I don’t know anyone who loves trials—or who is happy when God allows them to come. Trials can make us weary. They can tempt even strong believers to lose heart. Elijah reached that point after experiencing tremendous spiritual victory, and yet in 1 Kings 19, we find him exhausted, discouraged, and afraid.
Trials can also seem relentless. Scripture reminds us that our spiritual enemy is persistent, accusing believers “before our God day and night” (Revelation 12:10–11). Sometimes the same trial continues far longer than we ever imagined. Abraham and Sarah waited approximately twenty-five years for the fulfillment of God’s promise of a son.
Trials require us to put on the armor of God (Ephesians 6:10–17) and to live by faith (Habakkuk 2:4). Sometimes God removes a trial. Sometimes He gives us strength to endure it. Paul pleaded with God three times to remove his “thorn in the flesh,” but God did not remove it. Instead, He told Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:7–10).
Paul knew what it was like to pray for healing and see God answer. Epaphroditus was restored from a serious illness (Philippians 2:25–27). Yet Paul’s own affliction remained. This reminds us that God’s refusal to remove a trial does not mean He has refused to answer our prayer. Sometimes the answer is not deliverance from the trial but grace through it.
Trials can become so difficult that God provides a way of escape (1 Corinthians 10:13). At other times, as with Jonah and many others throughout Scripture, God permits the trial to continue because He is accomplishing something through it.
“No physician ever weighed out medicine to his patient with half so much care and exactness as God weighs out to us every trial. Not one grain too much does He ever permit to be put in the scale.”
— Gospel Message
Trials have a teaching ministry. James tells us that “the testing of your faith produces endurance” and that endurance, when allowed to complete its work, makes us “perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:3–4). Trials can teach us what comfort and prosperity sometimes cannot. They expose the condition of our faith and challenge us to obey God’s Word regardless of our circumstances.
God told Israel to remember their forty years in the wilderness because He had been testing them “to know what was in [their] heart, whether [they] would keep His commandments or not” (Deuteronomy 8:2).
Trials can reveal our weaknesses, but they can also reveal the strength God has already developed in us.
Paul said: “I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am.” (Philippians 4:11)
Paul had learned how to live with little and with much, with abundance and with need. His circumstances did not determine his contentment. His strength came from Christ: “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13).
That is one of the great lessons of trials: we may discover that God’s strength is greater than our circumstances.
Trials can also be God’s means of discipline. Hebrews 12:6–11 reminds us that “those whom the Lord loves He disciplines.” Discipline is not rejection. It is evidence of God’s fatherly love and His desire to make us holy.
There is a beautiful story about a teacher who read to her class, “My yoke is easy.” She asked the children what a yoke was. One boy answered that it was something placed around the necks of animals. Then she asked, “What is the yoke God puts on us?”
A little girl answered, “It is God putting His arms around our necks.” What a beautiful picture.
Sometimes God’s yoke feels heavy because the trial is heavy. But we never carry it alone. The God who allows the trial is also the God who promises His presence, His grace, His strength, and His sustaining love.
We may not understand every trial. We may pray for God to remove it and find that He does not. We may grow weary and wonder how much longer we can endure. But we can trust Him.
The trial may change us, but it does not have to destroy us. In the hands of God, even our hardest trials can become instruments of spiritual growth.