Trusting God to Work Things Together for Good

Hey dear bros, sisters, do read this article... it's 3 pages long, but very, very inspiring and heart-stirring. When I read this article, I found myself identifying with a lot of these struggles that this dear brother had, found myself saying "Amen! Amen! Amen!" Reminded personally how God has so faithfully broken my heart over the past few years, that He may set and mend my own heart right before Him...

Do read this! http://www.crosswalk.com/finances/1386147/page1/

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Excerpt:

During this time, I discovered what it means to give to God out of my poverty rather than out of my surplus. In the 1970s, Susie and I had volunteered two years of our lives to a form of missionary service. But the gift of those two years in the 1970s paled in comparison to the effort of even one week of walking with God during the tough times in the 1980s and saying to Him, "I still love You. I still trust You. I am not complaining. I am doing the very best I can to believe You are working everything out together for my good." The two years were given when I was on top and life was good; each week was given when I was on the bottom and circumstances were bleak. In a fashion similar to the widow and her mite, I believe a single week of "hoping against hope" can be more pleasing and glorifying to God than a two-year missionary journey.

Perhaps you have had occasion to survey the landscape of your life and found very little evidence that God has "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future." May I encourage you to immerse your mind daily in words that will help you to know God more intimately and that will remind you that your God is always present, invariably loving, inevitably faithful, and absolutely worthy of all your confidence.

Consider the promises of God found later in Jeremiah: God is revealing in greater detail what it will be like when the trial His people are going through in Babylon has served its purpose. God declares in Jeremiah 32:

"They will be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear me for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me. I will rejoice in doing them good and will assuredly plant them in this land with all my heart and soul" (Jeremiah 32:38-41).

Those are tremendous promises. In sharing His father's heart, God promises He will "never stop doing good" to His chosen ones. In The Pleasures of God, John Piper looks at the passage this way:

He will keep on doing good. He doesn't do good to his children sometimes and bad to them other times. He keeps on doing good and he never will stop doing good for ten thousand ages of ages. When things are going "bad" that does not mean God has stopped doing good. It means he is shifting things around to get them in place for more good, if you will go on loving him. He works all things together for good "for those who love him" (Romans 8:28). "No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly" (Psalm 84:11). "It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes" (Psalm 119:71)....

But the promise is greater yet. Not only does God promise not to turn away from doing good to us, he says, "I will rejoice in doing them good" (Jeremiah 32:41). "The Lord will again take delight in prospering you" (Deuteronomy 30:9). He does not bless us begrudgingly. There is a kind of eagerness about the beneficence of God. God is not waiting for us, he is pursuing us. That, in fact, is the literal translation of Psalm 23:6, "Surely goodness and mercy shall pursue me all the days of my life." God loves to show mercy. He is not hesitant or indecisive or tentative in his desires to do good to his people. His anger must be released by a stiff safety lock, but his mercy has a hair trigger. . . .