The Theological Principle You Need to Count Trials as Joy

The Book of James was written to Christians who were suffering. Having believed in Jesus, most likely as a result of Pentecost in Jerusalem, these young believers were scattered after a wave of persecution fell on the church. That persecution followed them, and now James was telling them how to respond. One of the first things he tells them is to change their perspective about the trials they were undergoing:

Consider it a great joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you experience various trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing (James 1:2-4). 

Now this is an entirely different way to view trials. Most of the time, and for most of the world, our first and main reaction when we experience some kind of trial is to find a way out of it as quickly as possible. But instead of manufacturing our way out of them, James says we, like the early Christians, should consider these trials as joy. 

To consider trials as joy DOESN’T mean you have to be happy about them; in fact, it’s a good and right thing to grieve any kind of suffering that we encounter. We can be joyful and sad at the same time. Considering trials as joy DOES mean, however, that we look beyond the trial and see what God is doing in us. And what God is doing in us, through these trials, is testing our faith to produce endurance, and we must have that endurance to reach maturity in Christ. Now we could look all over creation and find all kinds of examples of how pressure, difficulty, and even pain produce something stronger. Consider a few examples:

When you break a bone, what eventually reforms and grows back is stronger than it was to begin with.The process of building muscle involves breaking down of tissue so new stronger tissue can grow in its place.Forest fires, though destructive, create open spaces for new growth and ultimately lead to a more resilient ecosystem.Gold is made more durable through the process of refining to remove impurities.

The list could go on, but you get the idea. Perseverance? Endurance? Strength? These qualities are not built with comfort and ease; they are forged through adversity and difficulty.

In that truth, there is an underlying theological reality that the Christian must embrace. It’s one that is counterintuitive and will require us to look beyond our circumstances. It will require us to walk by faith and not by sight; to choose to believe something beyond the painful circumstances and trials that we are enduring. That underlying reality is this:

When it comes to trials like these, God is not trying to harm you; He’s working to strengthen you.

We see a shade of this later in verses 13-18:

No one undergoing a trial should say, “I am being tempted by God,” since God is not tempted by evil, and he himself doesn’t tempt anyone. But each person is tempted when he is drawn away and enticed by his own evil desire. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is fully grown, it gives birth to death. Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers and sisters. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. By his own choice, he gave us birth by the word of truth so that we would be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. 

In these verses, James acknowledges that it is very possible to respond wrongly to trials, and the beginning of that wrong response is to attribute evil to God. It’s to do the opposite of what that theological principle states – to think that God IS trying to harm us somehow. That mindset doesn’t lead to perseverance, endurance, and maturity; it leads to sin. In fact, it always has.

If you remember the very first sin, we might think of it as a simple choice to just eat a piece of fruit that was forbidden. But the temptation wasn’t just about the fruit; it was about the character of God. The serpent planted the idea that God was holding out His best from His children. That He was, in terms of this passage, trying to harm them. So the very first sin was not just a choice to eat; it was a choice to believe wrong things about the character of God.

And since we are going down that road, you can trace all acts of sin back to a failure to trust and believe. We fail to trust that God is actually loving. That He is actually generous. And therefore His instructions for how we live are not based in doing us some kind of harm but for our good. We fail to believe those things and we act accordingly. 

But if, by God’s grace, we consider things differently; if we are able to get outside our circumstances and remember that God is not trying to harm us, well then we can start to consider trials not as a means of our destruction but to build us into something different than we are.