What are these trials of life?

There’s an instructive story buried in the Old Testament. Not suspecting anything was about to happen, Jacob was jumped by an assailant. A long wrestling match followed, a wrestling [match] that lasted through the night, and through it Jacob came to realize he was wrestling with God. 

Jacob didn’t initiate the match and we don’t pick the times; God picks the times and places where He tackles us. “Lord, what’s going on here? Why are You letting this happen?” Martin Luther had three words to describe the Christian life, oratio, meditatio, and temptatio. The first two, prayer and devotion, often occur at times and places of our own choosing, but the third, temptatio, trial and trouble, chastening and growing, come where and when our heavenly Father chooses. Smackdown time!

Jacob was blessed through that long night of wrestling and when dawn finally came he had received a new name, Israel. Although it’s never easy, when we see the troubles and trials of life as occasions to grow in the ways of God, we are blessed at dawn by a new understanding of what it means to carry the name of God’s suffering servant, Jesus Christ (Genesis 32:22-30). “In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” (1 Peter 1:6-7)

[The Meyer Minute by Rev. Dr. Dale Meyer, Thu., Apr. 11, 2013]