How can you be sure that God’s looking out for your good?

After telling us that every good gift comes from God, James gives believers one proof of God’s goodness in James 1:18. He writes, “In the exercise of His will He brought us forth by the word of truth so that we would be a kind of first fruits among His creatures.”

He’s talking about what happens when a person becomes a Christian.

You might underline the phrase, ‘how God brought us forth.’ The actual word is regeneration. He’s “using language” as someone has explained, “that ordinarily applies to physical birth (being brought forth out of our mother’s wombs, and into the world) and applies it to spiritual birth.”

We didn’t just believe a new set of facts when we became Christians. Something happened to us. James is saying that God has given birth to us. And we know He had to do that because we weren’t born spiritually alive. You were born dead.

Take all the words you might use to describe a pitiful condition, that’s how it was for us. Before God saved us, we were blind, ignorant, imprisoned, deaf, hard hearted.We loved what was bad for us and we hated what was good for us. We had absolutely no sense of what was important. We got excited about the things that were trivial and were bored by the things that were important. We had no spiritual understanding.

We needed God to perform a miracle in us for any of that to change.

And if you are a believer.

He did.

That’s James point, “He brought us forth.”

God gave you a heart that sees and understands and loves the things that matter most. He’s given you insight into the kind of knowledge that is out of the reach of unbelievers, He’s given you a taste and delight for that which is most sweet. If you are a believer, something has happened to you, the most important thing has happened to you, and you need to remember it.

God has given you birth.

And it’s completely Him who did this.

James says that it’s because of the “exercise of His will” that “He brought you forth…”

The exercise of his will is just one word in the Greek. It refers to desire. It’s not a whim or a passing fancy. It’s a deliberate thought out desire. That’s why our versions read in the exercise of His will. The translators are trying to get across this idea that you are born again because of a deliberate and purposeful desire of God. In other words, you are saved because He wanted you for Himself.

That’s it.

End of story.

You are not born again because you were seeking it. You weren’t. You are not born again because you planned it. You didn’t.

This is all God. Start to finish. He brought you forth in the exercise of his will ‘by the word of truth.’

The phrase word of truth is used in the New Testament as a way of describing the gospel message.  God uses the gospel to save people and to give them new life, which once again just points back to God’s mercy and God’s goodness.

As one writer explains,

“When miserable man, whom He had no need of, who did Him no good, nor could be of any advantage to Him, had made himself miserable by his rebellion against God, God took such pity on him that He sent His only Son to undergo his torment for him, that he might be delivered and set free. And now He offers freely, to bestow upon these rebels, complete and perfect happiness to all eternity upon this, His Son’s account. There never was such an instance of goodness, mercy, pity, and compassion since the world began: all the mercy and goodness amongst creatures fall infinitely short of it: this is goodness that never was, never will, never can be paralleled by any other being.”

Maybe read that last line again.

A goodness that never can be paralleled. An unparalleled goodness.

One reason it is unparalleled is because God has no needs. Another reason is because it wasn’t anything in us that caused God to show this kind of love to us. Still another reason is because of what this salvation accomplished. James tells us that God brought us forth by the word of truth “…so that we would be a kind of first fruits among His creatures.” That phrase has many implications, but one important one is that now we belong especially to Him. And there’s no privilege greater than that. You belong to God. There’s no greater good God could show anyone than to enable them to experience that kind of relationship, which means, if you are born again, there’s no one on the planet who has experienced more kindness and proofs of God’s love than you have.

Don’t let any fool you.

Don’t be deceived.

You have to work at remembering how good God is.

In the middle of the uncertainties of life, it’s easy to doubt it. In fact, sometimes it feels like it is the hardest thing in the world is to trust that God is for us.

And that is super spiritually dangerous.

When you start doubting God’s goodness you are tempted to start looking for peace and happiness and good somewhere outside of Him and you are not going to find it. You find it by giving yourself, your desires, your ambitions, your hopes to God instead, and trusting completely in His blessing. Instead of thinking you’ll get the life you always wanted by getting something outside of God that you don’t have right now, you find peace when you start trusting all that you do have and all that you do want to God.

And you can.

Because He’s good.

He’s proven, He’s more for you than you are.

Instead of wasting time worrying about how you can get more, work hard at resting in God’s loving concern for you and trusting that He will provide for you exactly what is best. If you don’t, and you go outside of God, you may get what you think you want, but you won’t end up enjoying it. If it’s good it is going to be from God, and if it is not from God, then it isn’t good.

Because as John Calvin once said, “Without God’s blessing, we shall obtain nothing but what turns to our misfortune. Therefore, suppose we believe that every means towards a prosperous and desirable outcome rests upon the blessing of God alone, and that, when this is absent, all sorts of misery and calamity dog us.”