Message summary: Are you enduring a trial and wonder how in the world God is ever going to work out this situation. Like Paul you do “not know what will happen to me”. It may seem as if God is providing too little information.

Listen to our message on your audio player.

“We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). “And now, compelled by the Spirit, I am going to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there” (Acts 20:22).

A reader wrote us with this pain-filled prayer request, "I live with a recovering addict and heavy drinker who gets violent with me every now and then. He is my son. I love him. He just hit me again because he did not get his own way. Your devotion really helped. Please pray for me and my wife".

Many of us will testify that the Lord deals with us in unusual ways in the midst of trials. Trials tend to shake us out of complacency and, although undesirable and unpleasant at the time, they can draw us closer to the Lord, helping us to focus on that which really matters.

A spiritual truth I learned during a hard trial is that you don’t pick your trials nor do you schedule them! If we could pick them we would probably pick something like stubbing our toe and if we could schedule them we’d likely put them on Feb. 29 so we’d encounter them only once every four years and hope that it would be over by the end of the day, for at least another four years. (For an 80 year old that would mean only 20 days of trials over a lifetime!)

We begin the spiritual journey when we place our faith in Christ as our Savior and Lord. This journey is a long, marathon-like race. It will certainly include many "dangers, toils and snares" as we sing in the hymn "Amazing Grace".

The single, summarizing quote of an early sermon by Paul was, “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). Some deal with extensive trials all through their pilgrimage.

There is a lot we can know about our spiritual journey. We have many wonderful assurances in Scripture concerning God's overall plan and the final outcome.

But there are many specifics along the way that are not revealed to us, that which we do not know. Today let us consider two phrases the Apostle Paul uses in the second daily text:

"And now, compelled by the Spirit". This has the sense of being strongly urged or constrained by the influences of the Holy Spirit. The KJV states “bound by the Spirit". Like Paul we need to seek the Holy Spirit’s strong leading in life.

"Not knowing what will happen to me there". Although Paul was confident in the Spirit’s leading him, he didn’t know what awaited him. In the following verse he indicates that he had been forewarned that this will be a very trying time, but was not given foreknowledge about how the trials would “flesh out".

We often hear the acronym TMI (“Too Much Information”) although around here it might be taken as “Three Mile Island” that's located just nine miles from where we live. Paul was given Too Little Information (TLI), just enough to make one quite reluctant about making such a trip. Surely he could come up with plenty of excuses to delay this trip until the Spirit led him elsewhere, where people would welcome his visit, care for his every need. But Paul was a man of prayer and he was more interested in being obedient than being comfortable.

Not knowing all the details of how things will work out is the way we test our faith. Is it rooted and grounded in Christ or is it based on whether we get exactly what we want when we want it? Brooksyne often quotes this line from Warren Wiersbe, “Faith that cannot be tested is faith that cannot be trusted.” So how is the testing going for you? Can you trust your faith? Many of you reading this are in the very midst of a fiery trial. I sure hope you have the blessed assurance from the Romans 8:28 perspective. (If you haven’t memorized that verse you sure should.)

As you’re enduring the trial you may wonder how in the world God is ever going to work out this situation. As a preacher of the Gospel I have often ministered to people in deep trials; for many the most anguishing part is the “not knowing”. This is true when we go through a trial as well. We want a detailed plan for each step and a specific date for the return of “normal”. But we don’t get that.

Instead we are called to trust. And those who trust Him wholly find Him wholly true! When we experience TLI let us be sure to T&O (Trust and Obey)!

Be encouraged today!  Hebrews 3:13

Stephen & Brooksyne Weber