James 1

I coach my daughter's softball team, and I know that the best way to figure out how they are going to perform in a game situation is to put pressure on them in practice. I've got to stress them a little. I've got to challenge them a little. I've got to push them right to the edge of what they think they are capable of before they can make it to the next level.

The same thing is true of the Christian life. It's not about being complacent. God doesn't want believers that are content with their salvation. He wants believers that will further His kingdom. We are His hands and feet on earth. We are the tools that He uses to care for the orphans and widows. We are the ones that He uses to reach the rest of the world. Just like in that softball game, though, we must be trained for the work, and the best training that we can receive is pressure and trials.

What good is faith if it is not tested? How can you be assured of something that you cannot see (Hebrews) if you don't test it? You can't. So God allows us to be tested in order to boost our own confidence in our faith, to mature our relationship with Him, and to remind us of our reliance on Him for salvation.

Be careful here, though. This doesn't mean that God puts temptation in our way. God doesn't toy with us and tempt us to sin just to see if we will or won't, and I don't tease my softball team into cheating to see how they'll respond. I teach the rules, and I test them within those rules asking them to perform as they should. God also teaches the rules through His word and applies pressure to incent us to perform to His standard, but He doesn't tempt us to cheat or sin. He's not even capable of such a thing. Any temptation to cheat or sin is the result of our nature, not God's nature.

The good news is that when we go through these exercises, we can ask for help. We can ask for wisdom. My softball team sometimes asks me to stop practice so that I can explain why a play works a certain way or so that I can clarify what exactly I want them to do. When they do that, I don't make fun of them for not understanding. If I did, I wouldn't be a very good coach. They are learning, and I am coaching. God is the same. When we ask for help, He is not condescending about it. He doesn't judge you to be unworthy because you don't already know the answer. He simply responds with the help that you need.

God does have one caveat, though. He expects to be the one source of help that you turn to, and He expects that you ask in faith. He doesn't have patience for someone that worries about whether or not God heard his prayer or someone that turns to God and then turns elsewhere for a solution to the same problem as if they could hedge their bets.

In order to be effective with this we need to keep ourselves from getting in the way. That means that we need to spend more time listening – both to God and to others – than we do talking. They say that God gave us two ears and one mouth so that we could listen twice as much as we talk. It's good advice. The result of that listening is that we recognize God's direction in our lives because we are not in the way with our own opinions, and we are able to prevent conflict from escalating because we understand the perspective of others.

When we understand the perspective of others and recognize God's desire for us to act on the behalf of others then we start to live our faith and we've begun to achieve the end result of all the growth God pushes on to us through the trials. It's not enough to just hear or see the rules of the game. It's not enough to sit in the stands and watch the game. God wants us to be out on the field demonstrating our relationship with Him through our actions in the game. Just like my softball team. Those girls can't claim victory unless they play the game. Sitting on the bench doesn't make them any less of a softball team (so this is not salvation by works), but being on the field is the only way that they are going to identify themselves as a softball team.