Good morning everyone and welcome back to another morning with the masters where we devote ourselves to the Lord daily with you. Good morning you guys.

We are picking up with day five of our If God is for us celebrating the power of God's grace devotional in the Bible app.

There's a link to that in the description of the podcast for you guys want to fall along with us.

And as always I'm going to read the scripture and Tori's going to pick up with the Divo. Let's do it. The scripture is Romans chapter 8 verses 28 through 30 and it says this.

And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purposes for them for God knew his people in advance.

And he chose them to become like his son so that his son would be the first born among many brothers and sisters and having chosen them he called them to come to him and having called them he gave them right standing with himself and having giving them right standing he gave them his glory.

Wow the devotional is titled our assurance and it says.

Often when we think of the word good our minds typically go straight to our happiness and well being God's goodness to us must mean we imagine that he will make our lives easier or more pleasant and that everything will turn out the way we want it.

But some years back I experienced a time when I knew that God was working all things for my good but it looked in felt much more like death.

I had been praying that the Lord would help me with a relational conflict I knew that I needed help but I had no idea how to solve this particular problem.

I was lost and confused why is this so hard none of my other relationships had been quite like this one so trying to work it out was more complicated than I had ever imagined.

Then God answered my prayers by seeing things rip apart bit by bit it all came undone tensions grew and grew and I was pretty sure that things would be irreconcilable on this earth.

But wait is that even Christian relationships really be unreconciled and glorify God the good that Paul speaks of in Romans 828 has long been debated by scholars and theologians because the Apostle does not fully spell out what he means.

What we do know is that the text surrounding this verse points to the spirits in our session God's salvation and our ultimate well-being in Christ from this I think we can comfortably conclude that Paul is not referencing material rewards or pleasures that are apart from the spirits work in our lives.

Ultimately what is good is first the transformation that takes place in our hearts as we walk out our faith and second the glory that is to come today you may be living through a situation that simply doesn't seem good and yet your heavenly father is whispering oh dear one trust me he knows all things is indeed working all things for the good of those who love him.

He is not withholding good from you it isn't in his character to do so even what might appear like death will one day be revealed as his ultimate good in your life yeah that's so good so sorry yeah I think the big thing for me with this devotional that I don't want to say I'm hung up on but I'm really spending time thinking about is like okay well what is good is our definition of good or is it God's definition of good.

Yeah because I know that we all can feel like a bit slighted when we read that verse like all things work together for good yeah but like wait a second my life doesn't feel that way right now yeah the situation is unfolding the way I wanted it to I'm not in that relationship I wish I were I'm not in that job I haven't passed that test I didn't do that thing I didn't have that experience my life is not good so how can I reconcile this verse with my life and I think it's really important to make sure that we understand.

That our idea of good and the way that God works everything out for good are probably different yeah and this is like again it's not a good analogy but whenever I was eight I love transformers I loved robots I loved all that stuff now I'm not a big fan of AI artificial intelligence I'm like oh my gosh you're going to take over jobs all this stuff yeah and so at one point what I thought was good of course now I do not need good and so my version of good changes

it's like the waves in the ocean it's like one seconds here one second it's not here yeah and so God though has an eternal good it doesn't change it's always good and it's him and we have him yeah

and I think it's important to remember to I know we've used this example multiple times but when we look back on our lives and the breakups that we went through at the time that felt crushing yes

felt like the world ending and now we can look back at it and be like wow that was good because look where it let us and look what God did and look at our lives now and it's always hard to see when we're inside of our circumstances and they feel terrible and they feel bad

but that's when our trust comes in that we trust that we serve a loving and a good father because his definition of good and our definition of good are probably two very different things

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