When a health scare ends well, the promotion happens, a big tax refund arrives, we say God is so good! To be honest, we often judge God’s goodness by our circumstances. When things are going our way it’s easy to say God is good, all the time! But when the opposite happens, is God not good? Was He not paying attention? Or was He trying to teach us a lesson? Maybe God’s goodness is different than we think. 

We’ve been talking about what it means to stand. In Ephesians 6 we hear about putting on the full armor of God and after that we read “and having done everything, stand.” What is everything? And how does this relate to the armor? Did it fall off overnight?

We are told continuously “now is the time we must stand up for what we believe”. I recently did a podcast on standing against something. It’s been called spiritual warfare, and what was determined is that we get to stand in something which is Christ. But what does it mean to stand up for what you believe? 

Eventually, every one of us will come to a place in our lives where we say I have had enough, and I just can’t take any more. Not just a simple bad day, but real tragedy. Even tragedy is somewhat relative, but if you are impacted deeply, it’s a tragedy to you. We want an answer.  We can’t help but ask why.

We are creatures of time. We measure everything we do by the second hand on a clock. There can be a great deal of pressure in keeping up with schedules. When I was a child, time seemed to stand still. But now that I’m older the days, weeks, and months whiz by at a dizzying, confusing pace. Regardless of the speed of passing time, it makes relentless and unavoidable demands. One of which is the uncompromising necessity of choice. 

Have you ever been warned against following your heart. It’s partly because of Jeremiah 17:9 - The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? But also because following your heart is equated with acting on your emotions. But is that the same thing? Do we have evil, wicked hearts? Are emotions and desire the same thing?

I think that we as believers sometimes get trapped in our belief systems, and we defend them with a lot of determination. Some would have us think that we must purge our emotions and desires. That is just not true. God wants us to desire Him and He made us emotional creatures. You can have emotions and desires, but you just can’t live in them. So let’s talk about these two things.

How’s life going?  A little busy? Kind of crazy? Maybe that’s an understatement. There are family responsibilities, relationship problems, work issues. And then there’s the news - politics, wars, crime. We get bombarded with all of it. It’s easy to get distracted, and depressed, and even hopeless. We can easily get stuck there.

We live in a time when it seems there is so much pressing against us. I got into an argument with a very dear friend recently about how people in a third world economy are suffering more intensely than we do. I contended that suffering is relative, that my suffering was just as inconvenient as theirs. As I thought about this statement it occurred to me that my attitude was indeed that of an arrogant, entitled, and privileged American.

Today it’s Rick’s turn to share the character traits of God that he’s seen in his life.