A Generous God

"Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever." -Psalm 118:1

"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast." -Ephesians 2:8-9

People often throw around such phrases like "God is good" or "God has been so good to me" with such frequency that it can seem to lose its meaning, or worse yet...have its true meaning dumbed down to something reserved for a quotation on a coffee cup or an old and tired running shirt. It is a powerful and beautiful phrase, but do we even know what it means when we say it?

How is God is good? How has He been good? Paul says that the wages of our sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. On Thanksgiving we recall so many good things in our lives-- our family, our friends, our freedoms, our blessings, our faith. We recall things that we are truly thankful for, for ways that love has been shown to us.

The Psalms remind us over and over again to thank our good God, our powerful God, our mighty Lord. Psalm 118:1 tells us to "give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; His love endures forever." It is right and good to think of God as mighty and powerful and sovereign, but it also important to remember to remember that our God is GOOD. In all things He works for the good of those who love Him Paul says in Romans. ALL THINGS work together for the good of us and the glory of God. Good days, bad days, heartbreaks, celebrations, joys, sorrows...ALL THINGS work together for our ultimate good and for His ultimate fame. On Thanksgiving I think it is especially important to remember that our great God and King is good in His essence. If I have described LOVE as a VERB, an action, then God has shown us His love and goodness in the cross of Jesus Christ.

We know that God is good because He has been good. We are thankful to Him because of what He has already done. Often we are looking for God to do this thing for us or that thing for us to show us that He truly is good, when we need to look back to what He already has done to see how much love He has for us.

God has been so generous to us. Through the cross Jesus gave us something to boast in, someone to boast in, someone to ultimately thank for every good and perfect gift. He remains the one and only God, the great Savior, mighty and awesome, the reconciler and redeemer, the lion and the lamb, our greatest hope and ultimate reality, our GOOD God who shows us love in this way...that while we still sinners, while we were at our worst...He died.

So we remember how wonderfully generous God has been to us and be generous to all those God has put in our life. In the same way that we love because He first loved us, we are generous because He has been so generous to us.

May we trust how good God is by seeing how good God has been in the cross of Jesus Christ. May we be thankful for our salvation, for the death of our sin nature, and for the ultimate resurrection of all who believe in the name of God's son.

God is good indeed,
R.D.