The Trial of Your Faith (Part 1)

 

A trial of faith is, well, whatever tries your faith! For faith to be TRIED, faith must be contradicted. Contradiction is whatever questions – TO ME -- the faithfulness of God, and thus, the sanity of my faith in Him.

 

Now, don't misunderstand. God doesn't say, "I need to test your faith, so I'm going to do all kinds of things in your life to see if I can trick you into thinking I am a liar. But if you believe Me anyways, then I will know you really trust me." No. God isn't trying to figure out whether we have faith. A trial of faith is intended to BUILD our faith. It is intended to more firmly establish us in an eternal relationship with God.

 

But why must our faith be questioned and contradicted? Well, it wouldn't have to be if we started out free of unbelief, sin, darkness, and error. But we don't. In fact, we start out thoroughly entrenched in all of those things. The trial of faith is necessary to bring us OUT.

 

If I am reasonably comfortable living in error and darkness, and God begins to bring me into the Truth, I am going to panic. I won't understand. I will initially think that my error is right, and that the Truth must be wrong. That will be my perception and my reaction – because it is the only frame of reference I have ever had. God's dealings with me will therefore appear to me to CONTRADICT what ought to be if God is faithful. The trial is whether I will trust God despite all of this.

 

Now, if you limit Truth to doctrines and laws and rules to live by, then you won't understand what I'm talking about. I'm not so much talking about those things, although in the end, they will be affected. I'm talking about your inner constitution – your inner relationship with God. It is there that the trial of faith comes. The trial of faith will involve outward circumstances, but in the final analysis, the trial of faith isn't happening OUT HERE. It is happen IN YOU.

 

The trial of faith speaks to your personal relationship to God

– what you are to HIM, and what HE is to YOU.

The rest of what is going on is simply what is being used to deal with that relationship.

 

Excerpted from : THE TRIAL OF YOUR FAITH by David A. DePra at THE GOOD NEWS  © 1998-2005. All rights reserved. (Please include this line to forward the message).