good

downtown sign saying "expect delays"

Every Delay is a Good Delay

By / 2 minutes of reading / ,

Can you call your mayor’s personal phone number? What about your governor’s private number? Can you give Vladimir Putin a call? My guess is that your answer is “no” to all three of these questions. How amazing is it that we can’t talk to children of Adam and subject to God’s will, but we can talk to God, Himself!

When my wife and I were missionaries in Eastern Europe, we quickly learned to live with delays. And, when anyone told us, “No problem!” we knew it would be a big problem, and that seemed to happen daily! Slowly, through these delays, we learned that delays were often very good. We learned that how we saw our problems and needs disagreed with God’s intent.

When we finally realized that delays were good, we began saying, “Every delay is a good delay.” This phrase has become part of our family’s lingo. At the heart of most delays, we can find God applying the brakes on our requests. Sometimes, God allows delays for reasons only He knows. We see this in the life of Daniel when he was visited by an angel:

12 Then he said to me, “Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand and humbled yourself before your God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words. 13 The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days, but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I was left there with the kings of Persia,

Daniel 10:12-13

There are some “I don’t know why” delays, but God is sovereign, so His will is never compromised. When we experience a delay, we can rest in our trust in God. God is not playing with us as we do with cats. I once had a cat named Max. I’d exercise him with a laser pointer. He never could catch the red spot on the floor because it wasn’t real. That’s not God’s relationship with any of His children. If God delays an answer, then that delay is good. We know this is good because Jesus said, “No one is good except God alone.” (Mark 10:18) Therefore, whatever God does is good.

“Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord!”

Psalms 31:24

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

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Coup D’ état

By / 3 minutes of reading / , , ,

I have chronic pain so, for fun, I Googled “top 10 worst pains”. I won’t go through the list but one pain on this list I’d never heard of is a “spinal headache.” Just the thought of that makes me hurt.

So, being on such a fun scavenger hunt, I Googled “top Bible verses.” Did you know there’s a top 100 Bible verses list*? And, of course, there is a top 50 list, a top 10 list and so on. Who are these people that have nothing better to do than compile these lists? I’m old, sick, and retired, and I don’t have time to make these lists!

Anyway, while scanning through this top 100 list, I noticed that verses from the book of Romans showed up quite often. That had me worried about today’s devotional. Diving further in, I discovered that the twelfth chapter of Romans showed up twice in this list. Now I was getting nervous. Thankfully, those verses are Romans 12:1 and Romans 12:2. Whew, we’re looking at Romans 12:21 today. You’ve probably not read that one. 😉

Romans 12:21 (ESV): Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Being on a roll, I looked at over a dozen Bible translations and paraphrases and all of the ones I checked used the words “evil” and “good.” Digging a bit deeper, I checked the definitions the salient words of this verse.

Overcome means succeed in dealing with (a problem or difficulty) – defeat (an opponent); prevail. – (of an emotion) overpower or overwhelm.
Evil means morally bad – causing harm or injury to someone – profoundly immoral and malevolent.
Good means that which is morally right; righteousness. – well – of high quality – correct or proper.

This verse is thrilling! We, as Christians, have been given a mandate, a commissioning, to overcome evil with good. We are to instigate a coup d’ état against evil.

Now, coup d’ état means “a blow against the state” and satan is the prince of this world (John 14:30) so through using “good” we can strike a blow against the prince of this world. We can overcome satan’s power by the power of God. We know this because Jesus said in Luke 18:19 (ESV), “…No one is good except God alone.”

So, we succeed in defeating, overpowering, overwhelming things that cause harm or injury to someone or are immoral or malevolent (i.e., evil) by doing morally right things, by righteousness, things that are well, of high quality, that are correct or proper (i.e., good).

The picture I see when I read this short verse is this: When a CO2 fire extinguisher is used to put out a fire, the CO2 replaces the oxygen that fuels the flame. CO2 starves the chemical combustion (i.e., fire) by replacing the oxygen, which is its fuel. Likewise, good starves evil by replacing the morally evil things, the things that cause harm, that are immoral things with morally right things, correct things, proper things, that are of high quality, thereby starving the evil until it is extinguished.

God’s Word is so fantastic. Even an eleven-word verse can profoundly change how we live.

Good to me

By / 2 minutes of reading /

When your favorite sports team wins you want to call a fellow fan and replay the great plays of the game. My son-in-law is this way. When you buy car and get a great deal you want to tell someone; talk about how the deal came down, how you got more for less and all the of the car’s cool features. When you plan your marriage anniversary and for the first time get it right you want to tells someone, everyone, post it on Facebook.

The sports fan will acknowledge their team’s mistakes but will gloss over them because, hey, their team won. This same process is true with the new car purchase and the anniversary celebration. Sure, it might have been tough but victory was won.

The fact is, we all need to celebrate the good things that happen to us. So, it shouldn’t be surprising when our eyes are opened by the Holy Spirit and we see what God has done for us. God loves us and Jesus intervenes for us with our heavenly Father. We see this in Psalms 13:6 which proclaims, “I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me.”

Without a relationship with Jesus we have little hope for answered prayer for we will have ignored God’s greatest gift to us, How sad my life would be without God’s goodness to me.

Photo by Tom Grimbert (@tomgrimbert) on Unsplash

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