Avalon Robinson Author

Romans 8:28 might just be one of the most well known verses out there. Probably because it’s rather comforting and reassuring.

“And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.” (Romans 8:28)

I mean, come on, that will perk you up right? It pretty much says right there that we’re going to be ok. If we’re with God and for God things are going to work out for our good. Yay!

Turns out it’s a little more complicated than that. You only have to look at how things are working out in your life or the lives of God honoring people around you to see how that’s working out. We still lose, we still suffer, we still have hopes dashed, and dreams slip away. So where’s this good that’s supposed to be working out for us?

I’d argue that it’s been there the whole time. It’s just us who don’t know how to recognize it. 

The images our mind conjures of “good” usually involve a great deal of comfort, security, and happiness. Unfortunately, that’s not always how that seems to feel when that good arrives. Usually that’s because our definition of  “good” has gotten warped and twisted from what it actually means. So then when we find ourselves experiencing true good we can barely recognize it and we certainly don’t think of it as good for us. 

We’re thinking of what feels good to us, but God is in the business of bringing what’s good for us. The two couldn’t not be any more different. We need to separate what feels good from what is good and usually that involves doing business with what isn’t promised under the umbrella of “good”. Any of those nice comfortable things may certainly be present, but they are not a requisite for good to exist. So what isn’t promised under “good”? 

Good doesn’t mean fun

Right out of the gate, this one is hard for me. I’ve been told I’m a fun loving person and past experiences involving certain hijinks and shenanigans would seem to support that notion. If life isn’t fun, I’m usually on the look out for ways to make it so. 

But fun is not a requirement for something to be good. If that’s your expectation for if something’s good or not you’ll be shocked at how little you actually end up doing. Good things require hard work and sacrifice, and neither of those things are inherently fun. You may have fun along the way, but it is certainly not a given. You can’t base the quality of the outcome by the enjoyment of the moment. Work hard, make fun where you can, but don’t expect it as a requirement. 

Good doesn’t mean easy

We’ve been sold a lie hook line and sinker that the good or best things in life come to us. We don’t usually say it outright, but we come up with all sorts of ways to tell ourselves this lie. Just wait for the door to open! If it were meant to be it would be happening for you! It will happen when you least expect it! You can’t force good things!

Now, I want to be clear that those statements aren’t inherently wrong in the right context. We do need to walk that line between hard work and surrender and trust in what God’s doing. What I’m arguing against here is the idea that if it’s not coming easy than it isn’t good for us and isn’t worth pursuing. 

Nope.

God is really, really good at what he does. And he’s really good at working on more than one part of us at a time. He can be teaching us a lesson on patience while also working on our endurance. He can teach us how to be strong and firm while also teaching us to be shrewd and wise. The list goes on and on, and most of the time this growth comes to us through hard work, trust, and discipline. Easy doesn’t fit into that equation. 

Some of the best things in my life have come through the hardest work I ever had to do. Incredible good was done to me and for me, and not a bit of it was easy in the moment. Quite frankly, most of the time I wanted to cry on the floor and thrash around like a toddler who was told they couldn’t have ice cream. 

If you only accept the things that come easy, you will only get the little, low hanging things of life. That doesn’t sound very good to me.

Good doesn’t mean what you have in mind

Finally, and to cover the huge swath of anything else good isn’t, our idea of what counts as good might not necessarily be the same thing as God plans for our good. We’re not owed our idea of good. And honestly? Most of the time our ideas for it are severely lacking in the quality department. 

I chalk that up to us being really bad at doing God’s job. We’re just horrible at it. Our knowledge and ability as humans is so laughably limited in comparison to God. Any good ideas we do have is a direct result of us imitating grander, complete ideas of God himself. We use our limited hearts and minds to come up with God level ideas and the results are just as poor as you would expect. 

The same applies to our concept of what’s good for us. We’re only ever looking at one small portion of good while God is looking at the entire picture. He’s seeing things in motion we can’t even fathom. 

Also, he loves us so much more than we could ever love ourselves. And we’re really good at selfishly loving ourselves above anything else. We stop our idea of good at what feels nice. God takes his idea of good to what was always meant to be all along. Comfort alone is not good enough for him. He wants to see us complete. 

Plain and simple, God’s idea of good will always be better than ours. 

So while Romans 8:28 is very comforting and reassuring, maybe it’s not the pat on the head we always make it out to be. Maybe we need to see this verse less like thumbs up, and more like a rallying cry. Yes, there will be hard work, yes it will cost, yes it will take time and blood and sweat and tears. But God’s good will always be exactly that.

Good.

Let’s find some joy,

A