Tried and True

I’ve often been asked, “Why does God test us?”

After all, doesn’t God already know everything? If He knows how we’re going to respond, what’s the point of the test?

Maybe we’re looking at testing the wrong way.

One of the meanings of the word test is to prove. And there’s a difference between testing something because you don’t know if it will work and testing something to demonstrate that it will.
Imagine you’ve built a table. You’re pretty proud of it, too. Then a friend looks at it and says, “You really think that thing will hold you?”

There’s only one thing to do.
Sit on it.

You’re not sitting on the table because you’re wondering whether it’s sturdy. You built it. You know what it can handle. You’re sitting on it to prove what you already know.

Now, I don’t believe God creates our pain just to see how we’ll respond. We live in a broken world, and trials are part of that reality. But when God allows us to walk through them, He can use those moments to reveal what is true about our faith…and, even more importantly, what is true about Him.

Think about Job. Satan claimed Job served God only because God had blessed him. God didn’t create Job’s suffering, but He allowed Job’s faith to be tested. And when everything was stripped away, something important was revealed. Job discovered things about his own faith that he couldn’t have learned when life was comfortable.

And here’s the part I love: when we face a test, we also get the opportunity to discover something about God.
We get to prove His faithfulness.

The hymn “‘Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus” was written by Louisa Stead. She knew something about trials. Her husband drowned while trying to rescue a boy, leaving Louisa alone with their young daughter.

Yet years later she could write:
“Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him!
How I’ve proved Him o’er and o’er.”

Those words mean something different when you know her story.

She wasn’t saying life had been easy. She was saying God had been faithful.
Maybe that’s what God can do with the tests that come into our lives. We discover what our faith is made of, but even more importantly, we discover again what God is like.

And He keeps proving Himself faithful.

There’s an old saying that there’s no testimony without a test. Maybe there’s more truth in that than we realize.

So when the next test comes, take God at His word. Trust Him one more time.
Today’s test just might become tomorrow’s testimony.

In faith,

Roy Ice