Watch our Livestream 10am Sundays at 10am on Sundays Give Online
Romans 8:28 (ESV) — And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.
Our passage this week is just one verse, Romans 8:28. “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” It seems like we’ve said every week for some time now that today’s passage is the top of the mountain. It has been true every time, and it’s true again today. Maybe we should think of this chapter as being like one of those hikes on the Appalachian trail where you’ve climbed all day to the top of the mountain, and you’re finally rewarded with a breathtaking view, but instead of a peak, the trail flattens out and runs along a ridge. As you walk along the ridge the view changes, but it’s all majestic and wonderful and life-giving. Then occasionally you come around a corner and the view opens up to something even greater, and it’s so beautiful that you start to wonder if you might be dreaming. It’s almost unbelievable. Verse 28 is one of those places. “All things work together for good.” This verse has given more comfort to those who toil and struggle and suffer in this life than perhaps any other. All the promises of God seem to be summed up in these six words. “All things work together for good.” It’s so sweeping, so simple, so unambiguous. Can it be true? It’s such a fantastic claim to make about the world. Do I dare even believe it? Paul seems to be living in a fairy tale. Christians have certainly been accused before of believing a fairy tale. It’s hard to refute the charge with verses like this staring at us. Here it is on the page. “All things work together for good.” That does sound like the stuff of fairy tales. Whether or not Christianity is the stuff of fairy tales might be an interesting question about fairy tales, but all I want to know is if it’s true. Because if it’s true, it changes absolutely everything. If I could know that all things work together for good … oh, what peace! What confidence! I can’t imagine any greater comfort in this life than to know that this verse is true.
But there is some work to do before we walk up and claim this as our own. That’s because, while it is a sweeping claim, notice first that it is not a universal one. Paul does not claim that all things work together for good for everyone. The promise is bracketed on both sides by a qualification. All things work together for good “for those who love God” and “for those who are called according to his purpose.” It’s tempting to try to move right past the qualifications and just grab hold of the promise. But that is a grave mistake. This promise is not for everyone. There is indeed a kind of person who goes through life with a vague and naive confidence that everything is just going to be ok in the end. These are the Pollyanna’s of the world. They don’t know why it’s all going to work out. They’re just sure that everything is going to be fine in the end because that’s the way the world works. Maybe, for them, it is how the world has worked so far. That’s one of the dangers of living in the healthiest and wealthiest time in history. But everything most certainly does not work out fine for everyone. It’s very clear in the book of Romans that God makes distinctions. Those distinctions are going to come to a point in the next chapter, chapter nine. There really are villains in this story. In fact, the Bible says that all of us are born villains. We all have a villain nature inside of us that has to be changed. Thank God, he changes villains into saints every day. Otherwise this would be a sad story indeed. But everything does not work together for good for everyone. Romans 1 says that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.”1 A casual, thoughtless confidence that everything will just work out is simply another kind of unbelief. It denies the reality of God’s judgement. We may not walk up casually to this promise and claim it. We must do it boldly, but not casually.
Then who is the promise for? Paul says that the promise is for “those who love God” and “those who are called according to his purpose.” Paul is obviously not talking about two different groups of people. He’s talking about one group, and it’s the same group that he has been talking about all along in this chapter. This promise fits squarely into the context of what we’ve seen in Romans 8 over the last eight weeks. Paul is describing a relationship. Christians are people who are related to God in a particular way—that is as his children. This chapter is all about the blessings of being children of God. Verse 28 comes to us in that context. This promise that all things work together for good is given specifically to the children of God, those who “have received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry ‘Abba! Father!”2 The two qualifications on either side of the promise are highlighting that relationship from two different perspectives. Describing Christians as “those who love God” describes the relationship from our perspective. This is how we relate to God. We love him, as a Father. “Those who are called according to his purpose” points to God’s perspective, and highlights his role in the relationship. We’ll think about God’s calling in a few minutes, but first, let’s consider our side of this relationship.
All things work together for good “for those who love God.” Jesus said that the greatest commandment is that we should love God with all of our heart and soul and strength.3 It’s challenging to think that we can be commanded to love something. That offends some of our modern assumptions about how love works. But to love God is a command, and there are lots of examples in the Bible where God says, “If you obey this command, then these good things will happen to you.”4 But that’s not exactly what is happening here in Romans 8. Verse 28 is not an “if-then” statement. “If you love God then all things will work together for your good.” There’s a sense in which that’s true, but that isn’t Paul’s point here. When Paul says that “for those who love God, all things work together for good,” he is not describing a cause-and-effect. Loving God is not the cause, or the effect, of all things working together for good. Let’s think about that.
First, I think we all understand, at least theologically, that our love for God is not the thing that causes all things to work together for good. God is the one who works all things together for good. Some of your Bible translations make that plain. They say, “God causes all things to work together for good,”5 or “in everything God works for the good.”6 That is clearly Paul’s meaning. It isn’t something magical in our love for God that causes things to work for good, as if positive vibes were the key to a happy life. Neither is it the case that our love for God coerces or convinces him to work things for good. No, it’s God who works things for good “according to his purpose.”
But it’s just as important to see that our love for God is not the result, either, of things working together for good. In other words, Paul isn’t talking about gratitude. This is a little more tricky, because gratitude is so important for Christians. But in this context, Paul is not saying that we love God because God works all things together for our good. The love comes first in the logic of this verse. “For those who love God, all things work together for good.” So while gratitude for what God has done and will do for you is absolutely right and good and even commanded, the love that Paul is talking about in this verse isn’t just gratitude. Love that depends entirely on a gift that has been given and received isn’t really love at all, is it? If it is, it is a very immature love. Love for a person is not at all the same thing as love for the gifts that we receive from them. Genuine, mature love sees something lovely in a person and admires them for it, delights in them, feels an affection for them in response to what we see in them—not what we get from them. It’s the same with our love for God. If the only thoughts that you ever have about God are about the gifts that he has given to you, or the promise that he is going to give you something greater some day, then that is an immature love, at best. Gratitude is wonderful and necessary, but gratitude isn’t love.
Remember what we saw back in Romans 1, that all of humanity has an obligation, even before we consider anything that God has done for us individually, to see God as he has been revealed, and to honor him and worship him.7 What has been revealed about God is enough that there are no excuses for not loving him. The problem is that sinful man suppresses the truth about God, and does not love him. We are born with a villain’s heart. We have no taste for spiritual things until God gives us his Spirit, which he does when he adopts us as his children. When that happens, our spiritual affections are revived and renewed, and we are given the capacity to see God for who he is and to love him for it—to desire more of him because what we see in him seems good to us. It’s popular to say in our circles that love is not just a feeling. Love is an action. That’s true. The book of 1 John comes to mind.8 But it’s equally important to say that love is not just an action. Love is not a work. Love for God is a spiritual emotion. It’s a delight and a stirring of affection within us that comes from seeing him as he really is. If I were talking to the children (and sometimes the children’s version is helpful for all of us) I might say that to love God means that thoughts about God make you happy. We could probably do worse than that as a definition. Is love a duty? Yes. Is love an action? You bet. But is love also a delight and a spiritual affection? Yes, it very much is.
So, in this verse, love for God is not about cause-and-effect. Instead it’s about identity. It’s about relationship. Paul describes Christians in a few different ways in this chapter. What he says here in verse 28 is that Christians are those people who love their heavenly Father. That’s who we are. We are those who have been given the Spirit of adoption, “by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” We are those who see God as he is and who love him for it. That’s what we want to do, even this morning.
I said earlier that we may not approach this promise casually or recklessly. I suggest that the right way to approach this promise, like any other promise, is to start by seeing God through it. This verse is meant to give us confidence, and the way to experience the confidence that is offered here is by first looking through the promise to see the glory of the God who made it. Are you one of God’s children who love him and are called by him, and can therefore claim this great promise as your own? You won’t discover the answer by looking inside yourself. Look to God and see!
So let’s look at this promise and ask ourselves what they always tell you to ask in any Bible study, “What does this say about God?” “What is God like” is the most important question that you can ever ask. A.W. Tozer said that “what comes to mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you.”9 How I respond when things get hard—whether I’m anxious or at peace, whether I’m angry or patient, whether I’m grateful or resentful—all depends on what I think that God is like. Around here we believe in the sovereignty of God. That means that God is the author of this story that we’re in. He decides every plot detail. Well, what kind of storyteller is he? What sort of stories does he write? Does God write tragedies or a comedies, or even fairy tales?
The answer given here in Romans 8:28 is that God is the kind of God who works all things together for good. It isn’t just what he does. It’s what he is. God is good. Something profoundly true is being said about God in this verse. He is good. This is true in a way that nothing else is true. God is good. It’s one of the most common things said about God in the Bible.
Psalm 34:8 (ESV) — Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!
Psalm 106:1 (ESV) — Praise the LORD! Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever!
Nahum 1:7 (ESV) — The LORD is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in him.
Mark 10:18 (ESV) — And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.
The way to be confident that all things work together for good is to meditate on this: that God is good and he delights in what is good. And because he is good and he delights in what is good, he delights to bring about good things. He does not delight in evil or in death. It says in Ezekiel that God doesn’t even delight in the death of a villain in the same way that he delights in turning the villain from evil to good (Ezekiel 18:23). God delights to bring about good things for his children. But this verse highlights something else. Not only does he delight in bringing about the good, he seems to delight especially in working things together for good in unexpected ways. It seems to be the case that God delights in unexpected happy endings. If you just step back and look at the story of the world that God made, in the Bible and in the history books, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that God enjoys an unexpected happy twist, where all of the different parts of the story—especially the hard parts—work together in the end for good. The problem of evil is a very thorny problem. Why does God decree that suffering and evil will exist in the world? That was his choice. I don’t have a full answer to that question, but I know that God could have created a world that was full of nothing but goodness and light, from creation to eternity if that’s what he had wanted. But instead he decided that it was better that hard things would exist and that he would work all of those hard things together for good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose. There’s something about that kind of story that expresses the full character of God better than one where there is no sin or pain. I’ll say that again. There’s something about the kind of story where the hard things work together for good that reveals the full character of God better than one where there is no sin or pain.
The Bible is absolutely full of just that kind of story. We’re going to look at a few of them. But before we do, I want to give us another hook to hang this idea on. Sometimes having a word for something helps us to see the thing more clearly. We all love Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings story. Tolkien was a devout Christian and a wonderful storyteller. He thought a lot about this idea of the unexpected happy twist in a story. He wrote many such stories himself, but he also analyzed stories and wrote things that help us to be better readers of stories. Tolkien was also very much a man of words. He lamented the fact that we didn’t have a good word in English for the unexpected happy twist, and so, being Tolkien, he invented one. The word that he coined is “eucatastrophe”10—spelled “e-u,” then “catastrophe.” The prefix “eu” just means good. It’s the same root that’s used in the greek word for gospel, εὐαγγέλιον, which means “good news.” And “catastrophe” of course has negative connotations for us, but its literal meaning is just “an overturning.” So a eucatastrophe is just an overturning of events, but for the good. It’s the good catastrophe—the unexpected happy turn of events in a story. I think it’s a great word, and one that we should have in our vocabulary in our church. We are exactly the right people to use this word. If we can’t use this word in our church—with our idiosyncrasies, then no one will. But use it wisely. If you try to use it at work, people will think you’re being pretentious. But we can use it here. It can be one of our secret words that no one else knows. We’re not a club, but we can have a few secret words, and this should be one of them.
Eucatastrophe is a new word, but it’s a very old idea. All of the great stories in the Bible are this kind of story. We know the stories so well at this point that we often aren’t affected by them as stories. Nothing is unexpected. But in almost every story in the Bible, if you imagine hearing it for the first time, you come to a point in the story where a big smile would come across your face and you’d say, “I didn’t see that coming.” Just consider a few.
The story of Abraham and Isaac has one of the most dramatic happy twists in all of history. The son and heir of God’s chosen servant, the promise of the salvation of the world, is lying on an altar with a knife poised above his heart. In this moment it looks like God has broken his promise and that he’s just like the pagan gods, thirsty for the blood of our children. But just as the knife begins to fall, God calls out, “Abraham, do not lay your hand on the boy.” And there, caught in the thicket, Abraham sees a ram. We didn’t see that coming.
One of my favorites is the story of Joseph. Joseph’s story is full of trouble. Betrayed by his brothers, sold into slavery, falsely accused and thrown into prison where he’s forgotten by everyone. None of us knows that kind of trouble. And yet, God was working it for good. This is the story where we have the nearest thing to an Old Testament version of Romans 8:28. At the end of the story Joseph says to his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Genesis 50:20). The real happy twist comes at the end when Joseph very dramatically reveals himself to his brothers and they are finally restored to each other. They all weep for joy, and when they go and tell Jacob that his son is alive, after all these years, it says that Jacob’s heart went numb. He couldn’t dare to believe it. It was too good to be true, and yet it was. I think it’s one of the happiest moments in the Bible. Why did God orchestrate the story that way? Because he is that kind of storyteller.
The story of Esther is that kind of story. It’s about an orphan girl who becomes a queen. The story turns grim when Haman, the villain, forms a plot to murder Mordecai and kill all the Jews. But the story ends with another dramatic twist when Haman ends up hanging on his own gallows and Mordecai is raised to second in command to the king.
Paul’s own biography is that kind of story. He was a persecutor of the church, a murderer of Christians, the chief of sinners,11 until light literally broke through the clouds as he was walking along the road, and God called him, “Paul, why are you doing this?” And Paul’s life, and the life of the world, were forever changed.
There are so many others. The stories of Noah and Moses and David, of Job and Ruth and Daniel and Jonah. All of these stories are about God working things together for good in unexpected ways. There is definitely enough evidence here to suggest a pattern. This is the way the story goes for God’s children, because this is God’s character. He delights in bringing good out of desperate situations.
Of course, there is one great eucatastrophe at the center of human history. The death and resurrection of Jesus is the unexpected happy twist that changes everything else. The death of death itself by the death of the Son of God on a wooden cross—no one saw that coming. This is the climactic scene in the story of the world that makes sense of everything else that has happened, before or since. We saw earlier in Romans how there was this great unanswered question in all of the stories prior to Jesus. How can it be possible for God to work things together for our good while sin remains? If God is good, then he must also be just. But if he is just, how can he be good to me, a sinner? It’s a big problem. God’s very unexpected answer was the death and resurrection of his own Son.
The promise of Romans 8:28 is that if you believe that this story is true, if you believe that your heavenly father is this kind of storyteller, and trust yourself to him, and love him for it, then this promise is for you—and you can know that your life is also the kind of story where all things work together for good.
There is a silly version of this in some modern stories. “If you only believe, then all your dreams will come true.” What is silly in those stories is not the importance of belief, it’s that those stories always place the power in yourself. “Believe in yourself,” they say, “and all your dreams will come true.” But the Christian message couldn’t be more different. Our confidence is not in the strength of our own belief or the intensity of our own love for God or anything else in us. Our confidence comes because we have seen God, our father, and we see what he is like. We see that he is good.
I’m very thankful that Paul didn’t only say, “For those who love God, all things work together for good.” My love is a fickle thing. It comes and goes depending on what kind of day I’m having. That would be a shaky foundation for such a massive promise. Thankfully, there is a much more sure and steady foundation.
“All things work together for good,” not only because we love God, but because we “are called according to his purpose.” This is the view from God’s perspective. His perspective is both cosmic and also very personal.
The Bible has a lot to say about being called by God. We often think about calling in terms of the thing that we feel like God wants us to do. But we should start with the most literal sense. To be called by God means to hear your name, as a child hears the voice of a father. We are God’s children and before he gives us anything to do, he first calls us by name. “Ron, come here.” It’s that personal. Occasionally God calls people out loud. Moses12 and Samuel13 and even Paul14 heard with their ears the voice of God calling to them. That may never happen to you, but whether or not you hear the call out loud, you did receive just such a call from God. The reason I can say that so confidently is that the Bible is clear that no person ever turns to God in love without having first been called by God. When I say that this verse describes our relationship with God from two different perspectives, I am not saying that this is a relationship of equal give and take. It is not the case that we love God from one side, he calls to us from the other, and we happily meet in the middle where all things work together for good. God does all of the heavy lifting in this relationship. I said earlier that our love for God is not the result of God having worked all things together for our good. But our love for God is very much the result of God’s call. The truly unique and amazing thing about God’s call is that it creates life. God speaks into existence the response that he requires, which is love. Only God can do that. “Lazarus, come here!” That was a different kind of call. Something more was happening in that call than what happens when I call to one of my children. But that is exactly the kind of call that each of us received. The call itself brought life out of death. This is an important issue in the book of Romans. Does God call to us and then wait expectantly for us to respond, or does his call accomplish what it sets out to accomplish? I suggest that Jesus would have been waiting a very long time indeed for Lazarus to answer his call if the call itself didn’t have the power to create life.
In the same way that the voice of God spoke the world into existence and gave us physical life, so the call of God creates spiritual life and awakens our spiritual sight so that we can see him as good and love him as we were made to love him. “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”15
There is one last piece that needs to be in place in order for us to really have confidence that all things are working together for our good. We know that God is good. We love him as a Father and he calls to us as his children. But it’s no comfort to me to know that God is good if he isn’t interested in what happens in this life and has no plan for it, or if he does have a plan but isn’t able to accomplish it. But all of the theology that we need in order to receive the blessing of comfort that comes from this promise is here in this verse, and this is the last piece. God’s call has a purpose. “All things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” This is the second grand truth about God in this verse. First, he is good, and second, he is working things together according to a purpose. It’s his purpose that determines what happens in this story. God isn’t reacting to events that are out of his control, trying to make the best of a bad situation. He isn’t up in heaven playing cosmic whack-a-mole with our sins. God has a purpose, his purposes are good, and he works to bring about his good purposes.
Isn’t it wonderful how the cosmic purposes of God become so personal in this promise? He doesn’t just say that God works all things together for good according to his purposes, although he does. It says that all things work for good “for those who are called according to his purposes.” You and I have been called with a purpose. When the cancer comes, I think I might almost get through, just knowing that God was up in heaven, pulling the strings and working this thing for a greater good in some way. But there’s so much more than that in this promise. We have been called with a purpose. God has spoken your name with a purpose in mind. God is saying to you, “John, come here. I have something for you, but I have something that I want you to do. It will be hard, but trust me. I am with you, and I am working this together for your good.” The call of God is that personal.
So don’t be surprised when God’s purpose for you involves hard things. That has always been the way that God accomplishes his plan for his children. Remember that death and resurrection is the theme of God’s story. Our heart doesn’t resonate with stories where the happy ending comes cheaply and easily, because they aren’t true. We know that isn’t how the world works. It’s really hard to think that way when we are the ones living the story. When it comes to my own life story, I don’t particularly care about the literary quality of it. I’ll take the Hallmark version, where the trial is superficial and the resolution is quick and easy. But God isn’t that kind of storyteller. That isn’t actually the story that you’re in. So don’t be caught off guard when the suffering comes.
This doesn’t mean that we seek out suffering. When Paul says that “all things work together for good,” it means all things, not just the bad things. There have actually been lots of people in history who have made the mistake of thinking that God’s purposes for me are only ever accomplished through suffering, and so suffering itself becomes something desirable. But it’s simply not true that pain is more righteous than pleasure. “All things” means all things. Ecclesiastes 7 says,
Ecclesiastes 7:13–14 (ESV) — Consider the work of God: who can make straight what he has made crooked? In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him.
Prosperity and suffering are both from the hand of God, and he intends them both for our good. We don’t need to manufacture our own suffering. God is the one who is working these things together, both the good and the bad, as he sees fit. Our role is to receive the thing in front of us as a gift from our heavenly father and to trust that whatever it is, he is working it for my good.
The verse in Ecclesiastes also reminds us that we don’t know in any given situation exactly what working things for good will look like. “God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him.” That’s a theme of Ecclesiastes, if you remember from our study a couple of years ago. God “has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”16 Even here in Romans 8 we’re told in verse 25 that what we hope for is something that we do not see, which means that believing that all things work together for good is always a matter of faith. We can’t see the end before it comes. John told us last week how we don’t even know what to pray for, much less what God is planning to do. But the Spirit knows what we need, and the Spirit intercedes for us. And we know that what the Spirit asks for on our behalf is good, because he is good.
But there’s a deeper reason why we ought not concern ourselves too much about the exact details of our future. The upshot of everything we’ve said so far is that the good thing that all things are working toward is actually not a thing at all, but a person. Jesus said that “God alone is good,”17 If God alone is truly good, then the greatest good gift that God could give his children in any situation is the gift of himself. And that’s true. Our highest good is not any amount of health or wealth or any pleasant turn of events. Mankind’s highest good is God himself. There is more here than simply saying, God is the greatest good, therefore God is our greatest good. That’s too generic. I’m saying that the highest good that we can experience is the experience of seeing the face of God.
Psalm 4 says:
Psalm 4:6–7 (ESV) — There are many who say, “Who will show us some good? Lift up the light of your face upon us, O LORD!” You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.
Psalm 73:25 (ESV) — Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
Psalm 73:28 (ESV) — But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord GOD my refuge, that I may tell of all your works.
Psalm 27
Psalm 27:8–9 (ESV) — You have said, “Seek my face.” My heart says to you, “Your face, LORD, do I seek.” Hide not your face from me. Turn not your servant away in anger, O you who have been my help. Cast me not off; forsake me not, O God of my salvation!
The old writers had a word for this. They called it the “beatific vision.” “Beatific” comes from the same word where we get the word beatitude. “Blessed are the poor in spirit … blessed are the meek.” Or sometimes we say, “Happy are the poor in spirit … happy are the meek.”18 The beatific vision is the “vision that makes one happy,” and it refers to this experience of seeing God. I don’t mean seeing with our physical eyes. To see God is a spiritual act. To see him is to apprehend something of him, to experience him and to know him. Christians have always understood that the experience of seeing God is our highest good. I said at the start that feeling this way about God—“Lift up the light of your face upon us, O Lord,” “There is nothing on earth that I desire besides you”—is what it means to love God and to be one of his children.
So then, if God alone is good, and if man’s highest good is simply to see God, then the promise that all things work together for good must mean, ultimately, that all things work together to bring us to God. All things work together to reveal God to us in a way that leaves us blessed—leaves us happy. It is ultimately a promise of eternal life. But eternal life doesn’t simply mean being alive forever. Man’s greatest good is not a heartbeat. Our greatest good, and the thing that all things are working together to accomplish, is that we might see him as he is and enjoy him, face to face, forever. We see him now, but through a glass, darkly.19 The promise that all things work together for good is, above all else, a promise that there is one more great eucatastrophe yet to come. We live every day in expectation of a great happy twist, which will be unexpected even though we know it’s coming, when our Lord Jesus will come back and work all things together for good, once and for all. What makes that day great, and worth shaping your entire life in preparation for, is that, as the song says, “on that day we will see you.” “On that day, we will know you.” On that day.
But how do we live now in light of that day? A few thoughts as we close. First, as Christians, we simply have a different perspective on suffering. We believe that suffering, for a Christian, is accomplishing something. It is not in vain, and that changes everything. It is possible to endure unbelievably hard things if you believe that the hard thing has a purpose. Some of you are experiencing some very hard things right now. Know that your suffering is not in vain. God has a purpose for it. I don’t know exactly what that purpose is, and neither do you. But you know that he is good, he has called you by name, and he has called you to this very thing. And you do know something about what God is doing. You know that he is revealing to you something about himself, and that is the greatest thing that he could ever do for you. Remember that there are things about God’s character that can only be seen in the midst of suffering. In your suffering, let your cry be that of the Psalmist, “Lord, show me your face,” not first so that my circumstances change, but so that I might know you, which is my highest good.
But God is also accomplishing things that we don’t know about. Be in faith for unexpected happy twists. Make your requests known to God, and then wait for him to do good things. He might give you the thing that you asked for, but he might have something better. Paul says in Ephesians that he “is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think.”20 Be in faith for the unexpected.
Lastly, remember that our highest good is simply to see God and love the sight of him. Consider how that fact affects your day-to-day life. While the perfect, face-to-face experience isn’t here yet, God does reveal himself to us in this life, and not just in the major trials. He intends for us to experience the good of seeing him every day. Yes, life is often very hard, and when it isn’t hard it can often be routine. But God is constantly giving us glimpses of his goodness, and we should learn to recognize them and love him in those glimpses. We see him even now, and when we do, it is good. One way that this happens is in little moment of eucatastrophe that happen every day. Sudden, unexpected glimpses of joy that take a thousand different forms. I’m talking about those moments in life when something small happens that causes your heart to stir. It isn’t a thought about God, necessarily. You might be in a normal conversation, and then out of the blue someone says something that’s unexpectedly warm and poignant, and you feel a lump in your throat. Or you might be reading your children a story, and you get to the happy twist and your voice catches, and your eyes go wet. Or maybe in Sunday morning worship, you’re just singing along, minding your business, and suddenly a line lands on you and your heart swells and you feel like you’ve had a brief glimpse of something so beautiful that something deep inside of you says that it must be true.
I want to encourage you to lean into those moments. We should learn to see those moments as glimpses of the goodness of God. Think of those moments as foretastes of this promise that God is working all things together for your good. I’m speaking to Christians now, of course. Those moments when your heart swells at an unexpected glimpse of joy are the Spirit bearing witness with your Spirit that you are God’s child. I know that different ones of us are naturally more emotional than others, and that’s fine. But I hope you’ve had something of that experience. It is, I think, a uniquely Christian experience. As Christians, glimpses of joy affect us more profoundly than glimpses of pain. They affect us more profoundly because they are more deeply real. Not because the suffering isn’t real—the suffering is very real. But for children of God, glimpses of joy are even more real than pain because they are a foretaste of something that is eternal. They are a foretaste of the promise of an eternity spent in the presence of our good God.
It sometimes feels like there is a veil that separates heaven and earth. Its joy is on that side and suffering on this side. But in Christ the veil has been torn. It is a tattered old thing, constantly letting the light in. Every time the Spirit blows, the curtain flaps and light comes pouring through. And each time we catch a glimpse, our spirit groans. Not in pain, but in intense, joyful expectation. Our spirit groans inwardly as we wait eagerly for the day when the joy of the presence of the Lord will rush over us like a flood of light forever.
Brothers and sisters, come, taste and see that the Lord is good. If your heart has never swelled with joy at the thought of the goodness of God, then cry out to him today. “Lord, show me your face. Hide not your face from me.” For all of us, let us go and live in the confidence and peace that comes from knowing that God our Father is good, and he delights in working all things together for our good.
Here are some other recent messages.
We are a church built on the Bible, guided and empowered by the Spirit, striving to make disciples, and pursuing holiness in the context of robust biblical relationships.
© 2026 Cornerstone Fellowship Church of Apex
