God is good. God is generous. God is the God who blesses. These are the things that deeply impacted me about God in our study of Genesis. Remember the state of creation in Genesis 1:2? It was formless and empty and with the spoken word, God formed what was formless and filled what was empty. And He wasn’t stingy in forming and filling. He didn’t put a handful of stars in the sky but instead filled the heavens with countless stars! He didn’t just put a few creatures in the sea; rather the seas are teeming with all sorts of creatures! God’s abundant generosity and goodness literally jumps off the pages of the creation account. Now I am finishing up chapter 3 of Ephesians and once again, jumping off the pages of Scripture is God’s rich generosity toward those who believe in Him! Just like He generously formed and abundantly filled His creation, Paul continues this theme by describing a God who out of the abundance of His riches blesses us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. His words to describe God’s disposition toward His people focus on the superlatives and help us see the overflowing generosity of God. Listen…
- out of the riches of His grace (which, by the way, He lavished upon us) He gave us redemption and the forgiveness of trespasses
- the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints (which gives us hope and is sealed by the promised Holy Spirit)
- the immeasurable greatness of His power (which, by the way, is working toward us who believe)
- out of the richness of His great mercy (motivated by His great love) He made us alive together with Christ
- the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness (which is directed toward us) will take the coming ages for us to be shown all that this entails
- the unsearchable riches of Christ (that are now ours)
- out of the riches of His glory He grants us strength to comprehend what is incomprehensible...the breadth, length, height and depth of the love of Christ toward us!
Words like riches, greatness, immeasurable, unsearchable, incomprehensible— all work together to overwhelm us with a God who is exceedingly generous.
But if I’m honest, I must admit that I thought God was much different than the way Scripture reveals Him to be. I have thought of Him as stingy and withholding good things from me. How is it possible that this is what I have believed about God when all of Scripture is screaming at me to the contrary? Well, for one, we have an enemy who repeatedly whispers in our ears things like, “Did God really say that?” or “God is holding out on you.” Over and over Satan seeks to distort our perspective of God, making Him out to be stingy, or convincing us that His boundaries are harmful to us rather than good. But we also are distorted in our view of God because we view God through the lens of our circumstances. Our circumstances define for us who God is. When all is going well for us, and our prayers are being answered in just the way we desire, God is good and His ways are good. But when our circumstances are hard, when we get the cancer diagnosis, or our marriage is in trouble, and God doesn’t answer our prayers in the way that we think He should, we begin to believe the lie that God is not good, His ways are not good and that He is withholding good from us.
Let God be true and every man a liar. The Bible reveals to us the truth about who God is. Instead of letting our minds and our circumstances define who God is, we must allow God to define Himself and reveal who He is to us. And He does this through His Word. Our responsibility is to receive His revelation and believe Him and trust Him and instead view our circumstances through the lens of the goodness and generosity of God. When we do this, we can view cancer as a gift that has come to us from a good God who is working it in my life for my good and for the praise of His glorious Name. Marriage pain, pain in childbirth, pain in singleness, pain in loss, and financial suffering surround and impact all of us. But these are not evidences of a stingy and unloving God. These are tools in the hands of a generous and benevolent God who loves His children and out of the abundant, immeasurable riches of His grace and mercy, He is using these very things to form us, to fill us, and to bless us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. These are the very tools, in the hands of the Father, that produce in us a spiritual maturity and holiness without which none of us will see God.
It is my prayer that you will begin to see your circumstances through the lens of a good and generous God. I pray that you are able to not just know this to be true intellectually, but that you are experiencing His goodness and generosity toward you regardless of life's circumstances!
He is able to do more than we ask or can even imagine asking!!
Post a Comment