{"id":62292,"date":"2024-05-22T22:30:12","date_gmt":"2024-05-23T03:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/?p=62292"},"modified":"2024-05-22T22:30:12","modified_gmt":"2024-05-23T03:30:12","slug":"god-is-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/god-is-good\/","title":{"rendered":"God is Good!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">Last week, I wrote about the age-old question, &#8220;If God is good, why do bad things happen?&#8221;\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">I was not shy in my use of the Book of Job in that post.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">I am certain you remember, a bunch of truly, horribly, nasty, awful stuff happened to Job and he cried out &#8220;Why, LORD, why me?&#8221;\u00a0 (Dan Jones paraphrase.) God answers Job by asking him 77 questions that pretty much come down to, &#8220;Who do you think you are, little man?&#8221; (Again, my paraphrase.) God never mentions one word to Job about Satan&#8217;s involvement in all of his misfortunes, but God knew exactly what He was doing all along.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">That&#8217;s the point. God is God and I most certainly am not. (Thank GOD!)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">Now that I think about it, there&#8217;s a part where Job is sitting in a pile of ashes scraping his festering, pus-filled boils with a piece of broken pottery, and: (Job 2:9)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"reg\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\"><strong>His wife said to him, \u201cAre you still trying to maintain your integrity? Curse God and die.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"reg\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\"><strong>But Job replied, \u201cYou talk like a foolish woman. Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?\u201d So in all this, Job said nothing wrong. (NLT)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">That verse reminded me that I have an awful lot of good things in my life that God has generously poured out on me, which I often take for granted without the proper amount of thanksgiving and gratitude that our LORD is worthy of.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">Chief among my blessings is that I have a wonderful wife who has never, ever given me the kind of advice Job got from his wife. HALLELUJAH!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">I&#8217;ve been to places outside this country that have truly, truly highlighted how blessed and fortunate I am. Most of the world does not have the luxury of a daily warm shower. I do not have to burn bathroom tissue in the street to avoid clogging the plumbing. I have never spent one day of my life coping with a parasite that was living inside my body. (Ticks and mosquitos are tame compared to what many people in the world deal with.) Clean drinking water comes out of every tap in my house. Safe food is so abundant I, like most people in the United States, struggle with <em>excess<\/em> weight and body fat. I have access to amazing health care.\u00a0 I have access to safe and reasonably-reliable transportation that can take me almost anywhere in the world if I so choose. I have a safe place to live, plenty of clothing to wear, and so many earthly possessions I could not sit down and list them all.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">I can have ice cream pretty much any time I want &#8211;with sprinkles and a cherry on top if I feel like it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">It&#8217;s like I&#8217;m the grandkid somebody is spoiling just rotten.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">And that, above and beyond all the material blessings I just listed, is the real point.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">I am loved.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">God has surrounded me with people who love me and whom I love &#8211;and He adds to them all the time. He gave His one and only Son to die for me and create a relationship between He and I designed to last for eternity &#8211;and then He gave me eternal life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">He has done all of this not because I have earned it or deserve it, but because He wanted to love me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\">Yes, God is God and I am not. THANK GOD!<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\"><strong>Today&#8217;s Praise<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\"><strong>2 Timothy 1:9<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', geneva, sans-serif;\"><strong>For God saved us and called us to live a holy life. He did this, not because we deserved it, but because that was his plan from before the beginning of time\u2014to show us his grace through Christ Jesus. (NLT)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, I wrote about the age-old question, &#8220;If God is good, why do bad things happen?&#8221;\u00a0 &nbsp; I was not shy in my use of the Book of Job&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":62293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-20 05:40:11","action":"delete","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62292"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kinshipradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}