Joy in the Trial

“Count it all joy” sounds, at first read, like a typo. Joy is for weddings and homecomings, not for the diagnosis, the layoff, the betrayal. But look closely at the verb. James doesn't say feel joy. He says count it, a bookkeeping word. He's asking us to render a verdict about our trials that our emotions haven't caught up to yet, the way an accountant can call a costly investment a gain because he knows what it will return.

And notice the little word “when.” “When you fall into various temptations” (not if). James pictures trials like potholes: you don't schedule them, you fall into them. The question is never whether testing will come to your faith. The question is what you'll count it as when it does.

Here is the math James is doing: “the testing of your faith produces endurance.” Faith that has never been tested is faith that has never been proven, a parachute still in its packaging. Trials take our claimed trust in God and put weight on it, and something happens under that weight that happens no other way. Endurance grows. Not the gritted-teeth survival we usually mean, but the settled strength of a person who has held onto God in the dark and found He held back.

Then comes the line we'd rather skip: “Let endurance have its perfect work.” In other words, don't abort the process. Most of our prayers in a trial are exit strategies. James says God is doing something in the trial that matters more than getting out of it: “that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” God is not interested in merely adjusting your behavior; He is forming a certain kind of person, one who looks like His Son, who Himself learned obedience through what He suffered. The trial you're in right now is not a detour from your spiritual formation. It may be the workshop where the deepest work gets done. Count it accordingly.