When Trials Come (Part 2 of 3)

The Truth Network Podcast is brought to you by Zola Levitt Ministries. Being a Christian doesn't mean that life will be problem-free. In fact, as long as we're alive, we're going to experience hardship and trouble. It's going to be part of the story.

There's just no getting around it. So if we can't avoid trials, how do we respond when they come our way? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg answers that question in a way that might surprise you. We continue in James chapter 1. Well, let's get straight to the first verse, where James is introduced to us as the writer. James, he introduces himself.

What about the readers? Well, they're the twelve tribes scattered among the nations. What does this mean? Is this distinctly Jewish? Is this a letter just for Jewish folks? In which case we would be hard-pressed to find any meaningful application after all this time and to a congregation such as this. Well, we need to think it out, don't we? I think we'd be helped by turning over two pages to the beginning of 1 Peter and to see the distinct similarity between Peter's introduction and James's introduction.

They don't use the same terminology explicitly, but it is pretty similar. Peter designates himself an apostle of Jesus, one who has been set apart and sent by Jesus. And who is he writing to?

Well, he's writing to God's elect. Who are they? Well, they're strangers in the world. Where are they? Well, they're scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, and so on.

And what is their distinguishing feature? Well, they all belong to God the Father, sprinkled by the blood of Jesus and sanctified by the Holy Spirit. And he's turned back to James chapter 1, and he writes to these people, the twelve tribes who are scattered among the nations. Now, I think that what James is doing here is simply exploding the term which was a comprehensive term for Israel itself. And he includes in the terminology, it would seem, all, regardless of nationality, who trust in Christ as Savior. We have to wait till verse 18 to get the first real indication of this, where he says in verse 18 of chapter 1, The Father chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created. And then you will notice, he begins chapter 2, addressing the believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ. And what we find, then, in these epistles—and expressly, again, back in 1 Peter—Peter in chapter 2 picks up these Old Testament pictures and applies them directly to the variegated company of both Jew and Gentile, where he says, in verse 9, you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light, once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God, once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. And so, in the same way as the Hebrew people would look and do look for a day when they might return to Jerusalem, so the believers in the Lord Jesus Christ are scattered throughout the world, anticipating the day of their own great homecoming. That's why, you see, it is important for us, as nationalistic as we may be in our fervor, to always remember that the Christian's homeland is heaven, that our ultimate destination is there, and that the affairs of our world, as dramatic and as unsettling as they are, the only real way for us to gain any sense of sensibility to the vastness of it all is to take refuge in the designations that we have before us here—to recognize that we are those who are scattered throughout the world, but God knows that we're scattered throughout the world, and that God has a plan to deal with the scattering. We've been reading Matthew this week in our home to two of us.

There's only two who was in it. But this is what Jesus says, And then the Son of Man will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from the one end of the heavens to the other. Have you ever sit and look up at the sky and imagine all the people in China and all the people in India and all the people in Pakistan and all the people in Indonesia and all the people all over the place everywhere, and you say, How in the world are all these people who believe in Jesus all gonna get together in one tribe and company and nation and all sing the song of the Lamb? Don't worry about it.

It's not your to-do. But that's God's purpose. And when we see our place in the vastness of that scheme, then we have an understanding of how we fit.

Just sitting yesterday in the airport, watching people come and go, it just could make me weep thinking about all these lives. Just going here and there and everywhere. Well, I'm sure you feel the same. Now, once he has identified himself and identified his recipients, he gets straight to the matter at hand. What he's going to do now—and we can only dip into this, and it's a start for us at least—but what he's going to do now is to tell the redeemed people of God how to live in the world.

Well, that's helpful, isn't it? Here's a letter to tell us how to live in the world. How are we supposed to live?

How am I supposed to go to my work? How should I treat other people? How do I handle this?

How do I handle that? And lest we should feel that he was taking a long time to get going, he launches right into the heart of things, confronts his readers with the disturbing and yet liberating fact that the display of the Christian faith is not revealed in some blissful, otherworldly experience but is revealed in the rough and tumble of everyday life. Now, don't let's miss this. Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you face trials of many kinds, or, as Phillips paraphrases it, when all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives, my brothers, don't resent them as intruders but welcome them as friends. When all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives.

Let's just be honest. Our lives are crowded in upon by all kinds of trials and temptations. If that is not true, then we're dead. If we're alive, it's true. We are not yet the completed picture. We are not yet in heaven.

We're in the middle of this situation. And living in this world places demands upon us and confronts us with challenges and buffets us in ways that are painful and sorrowful, confronts us with things that bring failure and tears, doubts and disappointments, cries and groanings, trials and temptations. We are, as we've said before, a congregation that turns to the Bible Sunday by Sunday, and our lives are largely marked by quiet desperation. Hardship and difficulty, trouble, various forms of suffering, come to all of us at some time or another. One of the greatest illusions of life is this—to look at another person—and I don't care who the person is, any person—and think, I wish I was her. She's obviously got it down.

Or, what does he know about this? If ever—if ever—we were to start at any point in this room and just share one area, one area of trial or temptation, we would be here for a solid month of Sundays before we completed the project. I don't need to go beyond my own heart to tell you that. And thirty-plus years of pastoral life have introduced me to it on every front. We all face trials and temptations that are variegated.

The word in Greek is multicolored. They come at us whenever, wherever, in all kinds of ways. And we are all in this class. There's no exemption from this class. You cannot pass out of this class. You can't say, Oh, yeah, I did that.

I don't need to take that in this course. No, you never get out of this course. That's my experience. Just when you think you've finished one, bam! You get another one. And the world says to you, deny it. Conceal it. Shoo it away.

Maybe it'll run off and leave you. Or deny that it has an impact on you. Live above it. Or choose to go beyond it, or whatever it might be. Or resent it and grow bitter, as if a horrible intruder had come into your house and simply scattered everything all around and run away and left you desolate.

But no! What does James say? Consider it unalloyed joy. Consider it pure joy when you face trials of various kinds. How can this possibly be?

This seems to be an absolute contradiction, doesn't it? Joy trials. Most of our contemporary life is lived trying to deal with life in such a way that we don't have to have trials. And if we can avoid trials, then we'll have joy. But if we have trials, we can't possibly have joy. Therefore, we've got to get rid of these trials in some way so that we can get on with joy.

James says, no. If you want to know pure, unadulterated joy, then you will find it in your trials. What? You see, when this begins to infect a life or a congregation, then we'll have a very different impact on Cleveland.

Very different. You see, because people are so used to the Christian success story. They're so used to the Christian overcoming story. They're so used to the beautiful people's story. So that the unsuccessful, nonbeautiful, non-overcomers—I say, well, there's no point in going in there—those people have it all together. Why do they think that? Because we don't tell the truth. Because we have one of the finest cover-up societies known to man. And we baptize it with Christian orthodoxy.

Because if we were ever to admit the sorry mess that we really are, then maybe that would magnify the wonder of who God really is and draw people to God rather than to us. Now, I know you think all kinds of things, I'm sure. But I for a long time now have imagined everybody that I see with a wheelbarrow.

I've told you this before. And I have a wheelbarrow too. And when you see me, you can think of me and my wheelbarrow. And I have stuff in my wheelbarrow. I may have it hitched to the back of my car, you may like my car, you may hate my car, but I have a wheelbarrow. And in that wheelbarrow, I have trials and temptations and fears and failures and disappointments and heartaches and longings.

I don't wake at three o'clock in the morning just to think about the soccer scores from England, and neither do you. We are all in this together. And, says James, the way in which you can count it joy is not by moving yourself into a citadel that is absent from the trouble but is by your attitude in the trouble.

And how do we do it? Well, look at verse 3. Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds. Why would I do that? Verse 3, here comes the answer. Because you know.

Because you know. In other words, we have to bring how we feel under the dictate of what we know. If we continue to put what we know under the proviso of how we feel, then we will make all of our knowings subservient to our feelings. But isn't this true in so many areas of life? I think it is. Now, we'll come back to this.

We need to stop. But you'll see that there is a progression, because you know what? Well, you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Faith by itself does not develop perseverance. It is only faith when it is tested. I could take my jacket off and show you my biceps, but I don't think that would be good. Humility forbids it.

But the fact of the matter is, it'd be a sorry spectacle. Because unless you stress those things out, unless you test them, they atrophy. They just go away. And faith becomes significant under stress. So the very things that we seek to avoid are the very things that make us.

The Puritans had it right. Trials come to make us and to remake us. In shunning trials we miss blessings. That's what James is saying. Consider it pure joy when you face trials of various kinds, when whatever it is—we don't need to go into all the details of it, whatever it might be, different from one to another, but all of us understand it—whenever you face that, consider it pure joy because you know that now you have a chance to turn this tiny little muscle into something of significance. And when the testing is significant and is succeeded upon, perseverance is produced, and it is perseverance that gives way to maturity.

Take, for example, one illustration, and we'll finish. We say the apostles' creed together from time to time. How does it begin? I believe in God the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth. I believe in God the Father.

That's what we say. But, you know, we don't really know that we believe in God as our Father. Until the day when everything collapses around us. Until the day when it seems that his fatherly care has been removed from us. Until the day when it appears that he doesn't even hear our prayers, let alone answer our prayers. Until the day when it is faith with the lights out.

Until the day when it is faith in the waiting room. Then we discover whether we believe that he is Father. When you hear the phrase, Abba, Father, I bet most of you think, first of all, about a song, and secondly, about some kind of exultant response.

You know, Abba, Father, oh, yes, you know, Daddy, oh… You know, sort of very strong and emotional and just sort of rising up on the crest of it all. But in actual fact, Romans chapter 8 is all about suffering. It's all about suffering. And it is out of the experience of suffering that Paul says, and this is the wonder of it, that in the experience of that, you would ever cry out, Abba, Father. You see, unbelieving people cry out, Oh God, what do you think you're doing? God, I tell you… The Christian person, through all of the pains, when they can't pray, says, Oh Father, my Father! And sometimes that's all. Sometimes that's the whole prayer.

All you can get out. Father, that is one of the indications of the reality of saving faith—that one word. Small wonder that Jesus told the Pharisees, I have no interest in your convoluted, lengthy prayers, all of your shambles and your shibboleths, when you pray, say.

I have a strong sense that God desires to do something in Parkside Church along these lines, and it's a scary prospect, actually. You would never want to be the teacher. You should never want to be the teacher.

Because you have to study it, sleep with it, be confronted by it, preach it in front of your wife. She nudges you. You know, she knows.

And then there's everybody else. Well, we will go on, shall we? Yes, we will. We can find joy in our trials because of what we know and because of who we know. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life.

Alistair will be back to close with prayer in just a minute, so please keep listening. Here at Truth for Life, we teach the whole Bible, even the hard parts. And we hope that as you hear the messages on this program, your faith in God will be strengthened, especially during hard times.

And if you're a college student, we know that the pressures you may be facing on the college campus can be intense. Christian beliefs are far from popular, and you may be wrestling with doubts of your own about things you've been taught for years. There's no question that the college campus, even a Christian campus, can be a testing ground for what we really believe. And as a result, we have chosen a book titled Surviving Religion 101 to help you deal with the doubts you may be experiencing as well as to help you face some of the challenges to your faith you may be up against. This book tackles many of the common objections you'll hear, and it equips you to engage in a conversation with others with honesty and with compassion. Most importantly, it reminds you of what God says in his Word.

His voice is the one we need to follow. Now tomorrow is the last day I'll mention the book Surviving Religion 101, so if you'd like a copy, don't delay. You can request your copy when you give a donation online at truthforlife.org slash donate or call us at 888-588-7884. If you'd rather mail your donation along with your request for the book Surviving Religion 101, write to us at Truth for Life, P. O. Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio.

Our zip code is 44139. Now here's Alistair to close us today with prayer. Small wonder that James writes, Let not many of you become teachers, for those who teach will be judged with greater strictness. Lord, we come to you this morning pushing the wheelbarrows of our trials and our temptations. And we pray that you will sow within us the seeds of reality, the reality about which James writes here, the joy that comes by not denying their existence or running from them or hiding them, but in recognizing that it is down this very road of sadness and pain and disappointment and often fear and discouragement that you fashion in your people the things that make us useful to others that we meet who are surprised that we even have a wheelbarrow and that we even have anything in it. Forgive us, Lord, for presenting a front and a face to the community that suggests that this would be a nice place to come if you've got your act together, but not until. And we marvel that you took us when we were such a mess. In fact, if you had waited for us to be in a position where we would ever have been deemed acceptable to you, then of course we could never have come. But we thank you for your amazing and redeeming love. And may your grace and your mercy and your peace rest upon your people now and forevermore. Amen.

I'm Bob Lapine. None of us would choose to go through a trial. Trials are painful and hard, but the fact is there is something for us to gain in the process, and we'll find out more as we listen tomorrow. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.