Why is God so Good to Me?

The Lord appeared to Him from far away.  I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued by faithfulness to you. Jer. 31:3

Recently, I was chatting with one of my best friends about life and all the good things going on for both of us, when she looked up and wondered out loud, “Why is God so Good to Me?”  I’m a thinker and a processer, so that question has stuck with me for the past several days.  The most obvious answer to this question is because God loves you!  However, if you carry out the implications of that you can’t help but to wonder about those who suffer, doesn’t God love them too?  He absolutely does.

The basic Gospel message tells us that everything that God does, He does out of love for us and out of a desire to have a relationship with us.  Even when our sin cut us off from Him, Jesus sacrificed His own life, in order that someday we could know Him personally.  God wants us to know Him in the same way that we know our spouses or know our best friends.  He wants to be the one we turn to in times of joy and sorrow.  He wants us to pour out the contents of our hearts before Him after a rough day.  He wants us to experience His love first hand.  He doesn’t want us to be satisfied with a second-hand knowledge of Him.  He wants true intimacy with us.  Every blessing and good thing we have in our lives points back at this truth.  God loves us.

However, there is a tension that exists because the world we live in is not perfect.  God, in His love, did not create robots and therefore each human being has their own free will.  Unfortunately, we don’t always use our free will to noble ends, which creates a lot of havoc and chaos in the world we live in.  This is why we see evil and suffering in the world.

I’ve experienced that tension in my own life.  I’ve fallen victim to the “free-will chaos.”  As a young girl, I experienced abuse, which has impacted me in far deeper ways than I probably even know.  I’ve watched loved ones damage themselves in acts of self-destruction, as well as alcohol and drug abuse.  I was more aware of the evil that exists in the world than any girl needs to be at 4 or 5 years old.  However, from a young age, my circumstances drove me right into the arms of my heavenly Father.  At my weakest point, I relied on Jesus to be my strength.  I learned to depend on Him and to trust Him to pull me through some of my darkest times.  God used my parents, as well as other godly men and women in my life, to support me, to love on me and to pull me through.  I believe that God’s heart broke to see what I went through.  He would have never chosen that for me, but in His infinite grace and goodness He used that situation to cause me to lean on Him, to grow closer to Him and to become the strong and resilient woman that I am today.  He uses every situation, even the ones the enemy intended for our destruction, for our good.  He is the God that turns every negative circumstance on it’s head, making our mess a message of His love to the world.

Because of what I went through, I have learned that the most important thing I can do is to trust God, regardless of my circumstances, in good times and in bad.  Over the years, I have been blessed in so many ways that I too can look at my life and say, “God, why are you so good to me?”  Others, see the hand of God working in my life and at times have gotten the impression that everything comes easy for me.  It’s not true.  I have just learned that there are blessings to be found in everything, even in trials.

The bottom line is this: No matter where you are at in life, God loves you and desires a relationship with you.  If you are in a season of blessing, you have God to thank for all the good things in your life.  If you are experiencing hardship and suffering, you can be assured that it is God’s desire to use those circumstances for your benefit and to take you by the hand and lead you out into the better and brighter things He has for your future.  You can trust Him.

He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, yet the world did not know Him.  He came to His own, and His own people did not receive Him.  But to all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. John 1:10-13