Counting It Differently

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you fall into various temptations, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. Let endurance have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. (James 1:2-4, WEB)

James asks something that sounds nearly offensive to a struggling man. Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness, and let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. Read too quickly it can feel like a man who has never been where you are telling you to smile through it.

But look at the word he chose. He does not say feel joy, as though you could manufacture a good mood in the middle of a hard week or summon gladness on command. He says count it joy, which is a decision about how you add up what is happening to you. Counting is deliberate; it is done with the head as much as the heart. The trial is real. The testing is real, and James does not soften either one. What he wants you to know is what the testing is producing, so that you stop reading it purely as loss and start reading it as something that is going somewhere.

Steadfastness is the word, the quality of a man who stays when everything in him wants to leave. That is being built in you every time you face the same temptation again and do not give up on God, even the times you also do not win the fight itself. The staying counts, apart from the outcome of any single day. James wants that steadfastness to have its full effect, which means he expects it to take time and does not want you cutting the process short by walking away just before it finishes its work in you.

Lacking in nothing, he says at the end. That is where this is headed, and it is worth staying for, even when you cannot see it from where you sit. A man who quits three years in never learns what the fourth year would have made of him. James is quietly begging you not to be that man.

Lord, I cannot summon joy for these trials, but I can trust what you are making through them. Give me the steadfastness to stay in it, and let it finish its work.