God is Good

November 29, 2012

We say (or I do, at least) often that God is good. He is. But today I realized that this is not a ‘grin ‘n’ bear it’ statement – we say it because God is really good. He pours His goodness into our lives, and He is ready to help us as any time. He really is always there for us, even if we don’t feel like we can come to Him. We can. He is always accepting.

That being said, God will give us good things. He wants to give us gifts. :) Jesus said that if even human parents know how to give their children good gifts, God, the perfect Father, will surely give us good things. But even though God gives us good gifts, we have to keep Him first in life no matter what. If we take our focus off of God as our number one, as the most personal relationship in our lives, we will end up confused and a little lost. God has been working through a process with me this week where He was straightening out my thinking about Him and about other people. The gifts He has given me are good, but I forget sometimes that they are from Him in the first place. The gift is good, but the Giver is ultimate. He is awesome! God wants to pour out His goodness into our lives through gifts, but the ultimate is relationship with Himself. For example, my mom can give me something – let’s say she gave me an iPod. I can spend all day listening to that iPod. I can appreciate the gift she gave me a lot, and recognize that it is a symbol of her love for me. But if I never thank my mom, if I never spend time in relationship with her, the gift is no longer really a symbol of her love for me and of the relationship between us. It becomes about the iPod, not about the fact that she is my mom and she loves me, because I am no longer focusing on the reason that I have the iPod in the first place. That reason is that I have a relationship with my mom.   

The other reason we need to keep God first is because what we do affects other people. As Christians, one part of our purpose is to build other people up and help the people around us. If I am no longer conscious of how much God loves me (on my relationship with God) because I am focusing a gift instead of on Him, then I can no longer express God’s love properly to other people (because I am not realizing it myself). Part of our calling is to love other people, and in order to do that we need to be and receiving God’s love so we can pass it on to others. The key is wholeness: the more we receive God’s love, the more He heals us, and the more whole we become as people. The stronger we become in this relationship, and the stronger we become as people, the more we can minister that love to other people around us. I firmly believe that God can use anybody, but first they must submit to Him and want to be used (or at least be open to what He has for them)*. This has been the case in my life, at least. I finally submitted to God’s plan for my life, and walked with Him (relied on Him and on His voice, because He was the only direction I had) as I started doing what He told me to do (in this case, going to Bible college and making friends, among other things). He blew me away with what He was speaking to me. God is my Father? I thought. And He wants me to know this enough that He’s telling me? He cares enough about me that He led me to deal with some issues. Submitting to God in that and dealing with those issues opened up the way for the next awesome thing that God had for me – enjoying and making friends! Even though God had good things for me, He was the reason for them; why shift my focus away from God and become focused on the gifts when it’s the relationship with God that is so fulfilling? That is what we were created for. We are made for relationship with both God and other people; but the place where we have all of our needs fulfilled is our relationship with God.

*Here are some more thoughts on that. The prophet Isaiah was a sinful person, just like the rest of Israel. He had a vision of God in His temple, glorious and radiant. Isaiah was sinful, but God cleansed him and made him clean. That is how he went from a regular person to a prophet. My take on this (and what I wrote above) is just that God can use anyone, as long as they are willing. He can because He is the Healer; He takes away the thing, sin, that separates people from Himself (ie. salvation through Jesus), and heals people from all of their wounds and brokenness. He puts them back together again. God also can use anyone as long as they are willing, because the kind of people God uses are those who are willing to be used by God. It’s not because they are better than anyone else (that they have more education, are more spiritual, or anything; we are all equal and created by God for a purpose). It is because they are willing for God to use them.