Good From the Bad

Devotion for the Week...

Romans 8:28 says, "And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them." It's a wonderful verse that always helps me remember that God is in control and that His purpose for my life will prevail. Not only for my life, but for your life and even for the world as a whole. He is in control.

Even so, there are plenty of situations that make me wonder how God could possibly use them to bring about something good. On the other hand, I've definitely heard about wonderful things coming from awful situations, like the story of a soldier Aiden told me recently: the soldier stepped on a landmine and lost both of his legs, which is awful. But in the course of his recovery he met a nurse and she eventually became his wife, which is wonderful.

While I was thinking about the different people in the Easter story these past few weeks, I kept coming back to this verse. There's Pilate, who ignored what he knew was right in order to keep the crowd happy, the chief priests, who were so worried about protecting their own position in society that they were willing to kill a man they knew was innocent, and Judas, who betrayed Jesus for his own gain. Their actions ranged from self-serving to downright evil, but God used those actions to bring about the greatest good in all of history.

I admit it's hard to wrap my mind around how God uses our sinful actions to bring about His plans, but that's exactly how He works. It's not that He's wanting us to sin, but He's not surprised by it, either. He knows that we will sin and He makes use of our sinful actions to further His own purposes for the world.

In the case of the Easter story, men were more than willing to sin to serve their own purposes. Little did they know they were also serving God's purposes at the same time.

Of course, no one could have imagined what God could do with a man they worked so hard to kill. No one saw the resurrection coming. Let that give us hope when we're in the midst of bad situations and we can't see how God could ever use it to bring about anything good. We don't need to know how He's going to do it, we simply trust that He will.