Turning Your Trials into Triumphs

Welcome to this edition of PowerPoint with Jack Graham. Today we're going to be talking about the message about prayer. Specifically, praying through pain. Praying through trials. Praying through tears. When you don't know how to pray, when you don't know what to pray. Trials drive us to our knees and often to our faces in prayer.

When we are hurting, we need help and we have the Helper who is the spirit of supplication and prayer. And we can experience trials and grow through those trials, not just go through those trials or get through those trials, but we can actually grow through our trials. That's the point of this passage at the outset that God uses trials, painful as they may be, as a process to make us more like Jesus. Not always comfortable to be a Christian, but that Christ is making us conformable to Himself.

Not comfort, but conformity. We are to be made more and more like Christ and God uses trials to shape us and make us more and more like Christ. I've discovered in the Christian life that pain is inevitable, but misery is optional. That's why James says, count it all joy. When you add it all up, it is unspeakable joy and therefore we can say rejoice in the Lord always. And again I say rejoice, but that takes prayer and more specifically, prayer for wisdom. Praying for God's wisdom.

Well let me show you what I mean by just reading this text to you. In fact, I'm going to read it from a paraphrase of James chapter 1 beginning in verse 2. The Phillips paraphrase, it's a good one, it's an oldie but goodie because I think it's a new way of hearing this for us today. When all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives my brothers, don't resist them or resent them as intruders, but welcome them as friends.

I love that. Realize, that's the old English spelling by the way, that they come to test your faith and to produce in you the quality of endurance. But let the process go on until that endurance is fully developed. You must endure to mature. And you will find you have become men of mature character with the right sort of independence. And if in the process any of you does not know how to meet any particular problem, how many of us can say there are many times in my life that I don't know how to meet the problem in front of me? I would.

So what do you do? If any of you has a particular problem, you only have to ask God who gives generously to all men without making them feel foolish or guilty and he may be quite sure that the necessary wisdom, note that word in your Bibles, wisdom will be given him. But he must ask in sincere faith without secret doubts as to whether he really wants God's help or not. The man who trusts God but with inward reservation is like a wave of the sea carried forward by the wind one moment and driven back the next.

That sort of man cannot hope to receive anything from God and the life of a man of divided loyalty will reveal instability at every turn. When you face trials, you need to learn what God is teaching you and everything in it and through it. And the way you learn is through wisdom. God gives us wisdom when we ask in the midst of our trials. You may be facing a decision today and you don't know what to do and it's stressing you out. And you've run here and there asking people questions.

You've gotten pen and paper out, sometimes this is fine. You've put down the yeses and the noes and the fors and againsts but you still don't know what to do. You need to run to God and ask Him for wisdom and He will show you. Maybe you're in a dark night of your own soul and you need light in the night. You need to know what to do and how to experience life's trials and to do it with joy rather than defeat.

So what do you do when life hurts? Number one, you pray and you pray for perspective because He speaks here of wisdom. He said pray for wisdom. There's man's wisdom and there's God's wisdom. Man's wisdom, James tells us later in his letter, is from below but God's wisdom is from above.

And so as Christians we seek God's wisdom. He is the source of all wisdom. Jesus who grew in wisdom, stature and favor with God and man is the wisdom of God. He is wisdom personified.

Jesus is the wonderful counselor who lights the night with His presence, Emmanuel, and guides us and guards us. He is wisdom. So wisdom is a spiritual experience.

Remember when trials come our way and we are to count it all joy, the only way we can do that is to wise up and to move from experience to wisdom. And wisdom is understanding. It is understanding God's ways and God's will. Moses once prayed, Lord teach me your ways.

We can look around us and see God's works and they are powerful and wonderful. But we must pray and go deeper to know God's ways in our lives. That's a prayer to pray. It's a prayer for insight, for understanding. And when we cry out to God in prayer with wisdom, He hears us and answers us. It's not always the answer we want but it's always the answer that we need. Jesus reminding us that more than anything else in our trials, in our troubles, in our tests, we need to pray and start with the fact that we need help. The most basic prayer of all, a prayer that any Christian can pray is this, help!

Help me God! Because it is the realization that we can help ourselves. We get in situations that we cannot solve, that we cannot fix. We try, we do our best, but only God can give us wisdom as to how to respond to these trials in our lives. And when you're going round and round in one of these storms in your life and you feel like you've got spiritual vertigo, you don't know which end is up, pray for wisdom. What do you do when you don't know what to do? How do you find a way when there seems to be no way? You pray and wait on God's wisdom. There are nine Hebrew words in the Bible for prayer.

There are five New Testament Greek words that are translated prayer, but the simplest and the most ablest of all of the words is simply this word that James uses. Pastor James says, ask. Just ask.

All you have to do is ask. In verse 17 of James 1 tells us that God, who is the Father of all good things, all good things come from Him, will answer when we ask. The only prayer that is unanswered is the prayer that is unasked.

James will tell us later in the letter, you have not because you ask not. And if you don't have wisdom today, it is because you have not prayed with perspective, asking for wisdom. When God gives us wisdom in prayer, He most of the time does it through His Word. There is no situation in your life, no subject in your life that is not dealt with in God's Word. So if you want wisdom, it's in the Word. Wisdom is finding and fulfilling God's Word and God's will in your life.

So pray like that. And God who is good and God who is generous to supply all of our needs, James tells us, look at it there in James 1, He will give us generously or lavishly or liberally. It's a beautiful word picture. The word give lavishly or liberally, it means with an outstretched head, with an outstretched arm.

Beautiful. It is as though God is stretching out His arm to help us or setting a table, a banquet of blessings. Don't think of prayer as overcoming God's reluctance, but rather laying hold of His highest willingness and desire to bless you. You're listening to Power Point with Jack Graham and the message, Turning Your Trials Into Triumphs. Bring fresh passion and joy to your faith with Dr. Graham's newest book, Reignite, an intimate account of how God led Dr. Graham through one of the darkest seasons of his life.

Whether you're facing disappointment, doubt, depression, or heartache, Reignite offers biblical insights to encourage you in your pain and help fan the flames of faith in your life. And it's our way to thank you for your gift to Power Point. So call today to get your copy of Reignite as thanks for your support. Call 1-800-795-4627. That's 1-800-795-4627.

You can also text the word Power Point to 313131. And don't forget to visit jackgramm.org where you can shop our e-store, give a gift online, or sign up for Dr. Graham's free daily email devotional. Our website again is jackgramm.org. Now let's get back to today's message, Turning Your Trials Into Triumphs. God is saying to us, if you have a question you don't understand, He's not going to say, you again?

Really? We've been over this again and again and again and again. God's not going to say something like, you made this mess, you get yourself out of it. The word actually means keep on asking until the answer comes. That's what Jesus said, keep on asking, keep on seeking, keep on knocking. A-S-K, ask. That's prayer.

It's the simplest word of all and yet the most powerful. You could ask God why. In the upper room it was a dark night before the cross. Jesus had been preparing the disciples for the cross. He then spoke of going to heaven and preparing a place and He said, He said, when I go to heaven, He said, you know where I'm going and you know the way. Thomas looked around, everybody else has got their head down. Thomas raises his hand, do you remember him? We call him doubting Thomas, he's really believing Thomas. He had enough doubt to believe and to ask and he said, Lord, we don't know the way.

Where are you going and how do we get there? And that's when Jesus gave us one of the greatest Scriptures in all of the Bible. I am the way and the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through me. I'm so glad that Thomas asked that question because many of us know Jesus today because He was bold enough to ask and Jesus answered His question. Even Jesus asked why on the cross. My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? So you can come with your questions, you can come with your doubts, you can come with your fears, but pray in faith and in focus.

You're not going to get this with sound bites and on Twitter, Snapchat and whatever. It's going to take time in the Word and listening to God to hear and receive God's wisdom. So when you're in the middle of the griddle, ask God to teach you because mostly we learn more in adversity than in prosperity, right?

We learn more in our losses than in our victories typically. Ask God to strengthen you, ask God to help you, ask God to get you through and then watch a flood of wisdom fill your heart and ultimately you will come to a place of peace and rest to trust in God who knows what He's doing. Pray for perspective and with perspective and then pray with patience. He talks in this passage about enduring and persevering and when we pray, we are to pray with faith and trust and to keep on praying and not give up. That's why He said if any of you pray and doubt, if you doubt, then you're like the surf of the sea that's blowing one way and then the other and everything is unstable. So you have to pray in faith, believing and persevering. When you're in a crisis and the darkness creeps in and you're tempted to doubt and we all are, that's when we need to doubt our doubts and believe our beliefs because doubt is dangerous. If our faith fails, where else do we have to stand?

Now, James is not talking about saving faith here, but sustaining faith. Faith that trusts God and holds on and hangs on and remains firm. Faith that keeps on holding on and hoping on. Faith that prays and never gives up. What did Jesus say?

Pray and do not quit. The opposite of faith is fear and doubt and James therefore gives us this picture of a person like a wave, the surf of the sea, driven by the waves of the sea and he describes this unbeliever as, again not saving faith but an unbelieving believer, if you will. He describes this kind of doubt as being double-minded. The word literally means two-souled or two-faced. It indicates impurity, an impure heart, and instability. It describes competing thoughts bouncing around in your head. Faith and unbelief. A divided mind resulting in unstable action. Unstable in all of his ways.

My friend Tony Evans, Dr. Evans, described it this way. He said there are three ways to approach trials. Faith says yes, unbelief says no, and doubt says yes and no. James says if you pray like that, don't expect to receive anything from God, wisdom or anything else. If you come to God and say, Lord, I want some of your way and some of my way, I promise you God's not going to play that game. He just won't. But if you come to the Lord and say, Lord, your way, your will, anywhere, anytime, any cost, God will show you His ways.

If you want God to help you, surrender your all to Him and don't dare take it back. Otherwise, you're unstable. Bouncing back and forth like the waves.

You're going up and down like a roller coaster, round and round. That's no way to live. Then pray with praise. And James being a good pastor and preacher gives us an illustration of this praying for wisdom. And he uses a rich man and a poor man as the illustration. He tells us in verses 9-11 that there is a poor man who praises God because he realizes that even though he doesn't have anything, he has nothing that God supplies all of his needs. And so he praises God. And then there's a rich man, a rich man who has everything but then he loses it all and he realizes that he really didn't have anything because he didn't have God, he didn't have wisdom. So now he praises God that God brought him to the end of himself and the end of his wealth and his resources to bring him to faith. Rich man, poor man.

The rain falls on the just and on the unjust, the rich and the poor, the educated, the uneducated. And if you're poor, if you don't have anything, then you can praise God who provides for your needs and trust Him through it all. You pray, Lord I don't have any money but I do have my life. I've got my family, I've got my kids, I've got my health and even if you are so poor you have none of that, you can pray, Lord I've got you.

I have you. When you get to the place in your life when you discover that Jesus is all you have, you'll know that He's all you need. But then there's a rich man who has plenty of money, he loses his health, his wife, his kids, his marriage and he realizes, I can't help myself. So Lord, thank You for bringing me to the end of myself and humbling me so that I could come to You. Praise God always because whatever you need, whether you are rich or poor or something, someone in between, He will supply all your needs through the trials, through the years and through the tears of your life. One final thing, pray with promise.

James 12, 1-12. I'm going to read this again from another translation, it's so good. It says, Happy is the man who being tested is holding his ground. That's what I wanted you to see because that's what the phrase means. Holding your ground because having been approved he shall receive the crown of life which God has promised to those who love Him.

This is so sweet. Because when the trial is done, be it in this life or in the life to come, when the trial is over and you pass the test, you get to graduate. You graduate. And the diploma in this case is the crown of life. Now the crown can refer to the eternal crown. And certainly we look forward to the day that we are crowned rewarded when we are faithful to Christ because we take our crowns and we lay them at Jesus' feet. But I believe James really is talking about not an eternal crown so much here, but an earthly crown, a temporal crown. The crown of life. The Bible says we are to reign in life with the Lord Jesus Christ. The crown mentioned here is the victor's crown. It's the crown that was given to athletes when they competed and won the race. God rewards people with the prize who run the race and finish the course with spiritual victory, who keep pressing on. How long is your trial going to last?

I don't know. But I know when you persevere through the pain, when you keep going, when you want to give up, when you keep pressing on and praising God, when it hurts so bad you don't know whether you can stand it another minute. When you learn to love God by His wisdom more than ever, when you know Him better than you've ever known Him before.

That's wisdom. I know this, in the trials of my own life, He has seemed dearer and nearer to me than any other time. So cling to Him, cherish Him, experience His victory. Pray it through.

Pray it on. And watch God work in your life. You're listening to PowerPoint with Jack Graham and the message, turning your trials into triumphs. Chances are you've faced your share of crisis.

Maybe you're even in the fight of your life right now. Or maybe you're simply feeling exhausted by the busyness of life and sapped of spiritual strength. Whatever you're facing, we want to help fan the flame of faith in your life by sending you Dr. Graham's newest book, Reignite.

This personal account of how God led Dr. Graham through his own crisis will help you focus on God during difficult seasons so you can experience fresh passion and joy in Jesus. And we'll send you a copy as thanks for your gift today. So call now to request your copy of Reignite. Call 1-800-795-4627. That's 1-800-795-4627. You can also text the word PowerPoint to 313131. And don't forget to visit jackgram.org where you can shop our e-store, give a gift online or sign up for Dr. Graham's free daily email devotional.

Our website again is jackgram.org. Pastor, what is your PowerPoint for today? Pray. Prayer should never be our last chance but our first choice. And trials, tests, difficulties should drive us to prayer on our knees, on our faces before the Lord. The most basic prayer any Christian can pray is very simple, help.

Help me God. That prayer comes from the realization that we cannot help ourselves. We can't fix things ourselves. We all get in situations that we can't control. And we try, we do our best but only God can give us wisdom to handle trials in our lives, to properly respond to the trials in our lives. And so when you are going round and round and round in a dark storm of life and you feel like you've got some kind of spiritual vertigo that's the time to pray for God's wisdom. And God's wisdom is seeing things from His perspective. You see when you face trials you need to learn what God is teaching you.

And the way you learn is through the wisdom He gives you when you simply ask Him. So pray and ask for wisdom. Ask God to show you what you need to know, what you need to learn during times of difficulty. The wisdom of God helps us move from knowing absolutely nothing in a painful experience to understanding God's good purposes through anything that comes our way. Ask God to help you. Ask God to give you hope.

Pray and seek His face and then watch as wisdom fills your heart and gives you the peace that only comes from knowing Him and what God wants to do in your life. And that is today's Power Point. Remember when you give a gift to Power Point today we'll send you Dr. Graham's brand new book, Reignite, as our thanks. Call 1-800-795-4627. That's 1-800-795-4627. You can also text the word Power Point to 313131. Text Power Point to 313131. And join us again next time as Dr. Graham brings a message about how to choose the life God created you to enjoy. That's next time on Power Point with Jack Graham. Power Point with Jack Graham is sponsored by Power Point Ministries.