Today, we are not here to talk about goodness in the subjective sense that we tend to use it a lot of the time. “That’s a good movie.” “That restaurant has really good food.” Those kinds of statements are personal to us. A song we think is good might sound bad to someone else. No, the Holy Spirit does not produce anything so dependent on a person’s taste.
What we are here to talk about is goodness as defined by the Lord. He is the source of everything truly good, because it is in His essence. Scripture makes that clear through constant repetition. Psalm 34:8 says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good. How happy is the person who takes refuge in him!” Psalm 119:68 addresses the Lord directly and says, “You are good, and you do what is good.” And there was once a man who said to Jesus, “Teacher, what good must I do to have eternal life?” Jesus replied, “Why do you ask me about what is good?…There is only one who is good” (Matthew 19:16–17a).
If the Spirit is producing good in us, we will meet others, especially those in the middle of struggle or pain, with hope and the redemptive power of God.
So, if God is good, we can trust that when we are living in His Spirit, the things we receive from Him will be good. Sometimes, that’s easy for us to believe. James 1:17 says that “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” If something is perfect, we are happy to accept it. Sometimes, we are even happy to embrace Romans 8:28, which says, “We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” When we like what is happening in our lives, we hear that as a reinforcement of our success. But it’s a lot harder to swallow when our lives seem to be falling apart. Everything working together for good may feel like a hollow concept when we lose our job or get diagnosed with a terminal illness. Those situations are hard and the suffering we can experience in them should not be dismissed. We should also not dismiss, though, how much greater the power of God is. Over time, when we reflect carefully on our lives, we will have the same testimony as Joseph, the son of Jacob. At the end of the book of Genesis, after he had been enslaved, imprisoned, and horribly mistreated by his brothers, he was able to look his brothers in the eye and say to them, “You planned evil against me; God planned it for good” (Genesis 50:20).
So it is important for us to earnestly seek out the ways the goodness of God is at work in our lives. We should also ask whether that same grace is reflected in our interactions with others. If the Spirit is producing good in us, we will meet others, especially those in the middle of struggle or pain, with hope and the redemptive power of God. Even when it’s hard, we will seek to build others up. A writer of Psalms once said of the Lord, “There is no evil in him!” (Psalm 92:15, NLT). Even though we will not reach that level of perfection in this life, we should live in a way that makes it hard for people to find any evil in us. The closer we walk with the Spirit, the more we will see that transformation happen in us.
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