Trials get your attention. They can draw you toward toward Christ, or you may choose to runaway. What’s your usual response when a trial comes your way? This article by Lucy Ann Moll, an ACBC-certified counselor and a doctoral student, first appeared here on her website. It used used by permission.
Who likes trials? Only masochists, right?
Yet in Jesus Christ’s flip-the-world-upside-down gospel — where the weak are strong, and the poor are rich, and the messed up are cleaned up — trials are the wild path to joy, to true happiness. And here’s a key:
Christ gave his life for you in order to give his life to you
so that he could live his live through you.
Blessing of Trials
Sucky trials get your attention. Then you feel a need to deal. And Jesus is the real deal.
Did you know he wants you to think like he thinks? Did you know you can — what a mind-boggling thought! — because he empowers you to do so? It’s all Jesus.
‘For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ. 1 Corinshtians 2:16, ESV
With Jesus, trials help you and me see, really see. They help us gain a new perspective, God’s perspective, as long as we’re open to listen to him. But Satan tries to interfere.
As Timothy Lane and Paul Trip say in How People Change:
Nothing is subtle about the ongoing war that rages throughout the Christian life. Trials and temptations about, but we respond to them from a new vantage point.
New Perspective of Trials
We can change our perspective of trials. Here are just three ideas.
1. Remember that God continually blesses you. He is for you. You belong to him, and he wants you to experience the abundant life.
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. John 10:10.
2. Decide to want what God wants: a close relationship with Jesus. Let go of lesser pleasures that entice. Seek the greatest pleasure and spend your life enjoying God.
So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. Colossians 2:6-7
3. Embrace the truth that God uses sucky trials to increase your desire for the highest dream.
In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 1 Peter 1:6-7.
Isn’t it wonderful to know that you belong to God? That you can spend the rest of your life enjoying him? That trials have a goal?
And what is this goal? To become more and more Christlike as you love God and love your neighbor.
Invitation for YOU
Friends, we gave one hope: Christ. But sometimes life beat us down. This is where biblical counseling can help. If you’re facing trials and want God’s best for you, I invite you to consider biblical counseling.
The counselors at Biblical Counseling Center meet with counselees in four locations in greater Chicago and a fifth location in South Carolina as well as on Skype. Contact us. We invite your comments and questions.
May our great God bless you, as I know he will. Ephesians 1:3
