2 Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, 3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. 4 And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
James 1:2-4
One should note that a trial is a trial, regardless of a person’s attitude towards it (or towards God, who sovereignly willed it). The imperative here, ἡγέομαι, means “consider.” However, the word “count” is appropriate because there is a sense in which we keep an account of our circumstances, the same way in which a business tracks its expenses, revenues, assets, and liabilities. Two businesses with identical assets, conducting the same amount of business, and having the same overhead expenses can end up making drastically different decisions based on the way they do their accounting. In other words, your circumstance is, to some degree, what you make of it.
The world encourages one another to think positively, but they do so in vain; for they have no true reason to be optimistic—no hope in which to boast—if they do not have Christ. We have that hope. We are called to serve our Lord, and trials prepare us for that service in a way that nothing else can. For this reason, we can look at a trial as a divine training course, and rest on God’s word that he has equipped us to overcome it. Not only this, but verse 4 promises that we will emerge from the trial even more aptly equipped than when we went in!
So as we keep account of our circumstances, let us remember that it is ours to decide whether our trials are assets or liabilities.