The Real Good

"I will stand firm, however, in the belief that although God can give me more, His goodness doesn’t depend on it, because He gave me everything when He gave me Him." ~Joey Svendsen (from a great blog post you can view here)

God is good. He delights in blessing us with earthly comfort, and we are not always suffering (in the physical sense) while we await his return. At the same time though, sometimes we can get caught up in the earthly comforts and forget that God doesn't always choose to bless us with them. When things go badly we might blame it on several different things: God, a lack of His blessing, our own disobedience/sin, the world, etc. What we forget is that this lack of physical comfort is just a part of life. So again, God does not always choose to bless us with earthly comforts, but what we can know for sure is that God always chooses to bless us with Himself.

People die every day, especially people of faith being martyred in second and third world countries--the types of deaths that have a better chance of catching our attention. We might look at the situations of other people in those third world places and understand that God has not necessarily blessed them physically. But that's why one little fact about God and man can be made so much more clear: it is simply awesome that God's kingdom is completely other, or separate, from this worldly kingdom and it has nothing to do with fleshly comfort. We have been given eternal life, and more than that, we have God's love and His wonderful attributes to comfort us until we get to the other side. The problem of dissatisfaction in the life of a Christian only comes around when we forget our priorities. True life doesn't revolve around God providing our next meal or getting us a new job or the multitude of other things we pray for daily (even healing for a sick family member)! True life revolves around us being satisfied in knowing, growing in, and sharing Christ; nothing else. So let's remember this week where our priorities lie and consider praying for peace, wisdom, strength, and faith before (not necessarily instead of) fleshly deliverance both for us and those around us.