"You May" and Joy in Trials

Here's the deal: trials will happen. It is not a question of "if" but "when" and how we will respond to them. Our typical response is complaining, whining, and viewing ourselves as victims. Complaining is cheap conversational currency. Meet someone new, find something to complain about together, and you're lifelong friends. Of all peoples over the past 5,000 years we have the least to complain about, and yet we still manage...

So trials happen. We complain. In the common experience of the world, there is no guarantee that trials will yield anything positive. Plenty of people experience trials, process them angrily, and become embittered. Your nearest retirement community is full of people of this sort.

And so James here in these words is not expressing a "you ought" but a "you may," to steal from theologian Helmut Thielicke. It's not "you ought to consider it pure joy when facing trials of many kinds" but rather "you may consider it pure joy." There is this glorious new option opened up to us. We are free to consider even the harshest trials we face pure joy because we know that in the life in this new Kingdom of God, all the trials that we face must be subjugated for our good. There is a guarantee that it will bear good fruit if we allow it to do so.

And so we suffer trials with great hope. Not because we must but because we are suddenly allowed to. We press into these great promises of trials redeemed, a new and glorious hope that has dawned in the midst of the great blanket of darkness that are the trials of every kind that have assailed every generation since the beginning of time.

Hope wins. And so we are free to live a life of joy in the midst of trials because they must serve us for our good. And this changes everything. And so we rejoice in the hope beyond the trials as James invites us to do, not because we should but because we may.