The Quality of Endurance

Children are so cute when they’re babies. They’re so helpless and dependent. But as they get older, they learn certain skills. They learn to feed themselves and dress themselves. They learn to take care of themselves. They can’t be babies forever.

In the same way, we don’t want be baby Christians our entire lives. We want to grow up and mature.

I like the J. B. Philips translation of James 1:2–4, which says, “When all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives my brothers, don’t resent them as intruders, but welcome them as friends! Realise [sic] 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, and you will find you have become men of mature character with the right sort of independence.”

God allows hardship and trials in our lives so that we’ll grow up spiritually.

A teacher, for instance, might say to the class, “I’m going to test you today. It’s a pop quiz. So close your textbooks and take out a sheet of paper.” When I was in school, I was never excited when the teacher announced a pop quiz because I wasn’t prepared. I hadn’t learned the material.

God will bring pop quizzes into our lives as well. He tests us to see if we have learned the material. We are so quick to tell others how to live. We are so quick to tell others to have faith and to pray about things.

But often when trials and hardships come into our lives, we panic. So God sometimes allows us to go through tests to make sure we really know what we say we know. He tests us to see if we’ve learned the material.