All good things come from God

Read Deacon Stuart Neslin’s column, and check out what’s coming up in the church calendar.

If you’ve ever achieved something, you know that it is a really good feeling. There really is nothing quite like it. And the truth is, nearly every one of us, at one time or another, has had some sort of success — be it large or small or in-between.

Maybe it was some kind of award you received in school. Maybe it was an accomplishment on a soccer field or on a basketball court or baseball diamond.

Or maybe it’s because you have achieved what many of us spend a lifetime hoping to have — a healthy and loving relationship with a husband or wife. These various successes can really lift our spirits and fill our hearts with a great deal of satisfaction and meaning — even joy. It feels really good to experience good things. That goes without saying. And yet there is a trap. You see, when we do something good or when we achieve something or when something works out the way we had planned we can start to believe something that is actually a kind of lie.

And that false belief is this “It’s all because of me.”

When things go well we like to take the credit and when things don’t go well we like to pass the blame.

One of the greatest challenges of faith is truly believing that every good thing comes from God and that nothing bad can come from him. That might sound good, but it is really difficult to embrace at times especially when our lives are filled with more than our fair share of sorrow or disappointments or tragedies.

It’s easier to blame God than to admit that we simply don’t know we don’t have the wisdom or insight or ability to make sense of everything that comes our way in this life. We can never see exactly as God sees and never understand as perfectly as God understands. We can never know precisely how or why our lives unfold as they do. And that’s OK. This idea gets at the very heart of Christian life. Too often we live under the assumption our number one priority, when it comes to God, is making sure that we don’t get him mad at us. We try to make sure he doesn’t send bad things our way. And yet this is nearly the complete opposite of what our lives as believers and disciples are to be about. A faithful life is so much more about embracing the positives than about avoiding the negatives.

God is good. And he wants nothing more than to share that same goodness, that beauty, that grace with us. He wants that unbounded goodness to be life-changing for us and for those around us.

But it starts with believing deeply that every good thing comes from him. Not SOME good things. EVERY good thing. All from God. And with that, why would we try to find those good things anywhere else?