Those who have experienced great loss and difficulty in life often treasure this truth more than those whose bellies and bank accounts are full. For those desperately seeking Him can be assured that God will work all things they have been given— gifts and trials alike— together for good. He has given us the greatest good of His Son, which can not be taken from us, and has given us more than we could ask for or desire in the unsearchable greatness and inexhaustible fountain of riches in Christ.

A man loses his fortune in a fire. Shortly after, all four of his young children die in a tragic shipwreck. A young woman’s husband is brutally murdered. Her second husband dies of cancer, and she herself passes away after a decade-long battle with dementia. A promising teenager becomes a quadriplegic in a diving accident. For the rest of her life she is confined to a wheelchair; from the neck down unable to move her once active body.

And yet, Joni Eareckson Tada, after learning to write with a pen in her mouth, reflected: “It is a glorious thing to know that your Father God makes no mistakes in directing or permitting that which crosses the path of your life.”

And when it seemed providence had dealt her a cruel hand in the death of her two husbands, Elisabeth Elliot wrote, “God never witholds from His child that which His love and wisdom call good.”

And even as his ship slowly passed by the place where his children drowned, Horatio Spafford penned the beloved lines, “Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say it is well with my soul.”

There seems to be a shocking dissonance between the words and the lives of these individuals. Were they deluded into thinking that God has been good to them? Or, had they taken hold of the promise many of us have a difficult time grasping— that God withholds nothing good from the upright, for God Himself is our greatest gift and gives Himself freely to us.

When the psalmist writes, “No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly,” our first instinct is to make a mental list of all the good things that we do not have. Like our first parents, we are tempted to believe that God is keeping something from us.

Read More