom of the Haven. Alan looked at me and said, “It’s OK, Dave, you go down and get it back, we will wait for you.” Now I was tired, the water was deep, and I just didn’t fancy groping around in the mud 100 feet under the water. So I passed up on the opportunity!
Driving home afterwards I was uncomfortably aware that I had just been set a test… “Have you got the nerve to go to that depth alone, and have you got the persistence to stay down there ‘till you find the thing. It’s OK, we will wait for you”. I had failed the test… the team went to Holland a month later to clear a blocked pipe and I was not invited.
Now, the bible says that God tests our faith, James puts it like this:
“Dear brothers and sisters, whenever trouble comes your way, let it be an opportunity for joy. For when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be strong in character and ready for anything.”
The meaning of peirasmos – to test or to tempt?
That word, tested is an interesting one because it could easily be translated tempted. It’s a word that means different things in different contexts. In James 1:3 it is about testing rather than temptation. Here’s I.Howard Marshall, a wonderfully gifted New Testament scholar, writing about this same word in 1 Peter :
“A trial is a test to see if something can stand up to the strain, a temptation is an attempt to destroy something.”
James is writing about the fact that our faith is tested in all kinds of ways. The most Christian thing to do, James says, is to rejoice in this, don’t be overwhelmed by it. It is a chance to see how you are doing spiritually. God does not tempt you, but he does test you.
What do tests demonstrate?
It is easy to get the wrong idea about this. As though God were acting like a scientist in a white coat and a clipboard, watching the antics of his human lab rats as they navigate the challenges he gives them. The important thing to grasp is that he does not need to test us to find out how we perform, he already knows. The tests are for our benefit, not his.
When we are tested, there are three possible outcomes:
First, you turn out to be weaker than you think. Early in the bible’s story there are two brothers, Cain and Abel. Each brother brought a sacrifice to God in worship – Cain brought fruit and vegetables, and Abel brought an animal from his flock. For reasons that become clear later in history, God accepted the animal sacrifice but not the vegetables.
What is important about this story is that God spoke very gently to Cain about this, encouraged him to try again; warned him that this was a challenge of faith. But Cain was so poisoned with resentment about the whole thing that he stormed off, let his bitterness grow and wound up killing his brother in a meaningless act of revenge.
Cain killed his brother because he was weak… did you know that one of the tests of faith is whether you can see yourself as you really are?
For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.
Romans 12:3
A woman was walking past the door of her bathroom one morning when she saw her husband standing on the bathroom scales. He had a rather large tummy and was pulling it in to try to improve his figure. “That won’t do you much good”, she said, “You can’t walk ‘round all day keeping your tummy pulled in”. Some people cannot see what they really are – that takes faith.
The second possible outcome of a test is that you discover that you have stagnated – you were once a dynamic growing Christian and you carried the world before you but as you got older, things have changed. Israel’s heroic king, David, was like this. He had a stunning spurt of growth in his teenage years, he faced down Goliath when no-one else in Israel would fight the Philistine champion. He re-united the tribes of Israel under his leadership, saw off their greatest enemies. We are still quoting his poetry 3.000 years after he wrote it. But in his later years he went into decline, lost control of his family and the nation. He made some rotten decisions and dodgy appointments.
David’s last instructions to his son, Solomon, was to punish some of the villains he had failed to deal with while he was alive – he cuts a sad figure as he approaches his death.
We need to be tested to show us whether our faith is alive or dormant, whether we are growing or stagnating.
Which brings us the third possible outcome of our faith being tested, we discover that we are doing OK. In the first century of the Christian church there was a small but tough group of believers in the city of Philadelphia – it is still there in modern Turkey. The Christians came under severe attack at the instigation of the local synagogue. Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, the Christians would not back down and the pressure eased. In the book of Revelation, Jesus names these Christains as exemplary, “You had little strength”, he told them, “Yet you obeyed my word and did not deny me”. We can be tested and come out knowing that we are doing OK
What kind of tests?
You may be getting nervous at this point! Just what sort of tests happen on our lives? I am going to highlight six; six ways in which we discover where we are at spiritually:
How you gonna do in the small things? Actually, this is not so much a test as a habit of mind. I had a friend who was fond of saying, “Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves!” It’s a good principle for handling your money, get the small stuff right and the habits you develop will stand you in good stead for the big stuff.
In Luke 16:10 Jesus picks up the idea of faithfulness in small financial matters being a model for the way faith works in general.
The test of small things reveals our potential for great things.
How you gonna do in the wilderness? There are times in our lives when god seems miles away and we just don’t get a buzz from our bible, from going to church or from worship. How will you do when that happens? Now, this is part of the normal Christian life, and we need to be able to cope with times like this. The songwriter who composed Psalms 42 and 43 was experiencing this as he wrote. Even though he felt rotten, he kept on praying, continued to worship and held on to his faith in God. He passed the wilderness test!
The wilderness test reveals how we will cope when we are spiritually dry.
How you gonna do when your integrity is tested? There are times when the pressure to compromise is very great and very subtle. Peter faced this when he visited the Church in Antioch, a fellowship mostly composed of non-Jewish believers.
Peter was happy enough to enjoy a bacon sandwich at the men’s breakfast in Antioch, he was having a great time with the gentile Christians. Then one day a team of Christians arrived from Jerusalem, they were disciples of James and very, very Jewish. They were suspicious of gentiles, and believed that is was wrong to eat with them. So Peter quietly distanced himself from the gentile Christians… of course, others were influenced by this, even Barnabas.
Peter was intimidated and lost his integrity as a result. How you gonna do when you are afraid of someone… you gonna back down? The integrity test reveals whether we will compromise under pressure.
How you gonna do in combat? Christian living is war, a constant fight against the world, the flesh and the Devil. God graciously shields us from the full force of this sometimes, but there are times when we face real adversity. Paul writes about something he calls ‘the day of evil’ – those periods on our lives when we seem to be at the receiving end of some personal attention from Satan.
I experienced a little of this a little while ago praying for a woman who was deply involved in a practice called Shamanism – a variety of occult activity. She wanted to be free of this, but found that she could not even say the words to ask God for help. As if her toungue was tied; she knew what to say, but just could not say it. As we prayed, I could ‘feel’ the presence of evil… this woman would try to pray and I could ‘feel’ her being jerked back as though she was attached to a chain. That evening she felt better, but she ws still under the control of whatever had her when she left. We continued to pray for her through the week and I had some very strange feelings… what if Satan gets my kids, what if you get cancer and die, what if Cathie dies in a car crash? I kept getting the feeling that, if I prayed for this woman, I would be punished in some way.
The test of combat exposes your ability to stand when you are doing God’s will and something powerful is against you.
At the end of the week we met again and she was free – she remains free to this day.
How you gonna do when your endurance is tested? I have a friend who is fond of pointing out that there ought to be eleven commandments, not ten. His eleventh commandment is this, “Thou shalt bash on!” He was always pointing out that we give up too easily. There are two New Testament sayings that relate to this:
“Don’t get tired of doing what is good. Don’t get discouraged and give up, for we will reap a harvest of blessing at the appropriate time.”
Galatians 6:9
“So my dear brothers and sisters, be strong and steady, always enthusiastic about the Lord’s work, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.”
1 Corinthians 15:58
The endurance test reveals your long-term stickability.
Perhaps the most important test, how you gonna do when it’s a question of who’s the boss? There is a scene in the movie The Day After Tommorrow when hundreds of New Yorkers take shelter from a terrible snowstorm in a library. One of them phones his father, who is a world-famour climate scientist. The father tells his son that he should stay in the building and wait to be rescued, under no circumstances should he try to get out of New York by himself. After several days the storm abates and the most people decide to walk south and find rescue.
There is a scene where Jake Gylenthall, who plays the young man, tries to dissuade people from leaving, but most of them ignore him. Even the authority figures like the police are leaving, what should he and his friends do?
The father had told him to stay and wait for rescue, so that is what he did, everyone who left the library froze to death that night.
The test of Christ’s lordship reveals what you will do when it is a question of who really has the final authority in your life.