When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do. John 6:5-6

Jesus had recently performed a number of miracles. Now he was testing his disciples, Philip in particular. He was about ready to perform yet another miracle right before their eyes. Notice the question isn’t “how shall we feed these people?” Either way, I suppose, Jesus’ response would still be the same, “watch and learn.”

Being tested is part of the Christian faith and walk. How and why we are tested is different for each of us because we are all at different stages of faith in life. We often don’t recognize tests as they come our way. We chalk it up to life itself, and yet God uses the situations is our lives to test and refine us.

Many of us start out as raw crude oil that just got extracted from the earth. In order for us to be refined into gasoline or diesel fuel, we undergo an almost unrecognizable refining process. Think about it: the crude oil that comes out of the ground is pitch black. Gasoline is clear. To get from crude oil to gasoline requires a lot of energy, is quite expensive, and it’s a fairly complicated process to purge impurities and to refine the raw crude into something usable.

Welcome to life.