Romans 8:28 – And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

This has been one of my favorite verses for the past 20 years. A verse I committed to memory and repeat often. But over the past month God has truly revealed this scripture to me on another level and this morning I want to share it with you. Listen up, if you’re currently under pressure or stress, frustrated over the process, or in the middle of a mess, I believe God wants to speak directly to you this morning.

Oh, I’m so glad you’re here!

God causes all things to work together for good. I’ve always focused on two words here. All and Good. God causes ALL things to work together for GOOD. All good. In fact I would say it “it’s all good.” I’m all good. All this is good. And darn did I ever try to believe it.

And typically it was all good. But I guess you could say life happened, people got sick, days were spent in the hospital, I witnessed pain. Pain like I’ve never seen before. I witnessed loss and anger and heart ache. I saw bad things happen to good people and I struggled with my normal response of “it’s all good.” All good … but there were some things that simply WERE NOT GOOD.

So what do you do when it’s not good? No matter how you spin it, what you’re dealing with in your family, in your marriage, in your health, or in your finances is NOT GOOD. God said ALL things, but not this thing. It just can’t be good.

And then God brought me back to this scripture, one of my favorites and pointed out another word. Together. All things work TOGETHER for good. This bad thing, this hard thing, this seemingly unfair thing works TOGETHER with all other things and creates the good we seek.

What we often do is we single out this one event in our life and we say “this, this isn’t good.” And then we set up camp on that single event and life becomes overall pretty crappy. We get depressed. We even begin to lose our faith because God’s promise of “all good” somehow skipped over us.

This is NOT good. Maybe you’re dealing with one of those “NOT GOOD” situations in your life. Me too.

Here’s what we must do … remember it is a part of the ALL and let god put it TOGETHER. And when he starts working it TOGETHER, it will be good.

God is a master mixer. He can whip up some amazing things in our life. And just like baking a cake, it takes all kinds of ingredients. And typically those ingredients on their own don’t seem remarkably good. Sit around and try to eat salt. Not good. Drink some vanilla extract. Nope. Here’s a tablespoon of baking powder. Not good alone. But worked TOGETHER, deliciousness.

God uses EVERYTHING in your life … ALL things. And he works it together for good. Today, this “thing” may not seem good because alone it is NOT good. And it’s completely okay to recognize that truth. Gosh I used to feel guilty about that. But there’s no guilt here. Not all things are good. Sometimes and somedays can really suck.

God sees the big picture, and it is good. We see this specific moment and we focus on this single ingredient and have a hard time understanding why.

But your entire life isn’t defined by this day or this event. It’s all part of the recipe and God uses it ALL, then he works it all TOGETHER and you know what he makes … he makes something GOOD.

All things work TOGETHER for good. I won’t single out this one bad ingredient and focus on it. I’ll let the master mixer work it all together and trust that in the end, it’s going to be good. Real good.