(NLT) 1Peter 1:7 “These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold, though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So, when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ reveals himself.”
Some treat faith as though it is replaceable by mail. Then trials come (this, I promise you) and cause horrible feelings of loneliness. Faith is more important than anything tangible. Just think of how we inhale and exhale, expecting our breath to be supplied automatically. This is absentminded faith. But suppose we decide to remain present, to maintain an attitude of gratitude, and store up golden faith before times of trauma? Let us be grateful.
Faith is as fragile and valuable an asset as our babies and older adults. Like them, it requires priority treatment, diligence, and protection. These caring actions come through constant prayer.
During trials, it becomes irrefutably obvious that prayer and faith go together. “Now, faith is the substance of things hoped for and evidence of things unseen.” Are we grateful, feeling our faith renewed with every breath taken? God, our heavenly father, who is greater than his creations, loves, heals, comforts sadness, disallows hate, eradicates fear, eases disappointment, gives rest during trials, and will never forsake His own.
We have all experienced joy, excitement, praise, and happiness, to name a few exigencies of our lives, but not excluding opposites. Faith in God has never been negotiable through all these blessed years: it is my constant hope. Faith encouraged me when my heart was breaking as family members passed away all too soon.
When atmospheres seem hopeless, God gives us strength to do kind deeds even when it seems unappreciated.
GOD refuted the world as it was (“only evil continually”), so His coming, in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, so the righteousness of the law is of Him, not of man. He negated perishing by paying our sin debt without recompense from any human.
Now, just because we can “la-la-la” through life doing nothing does not suggest that “anything goes.” It means, instead, that God is gracious and full of compassion, rich in mercy, and has given us free will. Man can blessedly thrive by choice with his allotted measure of faith. By having faith in God, we can live with a common-sense understanding that the earth is the Lord’s: the world and everything in it.
James 2:18 says, “How can you show me your faith if you don’t have good deeds? I will show you my faith through my good deeds.
The Traveler Weekly 