Hope, Healing & Freedom Podcast: Episode 110
TRANSCRIPT
God causes all things to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purposes. Does this really mean that everything works for our good? What about when bad things happen? Even bad things work for good? The answer is yes! In this podcast we will look at how God is able to take everything that happens in our life, even those really difficult things and cause them to work for our good. Come along, I think you will be encouraged.
I’m Lee Whitman with Restoring the Foundations and I welcome you to this Hope Healing and Freedom Podcast. Today’s verse is Romans 8:28, “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” One of the benefits of having walked with Christ for 50 years is that I can look back at things that happened in my life and see how God used them for good. Some of those events were not good at the time, but God is so amazing that He is able to take even horrible circumstances in our lives and make good come out of them.
I was fired from the first pastorate I had after graduating seminary. Shocking, right? Let me explain. After graduating seminary, we were hired to be the associate pastor and youth pastor at a church here in the Nashville, Tennessee area. The circumstances that led us to interview for this job were an absolute God story. We called a friend of ours who happened to be leaving in 15 minutes to fly to Tennessee to meet with this church who happened to be looking for an associate pastor. Coincidence you say. I think not! Through that contact we interviewed and got the job. Without a doubt we knew it was God leading us to this church. As youth pastors our youth group grew from 20 kids to sometimes as many as100 kids. The kids loved us, and we loved them, and they were growing in their relationship with God. We also were given the responsibility for the religious education of the church which included the babies in the nursery all the way to the senior adults. I was also the commissioner of an eight-team softball league that played behind the church that impacted 150 men. Everything went great for three years until…. until I was called into the pastor’s office and met with the pastor and the chairman of the board of directors of the church. At that meeting I was told that the next Sunday I was going to read a letter of resignation, a letter that they had written, and I was not to have any more contact with the youth of the church. I was never given a reason for my dismissal just that my employment was being terminated. You understand that we moved to this church from out of town and the only friends we had were members of the church. So, in that one event I lost my job and the income that came with it, my family lost our church home, and we lost our circle of friends. As you can imagine I was devastated. At that point in my life this was by far the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
Fast forward and this event became one of the best things that had ever happened to me. How could that be? God caused good to come out of that very painful situation. Some of the most important lessons I have learned about my identity as a son of God, about God’s grace in the midst of a storm, of being able to really trust God when everything around me looked hopeless all came from that one event.
A pastor friend of mine told a similar story about an experience he had in a church. He was called to be the senior pastor of a church of about 125 people outside of Chicago. During the next few years, the Lord used this man to bring people into the Kingdom of God and the church grew to about 500 people. Then during one service the Holy Spirit fell. The people in the church did not know what was happening but many were filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in tongues. Two or three people got instantly healed of serious physical problems. The pastor was amazed because he had never been baptized in the Holy Spirit before that night. He and most of the church were experiencing something with the Lord they had never experienced before. As a result of this incredible outpouring of the Holy Spirit the church leadership became very uncomfortable and told this pastor to stop allowing the Holy Spirit to cause this chaos in the church. He was young and had a young family and was afraid of losing his job, so he tried to limit the release of the Holy Spirit. He tried to obey the church board for a few months but in the end, he could not turn his back on what he and most of the church had experienced. The church board did not believe in the Holy Spirit, nor were they excited about the chaos that happened when the Holy Spirit showed up so the pastor got fired. As you can imagine he was devastated and deeply hurt. He knew what he had experienced with the Holy Spirit was real. He was so wounded by the church that he gave up on ministry and took a job as a banker and wanted nothing to do with the church. He even stopped taking his family to any church.
One day while he was spending time telling God how hurt and angry he was, God asked him if he was willing to go back to pastoring. He said he was willing to pastor again but he did not want to pastor in a church. So God had him start a small group in his home. The home group was made up of people who were tired of religion as usual and wanted to experience God on a fresh and intimate level. This pastor used the lessons he learned out of a terrible experience to begin a ministry that ended up healing hundreds of wounded people. God caused good to come out of that.
Sometimes people make the mistake of believing that since God causes all things to work together for good, then He is the one who causes the bad things to happen. That is absolutely not true. God uses the bad things that do happen in our lives to bring blessings into our lives, but He doesn’t make bad things happen. I also hear believers say things like “God allowed this bad thing to happen” when what they are actually saying is that He caused it to happen. Again, God does not cause bad things to happen to us. He gave mankind free will and along with that free will comes the ability to do bad things. We would not want to be in relationship with a God who took our free will away. That would make us slaves. Because He loves us so deeply God gives us free will so that we have to choose to love Him. By giving us a free will it also means that God does not control everything that happens in life. When someone drives drunk and kills another that is not God causing that bad thing to happen or even allowing it to happen. That death was due to the fact that God gave man free will and He does not dictate or control people’s behavior.
To see an example of God causing good to come out of bad let’s look at the story of the prodigal son. The boy is off spending his inheritance on wine women and song. As long as he had money, he was living the high life. But an amazing thing happened. The grace of God showed up in a famine. It says in Luke 15:14, “Now when he had spent everything, a famine occurred in that country, and he began to be in need.” Watch how God even caused good to come out of a famine. When the famine hit this boy found himself in need. In verse 17 it says, “But when he came to his senses”. It took the famine to snap this boy out of his delusion and bring him back to his right mind. Did God cause the famine? I really don’t know but I do know that God used the famine to bring this boy home to his loving father so he could fulfill his destiny.
The ultimate example of God causing all things to work together for good is found in the death of Christ. God sent His son Jesus to bring the Kingdom of God to earth. Jesus went around doing amazing things like healing the sick and even raising the dead. And everywhere He went He taught people about the Kingdom of God. Not everyone however thought Jesus was wonderful. The religious leaders saw that Jesus was a threat to their religious and financial security and had Him put to death. Up until the point of Jesus’ death He had a few hundred followers. Once again God caused good to come out of Jesus’ tragic death. God used Jesus’ death and resurrection to change the world forever.
Another picture of God causing good to come out of bad happened after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension into heaven. The disciples were spreading the gospel of Jesus all over Jerusalem and Judea. When those same religious leaders got wind of the large crowds who were believing in Jesus as the Messiah, they began to hunt down and persecute and, in some cases, kill the Jesus followers in an attempt to stop the spread of the Gospel. Instead of stopping the spread, God caused good to come out of that persecution. The new believers and followers of Jesus left Jerusalem and went into all the land telling everyone about Jesus. God used persecution to move believers out of the city into the entire country and region. The gospel spread through the entire region because of the persecution.
In order to help you experience God causing good to come out of the bad things in your life, you are probably going to need to deal with two things. The first thing that can keep you from seeing the goodness of God in your circumstances are Ungodly Beliefs. It is not uncommon when we experience bad things to believe a lie like God has let me down. I can’t trust Him. Or a more direct lie like God caused this bad thing to happen. Or how about a lie that says that God does good things for others but not for me. These and many other lies need to be broken so that you can see the good that God wants to bring into your life.
The second thing that will help you experience the goodness of God is to get your heart healed. When bad things happen, it causes hurt. That hurt can fester and get worse blocking you from seeing the goodness of God at work in your life. God sent Jesus to heal the broken hearted. Our hurts and wounds can distort our view of God. They also give our enemy a landing strip in our life to continue to stir up negative thoughts. Once the wounds and hurts are healed, we can begin to see that God does use everything to cause good to come into our lives.
We have a good, good Father who wants to help us by causing all things to work together for our good. Sometimes it is only in hindsight that we are able to see just how amazing God was to use everything in our lives for our good. If you recognize that you are struggling to believe that God does cause good to come out of our bad circumstance, I want to encourage you to go to our website restoringthefoundations.org and contact one of our ministry teams in your area. Don’t settle. Don’t tolerate these hurts and lies in your life. Freedom is available.
PRAYER
Father God you are a good, good Father. I am constantly amazed how you are able to take horrible and difficult circumstances in our lives and cause good to come out of them. Thank you that you don’t give up on us when we get hurt and turn our back on you. You continue to pursue us even when we are not pursuing you. 2 Timothy 2:13 says “Even when we are too weak to have any faith left, He remains faithful to us and will help us for He cannot disown us who are part of Himself. In Jesus Name! called them to.
