“My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” James 1:2-4…………
God’s tests for me are never easy. They can be downright hard. Even seemingly impossible. And, perhaps because He has called me to devote my life 100% to Him and ministry, I get tested sometimes seemingly constantly, and sometimes in pretty big ways. And somehow along the way I got the idea the Lord tests me by teaching me something, then testing me on it, then moving me forward whereby I never need to look back and revisit old lessons and old testing. Oh, but not so! For sometimes God does bring me back to old lessons, and tests me again on those lessons, and here are 10 reasons I believe He does this, not just with me, but with any of us:
- To make sure we don’t forget what we learned and how to apply it to our lives. When times passes, we can forget!
- To remind us not to get prideful, and to be humble, and to repent if in fact we have become prideful.
- To keep us strong in the areas He has taught us and tested us just as an athlete doesn’t just train and stop once he wins a race or game but keeps training to stay in shape to be able to keep doing well and even winning.
- To further refine us where He has refined us.
- To further grow us where He has grown us.
- To help us do better where we haven’t done as well as we could have done in the past.
- To show us where we need more strengthening, in study, in spending time with Him, in relationship to Him and with Him.
- To further make us like Himself where He has already begun to do so.
- To further draw us to Himself because testing causes us if we desire victory to look to Him to be our strength and help, our guide and sustainer, our leader and teacher, our everything we need not to just pass the test but to persevere in life, the life of a Christ follower.
- To better equip us to help others to learn the same lessons.
Just as an athlete keeps training, so a student not only keeps learning, but goes back to previous lessons to be refreshed, and gets tested on things already learned, in which the student has already been tested, to keep the student on his or her toes. To keep him or her successful and victorious. To help the student to remember, and to grow, and to carry on.
How easy it might be for us to forget past lessons on which we have already been tested, and to fall back, to get flabby as an athlete might who quits training and staying in shape, and to get weak where God has strengthened us, if all we did was learn and grow, be tested, and never go back to the areas in which we have learned and grown and been tested.
The Lord knows what He is doing, friend. If He is testing us in something in which He has already taught and tested us, He has His reasons. Instead of resisting Him, or refusing the test, or complaining, etc., we need to simply trust Him, yield to Him, take the test – in HIS STRENGTH, for HIS GLORY, amen!