Tag: God is good

Morning Musing: James 1:16-18

Leave a comment

“Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers and sisters. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. By his own choice, he gave us birth by the word of truth so that we would be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the cliches people who have even the most rudimentary, generic faith like to throw around when something good has happened is that there is no such thing as a coincidence. It’s one of those phrases that is common enough that you could probably trick someone into thinking it’s from somewhere in the Scriptures if you put it before them in the right list. You might be surprised to learn that while that phrase never actually makes an appearance in the Scriptures, the idea isn’t so far off from something Jesus’ own brother, James, wrote. Let’s take a look at it this morning.

Read the rest…

Morning Musing: 1 Samuel 20:2

Leave a comment

“Jonathan said to him, “No, you won’t die. Listen, my father doesn’t do anything, great or small, without telling me. So why would he hide this matter from me? This can’t be true.””  (CSB – Read the chapter)

Jonathan was the kind of guy who believed the best about everybody. He was loyal and true no matter who he was dealing with. Today we tend to call this kind of person naive and we treat such a description as something we should want to avoid nearly at all costs. It’s better to have experienced and know how the world really works than it is to go through ripe to be taken for a ride by someone who does. Streets smarts are an indispensable tool for a good life. At least, that’s what we’re told. Read the rest…

Morning Musing: 1 Corinthians 2:9

Leave a comment

“But, as it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him’–”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

I love this verse.  Here’s how good our God is: We cannot even imagine all the good things he has planned for us.  We cannot even fathom them.  Some of them, perhaps, have not even been invented yet.  And God is prepared for them. Read the rest…

Morning Musings: Romans 8:28

Leave a comment

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”  (NIV – Read the chapter)

This verse is one of the single biggest clichés in the Scriptures.  We hear it often as a way to justify practically anything.  If something bad happens, well, God will work it out for good.  If something good happens, see, Paul was right.  If something good doesn’t happen quickly after something bad, well, we must not love Him very well.  If tragedy strikes, God can still bring good out of this even though you can’t imagine what it could be.  Clichés! Read the rest…

An Absentee God

Leave a comment

In this second-to-last part of our series, Reasons to Believe, we tackled what is perhaps the stiffest challenge to the Christian faith ever recorded: The problem of evil.  How do we who confess our belief in a God who is good account for all the evil in the world?  That’s perhaps a bigger question than we could answer over the course of a single sermon.  What we can do is talk about how to respond to those who are struggling with it personally.  That is exactly what we wrestled with in this message.  Keep reading to see what we discovered.

An Absentee God

I read a story a couple of weeks ago about a serial killer in Russia.  The man was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to life in prison for raping and murdering 22 women.  Recently he confessed to additional murders for which he had not been previously convicted.  Fifty-nine additional murders to be precise.  If you’re into math, that makes 81 people—mostly women—whom this monster raped, likely tortured, and murdered.  He was a police officer the whole time.  When he was off-duty, he would offer to give young women walking on the side of the road a lift home.  Over a span of more than twenty years, eighty-one times somebody’s daughter disappeared without any apparent trace.  Let’s just go ahead and ask the hard question: How, in a world presided over by a God whose goodness is affirmed over and over again by billions of His followers, is something like this allowed to go on for so long without recourse? Read the rest…