Daily Devotional

Word of the Day

Getting the Promises to Work

Trials are to get the promises of God working in your life. The promises do not just come because God made the promise; they are not unconditional. The Scripture says to inherit the promise you have need of patience, after you have done the will of God (Heb. 10:36). Patience is what allows you to inherit these exceeding great and precious promises to make you a partaker of the divine nature. The divine nature only manifests as a consequence of patience being developed in your life. If we will stand up under the trials that God brings, the promise is that we will embrace the divine nature.

Peter says the divine nature will manifest as we have escaped the corruption that's in the world through lust (2 Pet. 1:4). There is an escaping unto the divine nature. We are to flee all of this ungodliness and unrighteousness and turn our hearts toward the eternal, the invisible, the city which has its foundations whose builder and maker is God. Trials are not for the purpose of making us hard, embittered people but for changing our perspective into the eternal realm. Trials do not make you a better earthling; they make you a pilgrim, a pursuer of the eternal, an observer of the invisible.

Everything God allows to come into your life is to make you more like Jesus. You may say, "It doesn't seem to have done that, but I seem to be weaker, bitter, and afraid." That's because you haven't done what James said to do: ask God for wisdom to understand. As soon as He reveals what's wrong in your life, if you change, you will be made a new man or woman. You will be made a partaker of the divine nature brought through those exceeding great and precious promises. All things that pertain to life and godliness in Christ Jesus will begin to work in you diligence, faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, kindness, and love (2 Pet. 1:5-7). "For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that you ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1:8). But he that lacks these things--he that doesn't endure the trials, he that doesn't learn and grow from them, he that is not humbled and made meek through the midst of these revelations of the lack of character--is blind and cannot see afar off and has forgotten that he was purged from his old sins.

These trials are to make you more diligent in your pursuit of God. Diligence talks about an earnestness or a zeal. Have you noticed that when you are in these trials, it is good for you to be afflicted, as the psalmist says? Trials move you toward God, and it should work in you a new zeal. In the midst of these trials, when you draw nigh unto God, He draws nigh unto you (James 4:8). He begins to reveal His Word to you. Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the Word of God (Rom. 10:17). Faith begins to manifest and is matured. If you do these things, you'll stand. You'll not be overtaken in deception. You won't be blind, unable to see afar off, but you'll understand the eternal purposes of God, and He'll continue to work these things in your life. You have need of patience.

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