Hi there. My name is Lisa van den Berg with The Ways Of Wisdom, and I want to welcome you to God Today. I love taking a verse of scripture and unpacking it. And one of my favorite ones is Romans 8:28, because it’s a scripture that we hear a lot, right? “God works all things together for those who love him, and are called according to his purpose.” But sometimes we can stop at the first third of the verse, which says that God works everything together for good, but we forget the second part of the verse and the third part of the verse, right? And so we can go, “Oh, this isn’t really going very well in my life. God’s going to work it together for good. Don’t worry about it.” But we’re not actually looking at the other pieces that go, “God works everything together for the good of those who love him, and are called according to his purpose.”
And so the beautiful imitation is Romans 8:28 is actually way deeper than just asking God that get a slot machine to come on, God, give me, give me something that’ll turn my life around. Or an ATM like, okay, I need some money. Now, I’m just going to go to God and withdraw some money because that’ll solve all my problems. The invitation is actually even more beautiful than that. When we get to remember that He works everything together in our lives, because we love Him. When you remember that you are loved and you love Him, then your heart is way more open to see how He’s going to work everything out. And then the third part of the verse gives us a real indication of how He’s going to work it out, “called according to his purpose.” And this really helps us to go above our own thinking of like, oh, I think my problem of not having enough money to pay the rent at the end of the month, the solution’s going to be that God’s going to miraculously provide me with enough money. Somebody’s going to come up and give me money. And we have all of these ideas of how God’s going to solve this situation, right? But He’s going, “Hey, hey, remember that love is involved in this equation, and I might have, (and He probably does, and mostly does) have a very different way of solving it” than we think that He does.
It all fits into the much bigger vision of our purpose that we’re called to on this earth, and what He has for us here to do. And so what that does, is it releases us and frees us from the solution having to look a certain way. We get to open ourselves up and go, “Wow! You said that you will work everything together for our good, and I’m excited to see how you will do it because you love me, and I love you.” And the beautiful thing is that that opens us up to awe and wonder, and God is no longer in the little bitty box that we put Him in. He’s able to go way beyond those boundaries and show off just the way God does and still bring everything into a beautiful rounding.
So let’s pray. Thank you so much, Lord, for this opportunity to realize that you have way more ways to solve situations and allow us to work everything together for good, than we can even imagine. So I bless us today, and I thank you that our minds and our hearts and our spirits are open to see the ways that you will bring things to pass. It’s the most beautiful journey to be on with you. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.