It's All Good: 12 Devotions to Embrace Your NowSample

God Causes

As the Scriptures say, "No one is righteous - not even one." ROMANS 3:10 NLT

You may have heard the saying, "God is good, all the time; and all the time, God is good." While this rings true, what we often confuse (or hope?) it to mean is that “everything is good, all the time; and all the time, everything is good.” But you know as well as I do—everything is not good all the time. You can’t “fake it to make it.” No filter smooths the wrinkles of a wounded soul.

Truth be told, very little is good all the time. Life has ups and downs. Every career. Every relationship. Every endeavor like parenting or pursuing your dreams has high points and low ones as well. This is because we live in a world of polarity that is dominated, or at a minimum influenced, by sin. The sin might be your own, or it might be someone else’s. Or it could just be a collective atmosphere surrounding us all. The simple reality is that we reside in a world where we’ve all been wrecked, and we’ve all done the wrecking sometimes. There are no perfect Christians. We have all contributed to our own, and probably someone else’s, pain.

And you know what? That’s okay. We didn’t create this world, so we aren’t really in a position to judge it. Since this is the world we’ve been placed in, and our sinful nature has been placed in us, the starting point for letting go of our past so we can be present in our present is acknowledging that God made this place, and us. God allowed us to have a sinful nature. Because He did, this life will seem unfair sometimes when things don’t go as we expect. We might even disappoint ourselves at times. But it is God who allows all of this in order for us to live in an environment where we get to experience something very special: free will. We get to make our own choices, even if that means we sometimes fail.

It’s okay to not be perfect. Let that goal go. It’s okay that you may have made mistakes. You were learning, I hope. Forgive yourself. It’s also okay that someone else may have made mistakes too. They were also learning (we hope.) Forgive them. It’s time we all moved past blame to something bigger: belief.

Belief in God’s Word that says, “There is none righteous, no not one.” The belief that we’re in the same boat. Let’s all breathe out some blame. And belief in God’s Word that says He can cause it all “to work together for good” (Romans 8:28). And that beauty often resides on the other side of pain. So, let’s breathe in belief.

Jesus, help me breathe out blame and breathe in belief. Amen.