Slideshow image

“What God Can Do With This” - Friday, March 20, 2025

Scripture Reading: Romans 8:26–28

Romans 8:28 is one of the most quoted and most misunderstood verses in the Bible. It gets pulled out to comfort people in grief or difficulty — “All things work together for good” — and sometimes it lands as genuine comfort, and sometimes it lands as a way of rushing past someone’s pain. It’s worth reading more carefully, because what it actually says is quite remarkable.

The verse doesn’t say bad things aren’t bad. It doesn’t say you should feel fine about what’s hard. It says that God is at work in all things — including the hard things, the confusing things, the things that don’t make sense yet. That’s different from “everything happens for a reason.” It’s closer to: nothing is beyond God’s reach, including this. And notice what comes just before the famous verse: the Spirit intercedes even when we don’t have words for what we’re going through.

This connects directly to what Jesus said in John 9. When he refused to answer “who sinned,” he didn’t explain the man’s suffering or offer a tidy reason for it. He pointed toward possibility: this situation is not beyond God. God can work here. That shift — from looking backward for blame to looking forward for what God might do — is at the heart of what faith looks like in the middle of hard circumstances.

The invitation isn’t to pretend things are fine when they’re not. It isn’t putting on a smile and saying “God is good all the time!” when you’re actually falling apart inside. It’s more honest than that: I don’t understand this. I don’t know what comes next. I can’t see how it could possibly be okay. But I’m going to trust that God is at work here — even now, even in this — and that the story is not finished.

Reflection:  Is there a situation in your life right now where you’ve been asking “why did this happen?” What might shift if you started asking instead, “what could God do with this?”

Action Step:  Take five minutes today — on a walk, in your car, over coffee — and talk to God honestly about one thing in your life that feels stuck or broken. You don’t need the right words. The passage says the Spirit intercedes even in wordless groans.

Prayer:  God, we don’t always have words for what we’re carrying. Thank you that you don’t require them. Work in all things — including the parts we can’t understand — and help us trust that the story is not finished. Amen.