A catchphrase that is making the rounds in Christian circles today is this: “God is good all the time. All the time, God is good.” I’ve even attended church services where the phrase is used as a sort of contemporary liturgical chant:
Worship leader: God is good!
Congregation: All the time!
Worship leader: All the time!
Congregation: God is good!
I don’t argue with the truthfulness of that statement. I believe it with my whole heart. God is good. And He is good all the time. But hearing those words when you are grieving simply does not help. Proverbs 25:20 says, “Singing cheerful songs to a person with a heavy heart is like taking someone’s coat in cold weather or pouring vinegar in a wound.”
If you have been wounded by the very people God called you to serve, as my husband and I were, let me suggest that we revise the catchphrase. Instead of “good,” let’s insert a different attribute of God. Let’s start with unchanging.
God is unchanging. All the time. All the time, God is unchanging.
OK, so it doesn’t have the same rhythmic flow but the message is one that kept me going as I traveled my journey of grief. When it felt like my life was spinning out of control—when everything I thought I knew and could count on was changing—God was the constant in my life. In Malachi 3:6, God says, “I the Lord do not change.” Though everything else in life changes, our God remains the same.
Closely related to unchanging is the attribute of faithfulness.
God is faithful. All the time. All the time, God is faithful.
It still doesn’t have the rhythmic flow but apparently this is one of the attributes that encouraged the apostle Paul. In writing to the Christians at Thessalonica he said, “But the Lord is faithful; He will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one” (2 Thess. 3:3). To Timothy he wrote that regardless of what we do, “He [God] remains faithful, for He cannot deny who He is” (2 Tim. 2:13). And the writer of Hebrews encourages us to “hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful” (10:23).
As you move on through your journey of grief, cling to the promise that your heavenly Father is unchanging and He is faithful. Let those two attributes create an anchor for your soul. And one day, when your soul has had time to heal, we’ll get back in rhythm and chant together, “God is good all the time. All the time, God is good.”