Daily Devotional

August 13

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

Faith’s Trial

Scripture is full of this idea of the trial of one’s faith. Take the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews.... Every one of those men was tried. They had been given great promises and they had accepted them, and then everything seemed to go wrong.... Think of the trial of a man like Noah ... of ... Abraham, the trials that men like Jacob and especially Moses had to endure. God gives the gift of faith and then the faith is tried.... That is the theme of all the scriptures. You find it in the history of the Patriarchs and of the Old Testament saints, you find it running through the New Testament....

We must start by understanding that we may well find ourselves in a position in which our faith is going to be tried. Storms and trials are allowed by God. If we are living the Christian life, or trying to ... on the assumption that it means just come to Christ and you will never have any more worry in the whole of your life, we are harbouring a terrible fallacy.... Our faith will be tried, and James goes so far as to say, ‘Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations (trials)’ (James 1:2).


God permits storms, He permits difficulties, He permits the wind to blow and the billows to roll, and everything may seem to be going wrong and we ourselves to be in jeopardy. We must learn and realize that God does not take His people and lead them into some kind of Elysium in which they are protected from all ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. Not at all, we are living in the same world as everybody else. Indeed, the Apostle Paul seems to go further than that. He tells the Philippians, ‘... unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for his sake’ (Philippians 1:29). ‘In the world’, says our Lord, ‘ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world’ (John 16:33). ‘Be of good cheer’—yes, but remember that you will have the tribulation.

Spiritual Depression, pp. 139–40