All the time

God is good. If you say to most Christians, “God is good”, the response is automatic we say, “all the time”. We know this with our minds, we say it with our mouths but sometimes we don’t believe it in our hearts. When I was in high school, we would have hymn practice, because I was at a Christian school, and we would pray, “Lord grant that what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts and that what we believe in our hearts, we may show forth in our lives, amen.”

I loved that prayer because it was a reminder that this Christian walk is not about lip service. It’s not about what we say with our mouths, it’s about what we believe in our hearts and living it out in our lives. How different would your life be if you truly believed that God is good? How much less worrying would you do? How much less crying and stressing?

See most people say God is good because they know that’s what the Bible says but they look at their lives and are like “hmmm, I think He’s good. Just not in this area here.” “God is good unless it has to do with this situation here.” We may not say it out loud but we believe that, so we live that.

What this means is that we are free in the areas we believe in God’s goodness and are bound in the areas we believe He is not good. Because to believe God is not good is to believe a lie and to believe a lie of the enemy is to live enslaved by the false reality painted by that lie.

I’ll give an example, I believed for a while that I had sinned so bad, and God could not forgive me. I did not say it out loud, but I believed that God was low key mad at me and didn’t want anything to do with me. So what did I do? I distanced myself from God. The farther away I moved from God, the deeper I fell into the lie, the more it seemed true, but it was never true. God wasn’t mad at me. He couldn’t be, because all of my sins were nailed to the cross with Jesus. I was living in a lie and that lie held me captive until I was confronted with the truth of God’s word.

 So, God is good! James 1:17 TPT says, “Every gift God freely gives us is good and perfect, streaming down from the Father of lights, who shines from the heavens with no hidden shadow or darkness and is never subject to change.” Psalm 92:15 NLT says, “They will declare, “The Lord is just! He is my rock! There is no evil in him!”

This means everything God does can be trusted, there is no ulterior motive, no hidden agenda, no small print, whatever God says He means. He does good because He is good. We hear this all the time but what it means is that in the same way I don’t just do black things, I am black, I was born black and cannot change that, God does good because He is good, and He has always been good and He cannot change that.

That’s what the verses above are saying. Being good is not something He chooses every morning. It is who He is. Which is why we can trust in His goodness. If we can determine that it is certain that if you bump into me in the streets tomorrow, I am still going to be black, how much more is it guaranteed that when you run to God you will be met with goodness and kindness? God’s word is true! God is good, literally all the time!

Our circumstances are not always good. Life is not always good, but God is always good. The devil uses our circumstances and the bad things that he, the devil, causes to happen in our lives and around us to try get us to believe that God is not good but that is a lie. God is always good. Whatever area of your life that the devil is using to convince you that God is not good, is the very area where God wants to show you just how good He is if you’d let Him.  

Psalm 145:9 NLT, “The Lord is merciful and compassionate, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. The Lord is good to everyone. He showers compassion on all his creation.” Because you are part of God’s creation, God wants to be good to you and shower you with compassion. Yes, you! God thinks you are worthy of His love and kindness. Not because of anything you have or haven’t done but because of Jesus.

I’ll leave you with Psalm 145:8-9 TPT which says, “You’re kind and tenderhearted to those who don’t deserve it and very patient with people who fail you. Your love is like a flooding river overflowing its banks with kindness. God, everyone sees your goodness, for your tender love is blended into everything you do.”

Love and blessings,

Melissa Tsingano.