Enduring Faith

"And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing."   James 1:4

We're very fickle in our faith, aren't we? We are inconsistent, ambivalent. We sing "My faith looks up to Thee" . . . until the medicine stops working, until the lights go out, until the bill comes due and we don't have what it takes to pay it. Until our grades slip or our career takes a turn or we lose a mate . . . . How do we learn consistent faith? We learn it one day at a time. We learn it through endurance. James writes: "Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance" (James 1:2-3). He's not talking about a will-o-the-wisp faith that starts out on the 100-meter sprint and, quicker than you can think, is over. Anybody can handle that kind of faith. Anybody can take ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes of a test. But ten days or fifteen days, or a year, or two or three? Well, that's another matter. That's the enduring faith James is talking about.

_____

Excerpted from Charles R. Swindoll, Wisdom For The Way