“And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. 29 For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be  conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. 30 Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified.” ~ Romans 8:28-30

We all would like good to come our way. Good things, good people, good circumstances or good places. However, we don’t always know what is good for us. Not to mention our definition of good can be misleading. We don’t know the future and can’t predict how things will turn out. We are so limited in our understanding, so our efforts are feeble at best.

Good has only one source. All good flows from God. There is no good outside of God and all that is good is good because of God. Knowing this then helps us to find good. For a Christian, as our text states, “All things work together for good.”

This means that over and above all our circumstances in life is God working on them. He takes all our circumstances like ingredients and works them into a great masterpiece. Every single thing, with nothing left out, when it’s in God’s hands, He applies good to them.

Not that “all things ARE good,” because they are not. Living in a fallen world broken by sin, we experience what would have never been experienced by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. All things were good then and in Heaven, and the New Heaven and New Earth, all things will be good again, but not now. So, God works it all for good.

The important thing to see is that there is a certain classification of people to whom He “works all things together for good,” for. It’s for “those who love Him and are called according to His purposes.”

Every Christian “loves Him and is called according to His purposes,” because when a person becomes a Christian they are responding to God’s love toward them first. “We love Him because He first loved us,” the Bible says. When we become a Christian we are given the Holy Spirit, which the fruit of the Spirit is love, and we are given an internal thirst for God that cries out to Him, “Abba” (Daddy) Father. The evidence that we have the Holy Spirit inside us is the desire to obey Him as scripture says, “if we love Him we will obey Him.”

Not that we are perfect but that we “want to” obey and do His will. A Christian then places His life in God’s hands and allows God’s plan to unfold. This requires a surrendering of our own plans for our lives. This is why it says that, “God works all things together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purposes.” So then, it is to those who have given their lives to Christ, allowing Him to work out His plan that, “All things work together for good.”

Finally, at the end of verse 30, we have the target that God is heading toward, glorification. When God takes all our “stuff” and works it, what He is doing with it is glorifying us. What does that mean? It means He is conforming us into the image of His Son, Jesus. What “good” is then, is making us like the source of good, Jesus Christ. How much better to be good than to just have good given.

That’s why being “made good” can hurt and why we don’t always get what we want. Good is not us getting every earthly desire, it is getting Jesus and being made like Him. Whatever gets in the way of our ultimate goal, glorification, God works to remove.

This process of God “working all things together for good” will not seem “good” if we don’t see the importance and priority of glorification and making us like Jesus. However, when we do, we can trust that all things “are working” for our highest good. It is true then, that for the Christian, “it is all good.”