October 2 Daily Devotional

Simply trusting every day,
Trusting through a stormy way

Our faith ... needs to be perfected

There are differences in the quality of faith. Faith is many-sided. There is generally at the beginning a good deal of admixture in what we call our faith; there is a good deal of the flesh that we are not aware of. And as we begin to learn these things, and as we go on with the process, God puts us through His testing times. He tests us by trials as if by fire in order that the things which do not belong to the essence of faith may fall off. We may think that our faith is perfect and that we can stand up against anything. Then suddenly a trial comes and we find that we fail. Why? Well, that is just an indication that the trust element in our faith needs to be developed; and God develops the trust element ... by trying us in this way.

The more we experience these things, the more we learn to trust God. We naturally trust Him when He is smiling on us, but a day comes when the clouds are blackening the heavens and we begin to wonder whether God loves us any longer and whether the Christian life is what we thought it to be. Ah, our faith had not developed the element of trust, and God so deals with us in this life as to bring us to trust Him in the dark when we can see no light at all, and to bring us to the point where we can confidently say:

When all things seem against us,
To drive us to despair,
We know one gate is open
One ear will hear our prayer.

That is true faith, that is real trust. Look at a man like Abraham.... He trusted God absolutely when every appearance was to the contrary. And that needs to be developed in us. We do not start like that, but as we go through these experiences we find that ‘behind a frowning providence He hides a Father’s face’, and the next time the trials come we remain calm and collected.

Spiritual Depression pp. 227–8