Tom Kelton

Our Lord is a high-test, high-performance God. We can trust Him to do as He says He will. Many times it seems that the Lord won't be able to fulfill His promises, but even when a situation looks hopeless, our best recourse is to be patient and wait; God will be faithful.

Often God does not show us the valley between the promise and the fulfillment. He doesn't tell us in advance about the testing, the humiliation, the trials which will come into our lives and prepare us to receive His later blessing. When Abram set out from Haran, he had no idea that he would encounter famine and enemies. His faith was tested before the blessing came. There was a long delay from the time God gave Abram the promises in Genesis 12 to the time He began to fulfill those promises — twenty-five years to be exact. Through those years, Abram's faith would be tested and tempered by the experiences the Lord allowed him to endure.

God told Joseph in a dream in Genesis 37 that his brothers would bow before him, that he would one day be in a place of great leadership. The next thing, Joseph found that he was in a pit, then in a prison. Only after thirteen years of slavery and captivity in Egypt would he be made prime minister of the land, second in command to Pharaoh. Nine more years passed before the brothers who betrayed him bowed before him. Joseph's trials were intense before he ever saw God fulfill what He had promised, but He was faithful.

God has given us a promise of eternal life. He does not reveal beforehand the discipline that will go on in our lives between the promise and its fulfillment. The difficulties, the trying situations are what He's allowing so that we will be strengthened. Through these experiences, we will be prepared to receive His blessings.

Even though we don't know how we will be tried before we are blessed, we should expect to be tested in the pursuit of God's will. The apostle Paul teaches that we can expect the test when he writes in 1 Thessalonians 3:4: "For indeed when we were with you, we kept telling you in advance that we were going to suffer affliction; and so it came to pass, as you know." Like Paul, we can fully anticipate that our lives as Christians will contain some pitfalls and obstacles. Just because we are faithful to Christ doesn't mean that we are protected from problems.

Those who would leave the impression that becoming a Christian ensures that one's life will be filled with wealth, good times, and no problems are deceiving their audience. God has promised to be with His children (Matthew 28:20), and He has promised that all things will work together for good for those who love Him (Romans 8:28) — but those promises were not meant to shield us from the challenges that come from living in this world. Through our faithfulness in good times as well as bad, God uses the natural difficulties of life to mold and temper us into vessels of gold in His service (Romans 5:1-5; 2 Timothy 2:2).

Thanks to The Voice of Truth International, Vol. 35, pgs. 88,89.