Dear friends, don’t be surprised at the fiery trials you are going through, as if something strange were happening to you. Instead, be very glad — for these trials make you partners with Christ in his suffering, so that you will have the wonderful joy of seeing his glory when it is revealed to all the world.
1 Peter 4:12-13 NLT
Have you ever wondered why God has let some hard thing happen to you? If he loves you as much as he says he does, why didn’t he prevent that? Peter says, “When our faith is tested, that is the moment of great joy.” That’s not usually the way we see it, though, is it? We don’t want difficulty, or pain, or challenge. But think of it like this; a tool that has been tempered – heated and hammered – can survive stresses that an untempered tool could never survive.
Is the “helicopter parent” – the one who rushes to protect their child from every hardship and every challenge – doing their child any favor? They are not. Someday that child will meet a difficulty from which their parent, for whatever reason, cannot deliver them. What is the likely result? Breakdown and failure. On the other hand, if our parents, lovingly standing in the background, have allowed us to encounter difficulty and we have learned how, if not to overcome it, as least to survive through it, they have done us a great favor.
So, is my faith in God just a fair-weather thing? Do I believe in him just because he will never let bad things happen to me. Will that kind of faith survive the storms of life? It will not. Faith that cannot survive testing is no faith at all. But when everything is saying to us, “This hardship proves there is no God, or at least not a God of love,” and we pull out our Bible, point to its truths and its saints and its Savior, and say “I have every reason to believe in this God and I will suffer with Jesus,” then our faith is tempered and we can stand, ready for even greater challenges ahead. That, says Peter, is a moment for joy.
Called To Be Transformed 