Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. -James 1:2 (MSG)
Doesn’t it this verse say it all? “When tests and challenges come at you from all sides.”Doesn’t it seem like when tests come, they never just come one at a time, at a convenient time, or when we have enough strength to conquer them? All too often tests comes all at once and from every side, leaving us feeling trapped and overwhelmed.
It’s at this point that our faith life is forced into the open and shows it’s true colors. Is our faith really in God? In times of testing, we find out. I found that all too often, when I thought all my trust was in God, it was in a million different things. I’d call them crutches. Crutches are anything we put our trust in instead of God.
Our crutches could be our church, our job, our boyfriend or girlfriend, our friends, our family, our network, the school we went to, our own strength, our savings account, the list goes on and on. None of these things can sustain you and all of them could fail you.
“The superior Christian lets God strip him of everything that might serve as a false refuge, a secondary trust.” AW Tozer
I’m finding out that God is in the business of kicking out crutches out from beneath us. It seems like there are seasons in our lives where God will strip us of absolutely everything we put our trust in, except Him. In these seasons, we can either learn to put all of our faith in God, or continue to try to find crutches that will temporarily relieve us.
I promise you, if you’re putting your faith in anything other than God, you’re in for a long and painful journey. Let’s let get rid of our crutches by trusting God with all of our hearts, all of our minds, all of our strength, and all of our souls.
