My God

“God is good. 

God is good to me. 

God is good at being God.” 

– Uninvited, Lysa TerKeurst

If you asked me about these three things this morning, I would’ve quickly agreed. But deep down, I wouldn’t have believed them at all. This past weekend has been anything but good. Anxiety has laid siege on my life. I haven’t slept because I’m afraid of forgetting something I have to do the next day. I haven’t eaten because my stomach is in knots. I haven’t enjoyed time with my friends because I’ve been absolutely exhausted. So needless to say, I’ve been quite miserable. But today, the Lord spoke to my hammering heart and spinning mind. He gave me the very words I needed. As I read Uninvited by Lysa Terkeurst this morning, these three statements caused my head to clear. As she went through each one, proving that in fact they are all true, it became devastatingly clear to me that I wasn’t believing these very things. I haven’t believed that the Lord is good. I have believed that He doesn’t care about who I am and what’s happening to me. But Jeremiah 32:40&41 tells me differently,

“I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never turn away from doing good to them, and I will put fear of Me in their hearts so they will never again turn away from Me. I will take delight in them to do what is good for them, and with all My heart and mind I will faithfully plant them in this land.”

Even when we His children turn from Him over and over, the Lord looks to bring good to us. Because that’s who He is. As long as God has existed, He has never changed. He has always been good and all He does has been good. They can be nothing else because God can be nothing else. Not being good goes against God’s very character. And because He can’t go against His own character, he is always good. Always.

I haven’t believed that God is good to me. I have felt forgotten and ignored. I have felt as if He’s left me to fend for myself in this world that is looking to tear me apart. But again, God’s truth rung out as clear as bells. Romans 8:28 tells me this,

“We know all things work together for the good of those who love God; those who are called according to His purpose.”

God doesn’t leave things unfinished. He doesn’t give us a task to leave out the instructions on what to do next. He doesn’t put us on a path with no directions. God has laid my path before me and has promised to walk next to me the entire time. And because He has proven to be good, I can trust Him to be good to me in that promise. This also means that all the hard times in my life don’t contradict who God is. It only continues to strengthen the proof that He is good. The things we go through may not feel good but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t for our good. And that IS a significant difference. All of my most precious and important lessons have come through struggles and hardships. All of them have been good for me and my relationship with the Lord. So although it was painful and unpleasant, it was good for me. God’s plan was good the entire time I was suffering because He knew that it would bring me closer to Him. Anything the Lord places within my life is good because He is good. They are unable to be anything other than that.

Lastly, I wasn’t trusting God to be God. I wasn’t trusting Him to remain good throughout all of this. Psalm 33:11 was quick to prove me wrong.

“The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of His heart from generation to generation.”

I can trust God to be God because He can’t be anything else. Goodness is God’s very character. It is who He is. And He has always been that. In all the time that the Lord has existed, He has not changed once. He hasn’t changed His commandments, He hasn’t changed His standards for loving us, He hasn’t changed His plans of salvation. God has always been God and will always continue to be so. So God will always be good. He will always love me because I am His child. He will always walk with me because He promised to do so. He has remained the same his entire existence and therefore I can trust Him to continue to do just that.

All of this means that the love that Christ had for me the day He died on the cross is still very real and very alive today. Just because life has been hard doesn’t mean it hasn’t been good. Just because I have felt as if I have been in a desert far away from God’s love doesn’t mean that He hasn’t been there. It doesn’t mean that He has rejected me and quit loving me.

It means that through this anxiety, my God cares for me and my heart. It means that I am not alone and I am in the hands of the Almighty. My God is going to get me to where I need to be, even when I don’t see how. My God is going to feed the desires of my heart as they align with His own. My God still loves me far more deeply than I can ever imagine.

So even when life is chaos and I change every day, my God is still the exact same God.