God is For Us
“God is for us” (Rom.8:31). What an incredible thought! He’s not standing over us with a club, waiting for us to make a mistake — He is actively at work in us to help us become more whole.
God is for us. A great definition of love is, “the will for the good of another” or “extending yourself for the good of another.” This is how God loves us (more than past-tense “loved” us). He wants what is good for us, and wants to speak into our lives in order to “conform us to the image of His Son” (Rom.8:29). It breaks my heart to hear preachers to talk as if we are in an adversarial relationship with God, as if God doesn’t really like us but He saves us anyway. No — God is actually for us.
Not only that, God is for us. I think that means two things. God is for us, both individually and corporately. Paul is speaking for each one of us, that we can expect God to “work for the good of those persons who love Him” (Rom.8:28). That is a great comfort in hard times, that God has not abandoned us, He is not trying to see how much we can take before we fold, but He is with us and able to restore us and redeem our difficult experience. And He is also for us, corporately, as part of the greater plan to liberate all creation (Rom.8:21).
Finally, God is for us. Who can stand against us? What can possibly be bigger? The truth is, for much of the first 40 years of my life I was convinced that evil was more powerful than good, at least in the present age. I had simply seen too much destruction, and it looked to me like evil always won because it was willing to escalate violence (emotional and otherwise) until it got its way. But God is far more powerful than the evil we experience. And as we learn how to lean on Him and receive life from Him, that becomes a truth we can know from our own experience if Him. God is for us. “Nothing can separate us from His being for us.” (Rom.8:38-39).