Living My Best Life

July 19, 2024

And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son … Romans 8:28-29 NLT

God’s story is unbelievably, incomprehensively good. When you connect the dots and see where He takes us as we commit to Jesus, it seems too good to be true. It works like this: God loves us and creates us uniquely and specially in perfect love. He doesn’t want just “OK” or what we would consider good for us. He wants the absolute best and chooses the absolute best. He knew we could not have that life without a purpose, and He chose the best purpose. He chose that our ultimate purpose was to love Him and be called to become like His own Son Jesus.

In order to make that happen, He causes everything to work together “for OUR good.” What God calls good staggers our limited human imagination. It is BEST in capital and bold font. When He created the universe, the skies and all the heavenly bodies, He called it “good.” All of the birds and animals and sea creatures He called “good.” When He had finished all the rest of creation, He made humans. He looked it over and said, “This is very good! The best!”

The God who chose the best knew how to create it. It was to intentionally work all things together, the things we would choose and the things we wouldn’t. The good news and the bad news. The days of excitement and good times, and the days of pain and adversity. As they work together, like ingredients in the hands of a skilled chef, these elements give us the best possible life and make us like Jesus.

To be like Jesus means we must endure and learn to thrive through adversity. He certainly did. Trouble and adversity help us mature into the person God wants us to be, the person with an abounding and full life. You will never find anyone who has truly begun to resemble Jesus (in biblical times, throughout history, right up to today) who has not developed and found their best life in some degree through adversity. The farther along we get in living our best life, the life of fully following Jesus, we often discover that the things we thought were most hurtful and big mistakes were actually God working through circumstances to grow us in wonderful ways we never would have known otherwise.

We often toss around the words “living my best life” casually to caption a picture at the beach or enjoying some other good thing. But truly living your best life can only be found in following Jesus and trusting His lead.

• Jesus, only You know how I can truly live “my best life.” Help my desire and obedience grow.