And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. . . . You do not have because you do not ask God.
Romans 8:28, James 4:2-3
God causes all things to work together for our good. But this does not necessarily mean what we experience in this life is the very best God intended for us, for the simple reason our choices have consequences.
For example, we know from God’s Word that we do not have because we do not ask. What God intends for us is all that we might have, but us choosing not to ask will result in us having far less than he intended. Likewise, God intends for us to bear much fruit and have the fullness of joy by remaining in Jesus by obeying his commands. But if we choose not to remain in Jesus by obeying his commands, we will experience little or no fruit and even less joy. God also intends to experience his peace the transcends all understanding by not being anxious for anything and presenting our request to him instead. But if we choose to present our requests to him and be anxious instead, his peace will not guard our hearts and minds. Our choices have the ability to thwart God’s perfect will for our lives.
In what sense, then, does God cause all things to work together for our good? The answer is that God causes all things in our lives to maximize our opportunity to choose the very best he has for us. He is actively orchestrating every circumstance in life to bring us to the point of choosing the good. In this sense, God is causing all things to work together for our good.
The fact God’s very best is not guaranteed and requires our participation may be sobering, but it is also comforting. For we can know even in our poor choices, he is actively working for our good, seeking to turn our lives around to align with his objectives and design as he conforms us to the image of his own Son. Whatever our situation, he is always for us, wasting nothing.
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 the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire —may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.
1 Peter 1:6-7 (NIV)
Our church has begun a series on suffering and it has gotten me thinking about the tension that lies at the heart of the Christian faith. On one hand, God is profoundly good, a goodness we see in Scripture and experience every day. On the other, we are called to suffer. By “called” I mean that suffering, for a variety of reasons, is expected. But how exactly does God’s profound goodness factor into suffering?
The difficulty many have with God is the presence of suffering in the world. That if there were a God, he certainly would not allow this to happen. But this assumes God is the way we think he should be. It also assumes his goodness is the way we think it is. Sure, if God is all-powerful, then he must be the type of God who allows us to suffer. But whether we conclude he is good or not because of this depends on whether we define his goodness based on his willingness or unwillingness to allow us to suffer. Scripture makes clear God’s goodness is not defined in this way.
Our difficulty with God when it comes to suffering, rather, is our own conception of him. If we have been raised on a strict diet of being told God is good and he does not want us to suffer, we are understandably going to have difficulty when we do. We are going to think something strange is happening to us. We are going to think it should not be happening, and that God is not who he says he is. We are going to be inclined to a crisis of faith.
But there is really no cause for a crisis of faith if we turn to scripture, because in scripture we see from cover to cover a God, though profoundly good, willing to allow suffering. It isn’t as if the Word of God portrays God as a God unwilling to allow any form of suffering, and we now find ourselves coming to terms with a world full of it. The opposite is actually true: the Word of God shows God to be very willing to allow suffering, something that reflects the world we find ourselves in. Our difficulty with suffering then is our own ideas about God that neither agree with scripture or the world around us.
But how can God be both good and allow suffering? Again, the answer is that God’s goodness is not defined by his willingness or unwillingness to allow us to suffer. It is defined by something far more profound. To put it simply, God’s goodness is defined equally by his holiness. And it is God’s holiness that makes God willing to allow suffering. God did not create the world and then, looking down one day, say, “Something is missing. I know: suffering!” No, the Word of God is clear that all the suffering we see today came through sin. So suffering is clearly not something God desires, but it is something he allows on the basis of his holiness.
It is really important we understand this. When we object to God’s goodness on the basis of suffering, we are imagining a God willing to go to any length to prevent it. We are imagining a God willing to restrict our free will in order to prevent the consequence of sin, which is suffering, or a God willing to allow us to exercise our free will without consequence. In short, we are imagining a God who is either controlling or not holy. But God’s way of dealing with sin was to allow humanity to exercise the full range of free will and also experience the full consequence of sin. God was willing to allow sin to come through Adam and death through sin, resulting in the world we now see today.
And God is now in the process of delivering us not only from suffering but its root cause, which is sin, through Jesus Christ and his work on the Cross. Yes, even now, God could snap his finger and deliver us all from it instantly. But for a variety of reasons, he has chosen to deliver us progressively. He has chosen to keep us in the world, though we are no longer of it, experiencing his goodness in a variety of ways as we are transformed by him, being conformed to the image of His Son. And his reasons for doing so – though I have no space to go into it now – are all good.
Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.”
Matthew 16:24-25 (NASB)
What God has promised his children are glorious. Among them are health, wholeness and abundant life. But God has also promised us death. That is, death to what is often called “self.” In fact, death to self is the only path to greatness.
As a general rule, I do not like to die. But in the case of the death Jesus talks about, I will make an exception. Because the death that he has in mind is the death of everything in me that is not me. That is, it is everything in me preventing me from being all that I was created to be. Which is the same as saying: everything preventing me from achieving greatness.
Now when I say “everything in me that is not me,” I need to make a distinction here. In the words of the dating coach played by Will Smith in the 2005 romantic comedy Hitch, “me” is a fluid concept right now. Because the “me” that existed before Christ has died, and the “me” that now exists is a new creation. It is a creation that came to being when Jesus saved me, raising me from the dead to newness of life in him. For this reason, it is the only “me” that really matters. It is who I really am.
And God is in the process of putting to death in us all that is not who we really are.1 Some believers get confused by the fact we have already died to sin. They think that means it is impossible for us to sin, though we obviously can and still do sin. But the book of Romans makes clear we are not dead to sin in this way. Rather, our relationship to sin has fundamentally changed.The Spirit of God which now dwells within us makes it possible for us to overcome sin in every area of our lives. In this sense, we are now dead to sin. And the Christian life is the Spirit of God doing just that: putting to death in us the “misdeeds of the body” and we live “by” (in agreement with) Him.
This process is the “losing one’s life” Jesus is talking about. It is also what he is describing when he describes the pruning the Father as our Gardener performs in our lives as believers. Both point to the fact that in order to experience the fullness of life he has for us, something in us must die. In fact, it must die or we will die with it (see Romans 8: 13): we will experience the effects of death the “misdeeds of the flesh” in us produce in our lives (broken relationships, emotional pain, and even physical pain and sickness). But as these places in our lives are removed, we are liberated from the death and experience God’s resurrection power and life. Not only this, but we produce “much fruit”2. That is, we become all we are destined to become. We find ourselves on the path of greatness.
It may be difficult to realize death is the pathway to greatness, but for me it is a source of great hope. It means any area of my life bearing the marks of death are destined to give way to abundant life. My only task – though it may require perseverance – is to yield to God. He will do the rest. And in my experience, he is really good at it.
Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Matthew 7:1-2 (NIV)
Have you ever noticed not judging others and forgiving others are not in the Ten Commandments? Considering how important these virtues are to many, don’t you think that is a little strange?
I mention this because many times we try to be forgiving and nonjudgmental by treating them as simply “what we are supposed to do to be a good person.” And when we do, we run into conflict immediately for good reason. For example, when we try to forgive someone who has wronged us in the past, we immediately feel, “But that person does not deserve to be forgiven. They should pay for what they did.” And we are right. The Word of God makes clear there is such a thing as right and wrong, and that when others do wrong, they should be held accountable. So when we say to ourselves, “that person should pay for what they did,” God actually agrees with us. Our inclination not to forgive, then, actually comes from God. It is evidence of the sense of justice imprinted on our souls by God.
But the reason we should not judge is that God has chosen to not to judge us. And he has done so in such a way that we can only experience the benefits of his decision not to judge us by freely extending non-judgment to others. So choosing to judge others is not a sin in the usual sense. Rather, It is an act of disqualifying ourselves from the forgiveness God has freely made available through Jesus’ death on the Cross by our decision to disqualify others. By holding someone accountable for their sin, I am telling God to hold me accountable for all my sin.
And this is where the power to forgive really lies: understanding how forgiven we really are. Or shall I say: how much in need of forgiveness we really are. For you will only be able to forgive to the degree you realize how much you have been forgiven. So the next time you are struggling to forgive, ask God to show you how much you have been forgiven.
Forget not all [The Lord’s] benefits— who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
Psalms 103:2-5 (NIV)
One of the themes that has characterized my life with Jesus is freedom. I do not mean I have insisted on it. I mean that the Holy Spirit has insisted on it when I am least likely to grant myself freedom, when I am content to live a life of routine (or not so routine) religious devotion. In those moments and at various times throughout my walk with him (as I shared in my last post) God has interrupted my routine and insisted the freedom he has given me is far greater than my God-fearing mindset has imagined.
Freedom is a tricky word. We fear it at believers because we think it means freedom to do whatever we want, and doing whatever we want is what got us into this mess in the first place. But properly understood, freedom means living in the fullness of the new life Jesus has made possible, and that includes, most importantly, freedom from sin. The message of the Cross is that we are not free without the freedom he makes possible, no matter what choices we make. That is, the thing that prevents us from being truly free is not on the outside but on the inside. This is why doing whatever we want only ends in misery. It is why casting off all so-called “social constructs” to do whatever we want only results in a worse state, for us personally and for society. We think it is others that prevent us from being “who we truly are,” when in fact it is ourselves. For it is only by God showing us who we truly are, based on how he created us and intended for us to be, that we can be truly free.
When God shows us this, we are empowered to step into the beautiful. Think about freedom for a moment. When people fight for it, against whatever tyranny they imagine, it is not for the purpose of simply doing whatever they want. Even criminals could fight for that, and no one would think that a worthy cause. Rather, freedom is considered a worthy cause because it holds the promise of allowing us, as human beings, to step into the fullness of who we truly are. And there is beauty in that. The idea we can live in a way we were created speaks more of just choice: it speaks of being aligned with the created order. And being aligned with the created order speaks of beauty. It is a glimpse into a world where things are as they should be, the ideal in a world under the tyranny of all that is not.
To step into the freedom only Jesus can give is to step into the beautiful. Far more than religious duty, it is finding ourselves becoming all we should be, and also finding ourselves in a life that is increasingly as it should be: forgiven, healed, redeemed from the pit, crowned with love and compassion, and satisfied with the things our hearts truly long for, that our youth may be renewed like the eagle’s.
D. Patrick Collins 