Living as God's Girlনমুনা

Goodness

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you see the word “good”?

I think about being on my best behavior. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like getting into trouble. I guess you could call me a little bit of a rule follower, and that’s not always a bad thing. However, God has more for us than just following rules.

Following rules, staying out of trouble, and making good choices are important. I’m sure it makes your mom happy when you behave well, and even more important, your good behavior makes God happy too. He wants His girls to shine for Him in everything we do. That means always doing our best.

But did you know that even our best is still not good enough for God? I know that sounds harsh, but it’s true. The good that God wants for you and me is more than just us being on our best behavior. As you’ve heard me say before, God wants to make us good from the inside out. Oh, He wants to help us to do good deeds and say good words and think good thoughts, but even better, He wants our hearts to be full of and overflowing with His goodness. And God’s goodness enables us to do much more than any good we could accomplish on our own.

When something is good, you want more and more of it, right? That’s how it is with God’s goodness in your life. His goodness makes you want more and more of Him. God’s goodness makes others want Him too.

When you are full of God’s goodness, you want to do good things for the people around you. You don’t want to see them sad or hurting. So you show them God’s goodness so they will want His goodness in their lives too.

A word the Bible uses to talk about another type of goodness is “righteousness.” That’s a big word, but reading the first five letters will help you understand its meaning: “right.” God wants to make us right. Even more than helping us to make right decisions and do right things, God wants to make us right with Him. We definitely can’t do that on our own. We need God’s help. We need God’s Spirit to grow His right-ness inside us.

We often try to change our hearts by making sure we do the right thing, but that’s not the way it works. God wants more than actions that look good; He wants us to be good on the inside. He wants our hearts to be good so that we are honest, sincere, genuine, loving, and all the good things that make us more like Jesus.

Remember, anything good in us comes from God’s goodness poured into our hearts; it is His love that shows up in our actions. Good things will not always be happening around you, but with God’s Spirit in you, you can say yes to goodness in any circumstances. 

God wants to help us focus on Him even when life is hard or when others are not good to us.

So the next time you are having a hard time seeing goodness around you, remember that you have a choice. You can choose to focus on things that are good and right. Most importantly, you can choose to reveal God’s goodness as you are good to the people around you.

Faithfulness

Living as God’s girl leads to adventure and wonderful experiences. When you follow God, you never know where He will take you, but you can trust that it will always be for your good.

Following God can sometimes feel like you’re living in a mystery. He rarely tells us what tomorrow will bring. After all, He wants us to continue to trust Him and be confident that He is leading us somewhere great.

Following God takes faith. Having faith means you believe something is true even when you can’t see it or understand it. Faith also means not only saying you believe something, but also acting like you believe.

Our faith can grow stronger when we remind ourselves that God loves taking care of us. He loves surprising all His children with experiences and opportunities that help us better understand how much He loves us. Our job is to trust and believe that what He says is true and to make choices that show others how much we trust Him.

Think about it this way… 

Do you ever worry about having air to breathe? You probably don’t even think about it. You just inhale and exhale all day long, every single day, and you never doubt that air will continue to be available to you and continue to do what it needs to do in your body.

We can have this same confidence about God. Every day He wants us to live for Him even though we can’t see Him or see what He is doing. God wants us to trust that He is always available to us and that He is doing what He needs to do in our hearts and in our lives. Because He is!

Trusting that someone else knows what is best for you can be really hard. That’s why God wants to help us.

You see, faithfulness is another fruit of the Spirit that God grows in His children. The more we follow Him, the more faithful to Him we become. God wants us to trust Him, and trust means doing the things He tells us to do. When we are faithful to obey and follow God, people around us can see how much we trust Him and will be likely to get a glimpse of His irresistible, life-giving love.