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October 20, 2021
And here’s what I don’t want you to miss: in his darkest times, James did not see how God could possibly bring to pass what he hoped for—the restoration of his marriage. But he did his best to keep trusting God during the wait. And in His time, God did what seemed impossible.
To that end, He is going to take each of us through a similar process of transformation, though your personal issues will most likely be very different from what James went through. God graciously “forces” our faith to grow by creating or permitting situations that require us to find reserves of faith we don’t even know we have.
through that process, we become stronger, wiser men. We become men of faith. Men who are increasingly conformed to the image of Christ. How does it happen? By the process described in the first of the ten principles we’ll be looking at together in How God Makes Men:
God makes men by showing us how we can believe Him anyway in the face of what seem like impossible circumstances.
This was the first test God put to Abraham:
Will you believe God’s great promise for an invisible future or cling to the visible present?
Faith is letting the reality of the unseen rule over the unreality of the seen.
The third test God put to Abraham could be expressed this way:
Are you willing to give God the one thing you most want to keep?
The advantage of walking with God in faith over the years is that you actually come to a place where it is harder to doubt than believe, because you have seen Him act so many times before.
Nothing that happens to us by human decision can ever happen apart from the will of God.
God makes men by taking us through a humbling process that fundamentally changes the way we think.
But God is more interested in the success of our character than the success of our circumstances.
In my late thirties and early forties, I went through a nine-year wilderness experience that I thought would never end. Forty years? To me, that is unimaginable. But Moses didn’t become the man God had in mind overnight, and neither will we. I’ve found that the process of transformation and learning humility often goes like this: Step 1: I tell God what I’m going to do. Step 2: God responds. Step 3: I beg God to let me do it anyway. Step 4: He humbles me until I listen. Step 5: God tells me what He is going to do.
Moses was no ordinary child partly because no child is ordinary. The fact that you were born at all makes you remarkable, since you’re the product of one out of hundreds of millions of spermatozoa that competed to fertilize a single egg in your mother’s womb. As David prayed in Psalm 139:13, 16, You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.… Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
God makes men by turning our weakness into strength in such a striking way that only He can get the glory.
