Trials, Testing, and Testimony

Trials, Tests, Temptations

Trust, Triumph, Testimony (c)

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A Testimony to Testing

Trials are a part of life regardless of status.  If you're rich or poor, married or not, good job or no job or any other element, status, and position of life, we all face trials.

In our trials we are driven to find someone or something to trust, often just ourselves.  Flying as a navigator in the Air Force I trusted my crew and my instruments especially in the most harrowing times.  But, I also learned to trust myself.  In my most heated moments of stress, when my life and the lives of my crew depended on my every word, I felt a warm calmness come over me.  That calmness I have come to understand as the Holy Spirit guiding my every word, thought, and deed.  When we allow God into our lives we gain far more than the lowly confidence we can find in ourselves.  Out of that Trust, we gain Triumphs, out of our Triumphs we have Testimony to the power of God in Trusting Him with our lives.

Many years ago, there was a much greater man that felt God in his life but was most troubled.  He was troubled by what he was taught and that inner feeling he somehow felt about God.

As a boy he was whipped by his poor father because of sinfulness as determined by his father.

The family went to church but the boy was most uncomfortable with the churches preaching of hell and being damned to hell.

The family was poor but amazingly, the father would sometimes buy books for the family rather than food.  Father believed in books.

Sometimes, the boy would have to roam the streets and sing for his food but he had books to read if he dared go home.

The boy came to recognize God as supreme in his life.  Yet, he struggled with teachings of personal damnation that just did not seem to fit as he was also taught about a loving and forgiving God, as long as you purchased forgiveness.

The boy internally fought himself about the idea that everyone was inherently evil but never turned from wanting to trust God.

The boy grew and because of books in the home was able to attend college earning a Bachelor’s degree by age 19 and a Master's degree at age 22.  His father found ways to put him in law school but soon the boy put himself in a monastery.

But, the now young man continued this inner trials about God.  He inherently wanted to love God but had inner battles about God condemning His creation.  At age 24, still fighting God, he became a priest and was recognized as a scholar.  Most importantly, he found his first Bible hidden away in the monastery library.

He soon began to realize the church’s teaching did not match what he found in the Bible.  In fact, he came to the  understanding of faith and Trust in what he learned from the Bible rather than believe what he heard from the Pope.     From his important Bible studies, knowledge of Greek and Latin, he came to have great Trust and Faith in God and began writings to change the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.

On October 31, 1517, timid as he was and not thinking of the consequences, Dr. Martin Luther of Saxony Germany published 95 of his concerns about Catholic teaching on the Wittenburg Chapel door in Germany.  He did this not realizing he would start a revolution, a reformation, and a splitting of the Catholic Church resulting in a new Faith and Religion we now call the Protestant Faith.  

Martin Luther's Trials became a Test that refined him for great battles with the Catholic Church rather than a temptation to disavow God.   His timidity evaporated as his self-confidence in the Lord grew in its place.  In 1521, His Trust in God carried him through being declared an outlaw by Emperor Charles V, surviving general orders to be killed on sight, a kidnapping, and excommunication from the Catholic Church.  His peace of mind led him to translating the Bible into German, and leading his followers to The Revolutionary Triumph of the 2nd millennium.  We call the results of Luther's Trust in God The Protestant Reformation.

In Luther's Trials and Trusting God, Temptations to give up on God evaporated!  Luther's early challenges grew into Trials, becoming Tests that refined him for greater Trials,  and larger opportunities in desire to change the Catholic Church.  Although his Triumph of a Reformation was not his intention, it is his Testimony in Trusting God that we too will Triumph  through our Testing in our Trials.

"Without Trials, without Testing there is no Testimony."

Thanks be to God,

and

Thanks be to God for Martin Luther

 lonnie

© lonnie coggins

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Publication  0066


intro
THERE IS NO TESTIMONY WITHOUT TESTING.  Click the link for the story of one man who changed the world in trying to just change a church. Please share the message on your Fb page as you like, and if you like, click the FB 'Follow' button to have notifications of these publications.  For other messages like this, visit my FB page, or on FB visit-"A Daily Thought Group".

http://lonnieadailythought.blogspot.com/2012/10/trials-testing-and-testimony.html