After taking a week off from posting this blog, it really feels more like a month. Yesterday I spent some time thinking where do I go next and decided to start the book of James. It was the very first book that I really connected with when I seriously started reading the Bible. I did not get to far into the first chapter in fact I didn't get past verse 4 and was really forced to consider something. The price of perfection.
James 1:3-4
3 For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. 4 So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.
Perfect and needing nothing. Sounds like a great goal but a goal that is out of reach. This verse tells me it is within reach, however the only way to obtain this goal is by going through bad things.
Faith is kind of like a muscle it has to be tried, tested, and developed. Jesus is your trainer who is always putting you through work outs so that when the time comes you will be ready. It takes endurance to succeed and you can not learn endurance. You have to experience and survive to develop endurance which is never easy.
Below you will find two excellent quotes from Charles Spurgeon regarding this topic.
The man who truly possesses patience is the man that has been tried.
Afflictions find out our weak points, and this makes us attend to them. Being tried, we discover our failures, and then going to God about those failures we are helped to be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.
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