Page 6 - January 2014 Catalyst

When God ALLoWs your triAL
By Tony Evans
Have you ever gotten mail in your mailbox that isn’t ad- dressed to you? You take it out of your mailbox and read that the ad- dress doesn’t have your name on it. It just says, “Occupant.” You get that piece of mail by virtue of you being the “occupant” of that home. Trials are a lot like that. Just by virtue of being an “occupant”
on this planet in a fallen world, we will face trials.
Of course, no one
likes a trial. No one
wakes up in the
morning, stretches
and says, “Ah, what
a beautiful day for a
trial! I think I’d like
to have a trial today!”
at would be an un-
usual person who would do some- thing like that. Yet no matter how much we want to avoid trials in our lives, trials are inevitable.
Trials are adverse circumstances that God allows in our lives to both identify where we are spiritually as
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well as to prepare us for where He wants us to go. ere is no escaping them. You are either in a trial now, you’ve just come out of a trial, or you are getting ready to go into a trial.
But even though we all have to ex- perience them, I want to remind you to take comfort in knowing that
trials must rst pass through God’s hands before reaching us. Nothing comes our way without rst having received His Divine approval. And in order to get His Divine approval, there must be a Di- vine reason for Him to approve it. We need to trust that God has our best in-
terest in mind when He allows us to experience a trial.
For His Kingdom, Tony Evans
january 2014