The Goodness Of God

How can we identify the voice of God in our hearts and minds? How do we discern God’s voice from the other influences speaking into our lives?

“Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.” – John 8:12

The following program is sponsored by generous friends and partners of real life.
The Bible says that we’re to be thankful in every situation, but my mother died or my son died or my dog died.
We understand this, this is life and it hurts but because God is on his throne and he knows what he’s doing.
We don’t, we land on him and we give him thanks because He knows and he cares.
The statement is true. God is good all the time and all the time.
God is good today on real life, Jack Hibbs shares with you this truth, the goodness of God.
Does it really take a village to raise a child or does it simply start at home?
Drawing from their own inspiration and personal experiences? Jack and Lisa Hibbs co authored the book Turn Around at home.
This book will help you understand your emotional, spiritual and social background, giving biblical encouragement for creating positive cycles in marriage and parenting like any family.
Jack and Lisa had triumphs and made mistakes but found that intentional parenting was the key with over 50 practical ideas for parents such as Godly families begin with Godly marriages, raising Godly Children is a parent’s mandate and responsibility, how to discipline in a Godly family and the importance of prayer in a family.
Order the book turn around at home to help you make changes for good and equip yourself to provide a stronger spiritual legacy.
Perfect for parents, grandparents or a gift for parents to be, order your copy today.
Well, I want to welcome you to today’s program and we’re gonna be looking at the goodness of God.
But listen, there’s a way to look at the goodness of God.
First of all, we have to come to the conclusion or be convinced that God is good.
A lot of people want to impugn God these days.
A lot of people want to criticize and critique God because they don’t like the way the universe is going.
They honestly cannot deny the existence of God because notice that people blame God for the way the world is going.
Yet in reality, the Bible makes it very clear, the world is going in the direction that it is going because we have decided as humans to live it without God.
And so Paul’s letter to the Roman believers there in Italy, it wasn’t just a church, it was a vast network of fellowships, what we would call today, home fellowship of believers.
And he writes to them in chapter one and he tells them that God is very displeased and files an indictment against humanity based upon our ability to worship things like nature or to worship sex.
Then he shifts and that’s what we’ll be looking at today to chapter two.
And chapter two is the challenge for Unite to be discerning. Why do we want to be discerning?
Because he warns us there in chapter two, that being religious doesn’t mean you’re going to heaven that there are those who have all of their religious achievements, all of those who have their, the dots in the right spot and, and the T S crossed just right.
They’ve, they’ve prayed long enough. They’ve given enough, they’ve done all the good deeds to somehow be acceptable to God.
And you know what God says to that God says, no, that’s not how you enter heaven.
So we need to be discerning what’s going on in our lives.
That could be something that is actually hindering us to know God instead of helping us.
It’s very normal for us as humans fallen in our nature to create religion, which substitutes what God really wants.
And that’s a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
So I’m encouraging you, grab your bible, get out some note paper and a pen, take notes and find out what it is that you and I need to be discerning about regarding the goodness of God.
And so as we consider this, let’s look now at the goodness of God verse four.
So he says in that fourth verse or do you, you ought to circle those three words or do you despise the riches of His goodness forbearance and long suffering.
Those are three attributes of God. And then there’s a comma right there.
And then there’s a strong statement not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance.
This is a remarkable statement. Boy, we could have a tremendous time with this just on the goodness of God alone.
God is good. The Bible says, and because God is good, his goodness demands some things of us.
I think, you know, this Jesus was ministering.
It’s in the gospels and as Jesus is ministering, um what is known as the rich young ruler?
You ever heard of him before? The rich young ruler?
Now you have to read all of the gospels to get the understanding that he’s rich.
He’s young and he has authority. There’s not one gospel that says he’s a rich young ruler.
You got to read them all about the same guy. This guy appears in three of the gospels.
He’s wealthy, listen girls, he’s wealthy, he’s young and he has authority.
Oh, if I could just find one of those, well, this guy had no room in his heart for anyone else except what he wanted.
And that was his wealth, his youth and his power.
And he comes running to Jesus and he says, good master, good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
And Jesus gives him elements of the law remember that you need to do this, you need to do this, you need to do this.
And Jesus has set, setting the guy up completely because the guy counters Jesus and says, all these things you speak of, I’ve done since my youth.
So clearly, ladies, this is not the guy you want to meet. He’s an idol in his own mind.
He’s a legend in his own mind. He’s quite impressed with himself.
Jesus then turns him and says, and he goes after his idols, but Jesus qualifies and he says, why do you come to me and call me good?
Jesus says, there’s only one good and that is God. Jesus was actually trying to provoke the man to confession.
What would have been awesome is for the young man to say I called you good master because it’s obvious that you alone are God in skin.
It’s clear who you are. You’re the manifest word of God. But he didn’t do that.
The Bible says he wound up leaving and walking away from Jesus because he loved what he had.
The word good is reserved for God alone.
Now, you and I live in a culture we can’t even relate to that.
We see our tacos were good. Uh You know, that’s good.
The other things good, the old English, by the way, um Remember how the old English used to spell like goodbye, G 00 D B Y E, right?
Things like that. Spelling Old English.
Listen, when we say good morning, did anybody say good morning to you this morning?
Did you say good morning to anybody? You know what you were saying?
According to the ancients, God be with you this morning. That’s what good morning means. Good afternoon.
Good afternoon means God be with or God be in your afternoon tonight when you lay down and you say good night to somebody, God be in your night.
That’s what it means. But we’ve lost touch with that, right?
So when we say good morning, good night, good master God is good.
Technically, God is good because good is the manifestation of God’s nature.
And the Bible says just to make it clear, there is none good. No, not one.
That’s why we need them. So as we look to this church, mark it down.
If you would verse four, we learn this, that we as believers.
How are we to be regarding the goodness of God were to be the opposite of the world?
And that means we are to be thankful, believers. Can you write that down? Thankful believers, Christians, thankful believers.
Now, the opportunity is increasing every day for you and I to be thankful, believers, please hear me.
You’ve been tempted this week.
I know we have been bombarded with people telling us their story and what’s happening with their schools with their employment in the Military Medicine Union.
And you, you’re being told if you don’t take the shot, you’re gonna be fired.
And so we’re talking to attorneys and we have an exemption for me, you know, that or not.
But we have a religious exemption form on our website that you can download and print out and people are doing that and we have two different versions of that.
And I don’t know, call me dumb.
But I thought religious exemption you should be able to get from a church, but some churches don’t think that they should issue religious exemptions.
So what it is our first amendment, right? As Americans, you should know that.
And Paul the Apostle, if he lived today, he would exercise his first amendment rights.
How do we know because he exercised his Roman rights To advance the Gospel.
But in this case, your livelihood is at stake.
I had somebody to tell me this weekend two days ago that 33 years of working for a certain global corporation, they were threatened by that corporation that they were gonna lose so much percentage in pay and that their pension was going to be reduced.
The retirement was gonna be punished if they didn’t comply. Now, that is against the law in anybody’s book.
So I reached out to an attorney and I said, hey, this guy I know is being attacked.
What do you say about this? And he said, you know where we’re at? This is where we’re at.
He said, in any other world, this would be completely illegal, but now it appears we have no rights any longer as we once enjoyed.
You say, how does that relate to this message? This way?
We need to be thankful believers.
The reason, listen, the Bible tells us to be thankful why?
Because there’s the temptation to be unthinkable.
It, listen to be a thankful believer is to look around at the world that’s imploding in every direction which way you look around, It doesn’t matter.
And we need to choose to be thankful. The moment you and I start to grumble and gripe and complain.
We are literally grumbling and griping and complaining against God and you’re not gonna want to do that.
You’ll see and why in a moment, thankful, thankful to be thankful as a choice, you have to choose to do that.
God is good. When is God good all the time? Then when should I be thankful?
Always the Bible says that were to be thankful in every situation, but my mother died or my son died or my dog died.
We understand this, this is life and it hurts.
But because God is on his throne and he knows what he’s doing.
We don’t, we lean on him and we give him thanks because He knows and he cares.
He’s the one that is unpacking all of this in life. And let me tell you something.
You’re not gonna get this on media, you’re not gonna get this on Wikipedia and you’re not gonna get this on Snopes or fact checkers.
Listen, there’s people I watched it, I watched it.
There’s people the Christians are being exterminated in Afghanistan and they’re going to their death.
The reporter, I believe the reporter was from India reading the subtitles video going.
These Christians this week in Afghanistan, these are not Americans.
These are Afghan born again believers who are quietly with grandma, grandpa, child, mom and dad quietly walking to their slaughter.
They’re not screaming, freaking out and running around.
And the woman reporter in the subtitles and she says, and they’re singing, they’re singing songs to their death.
And you look, and you look up in American media that that’s not true, it’s not true.
Of course, it’s not true and it makes, it makes certain political leaders in power and not look good.
My point is this if they can be singing songs as families marching to their death, like it’s Auschwitz 21st century, then the loudest praise and worship ought to be coming from a free people who sit in comfort in Southern California.
We have no excuse God is so good to us with all that’s going on in this state and all the things that are happening in the incredible homelessness and all the filth and the ugliness we should be thankful because I’ll tell you what, be thankful.
Heaven doesn’t look like the 405 Freeway.
Heaven doesn’t look like South Central Heaven doesn’t look like downtown L A or San Francisco.
You ought to be thankful for that.
Thank God, this world is not our home, but we’re here for now.
And we need to be a thankful people.
You know, the world might sit up and ask us what’s with you? You’re thankful.
You just, you bowed your head there and you guys prayed over your meal. What do you guys thankful about?
Thankful for our meal, thankful for our ability to eat it. Yeah.
But are you aware of what’s going on in the world? Of course, I am.
That’s why we’re thankful, right? Think about that.
If they can be thankful, marching into heaven, we can be thankful sitting down in comfort, but we need to be a thankful group of believers.
And he warns us here. Look at verse four, you circle the word despise, it says in verse four or do you despise the riches of his goodness?
The word despise means to think little of or lightly of.
This is a tough one for us to swallow everybody listen carefully. This hurts.
It means to dismiss or, or to be disrespectful regarding something that is that has been bestowed upon us as good.
It means to take things for granted. How many of you have Children? Hang on.
Let me think. Now we have how many of us said Children Over 13/12, over 13, raise your hand.
I think that’s fair.
Over 12 or 13, maybe Over 12, 12, by the way, Mark Twain said, when you have teenagers, when they reach the age of 13, he said, put him, put your teenager in a 55 gallon barrel and put a lid on it.
But there’s a hole in the barrel and he said, feed your teenager through the hole.
And then he said, when that teenager reaches the age of 21, seal up the hole, that’s Mark Twain’s parental Book 101.
But there’s a kid reaches a certain age when they, when they begin to think that money falls from the sky and they think there’s this machine just pull out that piece of placket plastic and stick it in the machine.
The money comes out. Why can’t I have more money?
Uh And then when you try to tell them about life, they don’t like you anymore.
And there’s a lot that you can do, but there’s one thing you cannot do anything about.
And that is when your child becomes unthinkable for what you’ve poured into them.
It’s the number one pain to a parent is when that child can no longer, not even think about saying thank you doesn’t even enter their mind.
What happens they expect. It didn’t think about it. It’s automatic.
And for the Christian, when we have that kind of an attitude toward God, when we are not thankful by actual verb, action to go through the movement of thankfulness, then what happens is we are actually despising the goodness of God.
And there’s not one of us in this house that would say, I don’t despise this goodness.
Let me ask you this. How thankful are you? Are you profusely thankful of his goodness.
I think if we were, we’d look like a bunch of crazies. Yeah.
First service before service. One of the security detail guys. It was so sweet.
He’s just so turned on for Jesus and he said, you know what? You know what?
He’s all fired up. You know what I’ve noticed lately? The birds are singing louder.
They’re louder. Why? Wake up? They’re louder at my house.
And he said, it seems to me everything is greener. You know what’s happening to him?
What’s happening to him is what’s happening to him. The trees aren’t greener.
Those birds didn’t say, hey, can you guys, let’s turn it up.
This guy needs a little boost. His heart’s changing.
Listen, that’s, that’s walking with Christ. You get closer, the sky is bluer.
You get close to the trees are greener.
The things about God are more wonderful and the things about this world from man against us.
It doesn’t all matter that much. It’s remarkable. Thankful believers, we need to be careful.
We do not despise. Listen to Isaiah 51.
This is an awesome passage and I’m wondering, you know, what are those Christians in Afghanistan reading this today or tonight?
God says I even I am. He who comforts you. Who are you?
That you are afraid of man who dies? Is somebody bullying you? Somebody intimidating you?
Is somebody saying that we’re gonna cut your head off? Remember this? What God says?
What are you afraid of? That’s only a man talking man think of the day said, well, I don’t know, that’s pretty serious stuff.
Just like the day, the day that God begins to move his pinky finger on earth, the tyrants of this world will fall down and look what else he says.
And of the son of man who is made like grass, people. What are you afraid of?
Verse 13 that you have forgotten the Lord, your maker who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth that you fear continually all day long because of the fury of the oppressor God to say, knock it off.
I’m God. You belong to me and you don’t need to fear people.
You and I have been, listen, the world out there is trying to get you under its thumb.
The world wants to snap its finger and you crumble in fear.
Facebook says you say something, we’re gonna yank you off. Listen, I can’t believe we’re still on.
Don’t. So what do you listen? What are you saying?
If you don’t act like us, we’re pulling you.
Well, I don’t want to act like you think about it.
The Bible says the fear of the man is a snare.
Nowhere to be thankful.
The apostles were arrested and thrown in jail and in the middle of the night they were singing praises and thanks to God and it drove the Roman jailers, the Philippians jailers crazy.
That’s right. The world needs to see some thankfulness.
Whatever you’re gonna do today after service, you’re gonna go to lunch or whatever you’re gonna go do whatever you go do, be thankful about it and bow your head.
If we go to the restaurant and bow our head, people are gonna see us.
You’re catching on, you’re catching on, you want to freak him out, set your Bible right there, watch them, look at it.
I’ll tell you what you put your Bible on your table.
They’ll take your order, they’ll get you served and they’ll get you out of there like that in record time being thankful.
You cannot fathom the goodness of God that should make you confident, excited.
The goodness of God, the goodness of God is something that we don’t often think about, but it’s what we do need to think about more and more over and over again.
The Bible tells us that God is good throughout the Old Testament and New.
The scriptures announced that God is good. You and I need to train our minds.
In fact, the Bible tells us in the book of Colossians that you and I need to groom are thinking to understand that everything that you and I do in life should bring honor and glory to God because God is good.
In fact, you and I appreciate goodness, do we not? And the Bible would argue.
And I believe it’s true that goodness comes from God. In fact, without goodness, we would never know what’s bad.
So by that standard alone, what you and I need to realize is that God desires you and I to experience His goodness.
And when you look at the Bible, when you open up the word of God, and that there’s no other way to find out what is truly good or what is truly bad.
But apart from the word of God, that when we open up that Bible of His, we wind up finding out that it actually is reading us more than we’re reading it.
The Bible speaks of itself and says that it is a live and sharper than any two edged sword.
Think about that. So when we look at this age in which we live in, we need to be a discerning people.
We need to be a people that at a time when everyone seems to be doing what’s right in their own eyes, right?
We’ve got all of the arguments of this day and age regarding the experts, the experts say this, the experts say that are you with me on this?
I’m a little tired of what the experts are saying.
I need discernment to know not only where I’m at with God personally, but the fact of the matter is with all the noise that is going on around us via the news conversation.
What is rumored about what the experts are saying?
Look, you and I need to get to the word of God and read His truth because it will literally affect you.
That’s the reason why we’re here in real life. We want you to know more and more about Jesus.
That’s why we encourage you to go to Jack Hibbs dot com where you’ll find much more teaching to help you and your walk with Jesus Christ.
Until then, God bless you, my friends.
Does it really take a village to raise a child or does it simply start at home?
Drawing from their own inspiration and personal experiences? Jack and Lisa Hibbs co authored the book Turn Around at Home.
This book will help you understand your emotional, spiritual and social background, giving biblical encouragement for creating positive cycles in marriage and parenting.
Like any family. Jack and Lisa had triumphs and made mistakes, but found that intentional parenting was the key with over 50 practical ideas for parents such as Godly families.
Begin with Godly marriages, raising Godly Children is a parent’s mandate and responsibility, how to discipline in a Godly family and the importance of prayer in a family order.
The book turn around at home to help you make changes for good and equip yourself to provide a stronger spiritual legacy.
Perfect for parents, grandparents or a gift for parents to be, order your copy today.
Welcome to Real Life Radio with Jack Hibbs.
God’s word never will return. Void God’s word is spirit, its power and it has its effect.
Mhm.
So I wanna encourage you to grab your Bibles, open them up and get ready to learn from God’s word.
God did not give us Bible prophesy to scare us but to prepare us.
But I think you’re gonna get a lot out of it.
And one of the great reasons you are the light of the world.
Jesus said you are the salt of the earth. How does that happen by the power of the Holy Spirit?
You’re going to get excited about what Jesus Christ wants to do in and free you.
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The preceding program was sponsored by generous friends and partners of real life.