If Only We Knew How Good God Is (351) - May 23 2026

How Good is He? How GREAT is He? How wonderful and immense is His Grace, his undeserved favor for humanity. He loves and cares for the lost. He also loves and cares for those whom made him their Lord, and became His children. He rains on the just and unjust alike.

God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repent (to change your mind and inner man to accept God’s will)  (Romans 2:4).

What better way to spend life, than to reflect and have a relationship with Jesus?  You may or may not agree with this, depending on where you are in your journey with the Lord. It’s ok, God is not angry with you if you are not reading His Word or spending time with Him. But He certainly longs for you to come closer to Him by your own decision, your own Free Will.

This program covers the following Scriptures from the Amplified Classic version (AMPC): Psalm 147:1-20, Romans 2:4, Psalm 136:1, Romans 8:29, Mark 8:35, Lamentations 3:22–23, James 1:17, John 8:44, Matthew 5:14-16, Ephesians 4:17-19.

Transcript

0:06

(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) And welcome to Touch of God today. I am Pastor Marc and it is great to have you join us today. Let us invite the Lord here. Lord Jesus, Heavenly Father, Holy Spirit, we welcome you here for this moment. We thank you for your presence that we do not deserve, but we welcome you all the same, that we may show our hearts to you, that we may turn from things that we shouldn't be doing and turn to you. Let our hearts be open and exposed to you, Lord. Let us confess our sins to you, that we may be forgiven our sins and be cleansed of all unrighteousness. For Lord, where your spirit is, there is liberty. We welcome you here because we want to be free and we want to stay free. We do not want to be held captive by the wiles and the schemes of the devil. Let us agree with you, Lord, and not with the devil's temptations. Let us seek you with all of our heart, because Lord, you are good and you want us to be directed by your Holy Spirit. Lord, our free will has to choose you. Choose this day whom you will serve, you say. And Lord, we choose you. Let our hearts choose you. Lord, direct our hearts towards you. Show us your amazing goodness and greatness. Let us sense your presence as we glorify your holy, hallowed name. In the name of your Son, Jesus. Amen. Psalm chapter 147, verses 1 to 20 in the Amplified Classic Edition of the Bible. Verse 1. Praise the Lord, for it is good to sing praises to our God, for he is gracious and lovely. Praise is becoming and appropriate. Verse 2. The Lord is building up Jerusalem. He is gathering together the exiles of Israel. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds, curing their pains and their sorrows. He determines and counts the number of the stars. He calls them all by their names. Verse 5. Great is our Lord and of great power. His understanding is inexhaustible and boundless. The Lord lifts up the humble and downtrodden. He casts the wicked down to the ground. Verse 7. Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving. Sing praises with the harp or the lyre to our God, who covers the heavens with clouds, who prepares rain for the earth, who makes grass to grow on the mountains. He gives to the beast his food, and to the young ravens that for which they cry. He delights not in the strength of the horse, nor does he take pleasure in the legs of a man. The Lord takes pleasure in those who reverently and worshipfully fear him, in those who hope in his mercy and lovingkindness. Verse 12. Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem! Praise your God, O Zion! For he has strengthened and made hard the bars of your gates, and he has blessed your children within you. He makes peace in your borders. He fills you with the finest of the wheat. He sends forth his commandment to the earth. His word runs very swiftly. He gives to the earth snow like a blanket of wool. He scatters the hoarfrost like ashes. He casts forth his ice like crumbs. Who can stand before his cold? He sends out his word and melts ice and snow. He causes his wind to blow and the waters flow. He declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and his ordinances to Israel. He has not dealt so with any other nation. They have not known, understood, appreciated, given heed to, and cherished his ordinances. Praise the Lord! Hallelujah! The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. How good is he! How great is he! How wonderful and immense is his grace! The undeserved favor he has for us, his creation. He loves and cares for the lost. He also loves and cares for those who made him their Lord and became his children. He reigns on the just and unjust alike. Romans chapter 2 verse 4 in the Amplified Classic Edition ends by saying this, God's kindness is intended to lead you to repent, to change your mind and inner man to accept God's will. You see, when we do not repent, when we stay doing acts of wickedness and darkness, when we stay away from the Lord, we are rebelling against him and we are not in his will. We're not doing his will. We are rejecting his will. His will is perfect. His will is one of forgiveness of our sins. His will is one to give you a plan for your life, to have a relationship with you. But we have a free will to choose whom this day we shall serve. Will it be the Lord today or will it be Satan today? And we say, well, I don't worship Satan. Well, if you're not worshiping and seeking the Lord and following him and being obedient to what he tells you to do in his word, then you're being obedient to the darkness, to the demons, to the will of the devil, because the devil doesn't want you to do the will of the Lord and to tell people about how good Jesus is and to pray and to lay hands on the sick and to preach the gospel. No, but the Lord does. The Lord wants you to repent. He wants me to repent. He wants everyone to repent of their wickedness, to change their minds and their inner man to accept his will. Psalm 136, verse 1 says, O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy and lovingkindness endure forever. In this life, what better way to spend the time we have than to reflect on the Lord and to be obedient to him and to have a relationship with the Lord Jesus? You may or may not agree with this. Depending on where you are in your journey with the Lord, it's okay. God is not angry or mad with you if you're not reading his word or spending time with him, but he certainly longs for you to come closer to him by your own decision, your own free will. Beloved, we are all on a journey to be conformed to the image of Jesus. When I say all, the Lord wants all his creation to be conformed to the image of Jesus. But it's the battlefield of the mind where the enemy tries to keep us from being conformed to the image of Jesus with all the distractions. Even once we come to salvation through Christ, the distractions increase to try to keep us from the word. It's an invisible force that prevents you from opening up the Bible, keeping you from seeking the truth and staying free and getting free. There are so many other distractions in this world that can easily tempt us for us to agree and be led astray. But beloved, let us be strong in the Lord. Your free will has enough power, enough will to say no to those distractions and say yes to spending time with the Lord in his word, in worship, in prayer. And the Holy Spirit will give you strength, but the Holy Spirit will not force you to open the Bible. It is your free will. The Lord will not force you to do something against your will. It's his will that you have a free will to choose, but he hopes that you will choose his will and not your own. Just as Jesus said. Romans chapter 8 verse 29 says, For those whom he foreknew, of whom he was aware and loved beforehand, he also destined from the beginning for ordaining them to be moulded into the image of his Son and share inwardly his likeness, that he might become the firstborn among many brethren. So it was always the Father's will that we would be conformed and destined from the beginning to be moulded into the image of Jesus, the Father's Son. But included in that is sharing inwardly, inside of us, his likeness, the Lord's likeness. One person may say, I don't think of God that much at all. Another may say, I don't think God cares if I think about him. Then there are those who are seeking to find God with part of their heart, but not their whole heart. And they say, I think of God now and again. Another says, I think of God every Sunday at church. And sometimes when I have an emergency, I call for his help. Then there are those who are seeking to find the Lord with their whole heart. And they find him and recognize in their prayer time his very presence. They become more sensitive in the spirit realm to God's leading. Their goal is to give up their earthly fleshly life to Jesus and try not to keep it. Jesus said, as recorded in Mark 8, verse 35, for whoever wants to save his higher spiritual eternal life will lose it, the lower natural temporal life, which is lived only on earth. And whoever gives up his life, which is lived only on earth for my sake and the gospel's, will save it, his higher spiritual life, in the eternal kingdom of God. Of all the people described above, the Lord loves each of them the same. For Peter says, the Lord is no respecter of persons. He does not prefer one over the other. That is how immense God's love is. For God is love. And he is the father of lights. The person who is just going to call upon the Lord when there's an emergency, he loves that person just as much as the person who is fasting and praying and worshiping and singing praises to the Lord. We can spend a long time thinking about how good he is because when you realize that all the good things that have happened to you in your lifetime could only have come from the Lord, then you are able to reflect longer and be thankful to him. For none of the good that you experienced was earned or deserved or came from anyone else. Even if someone gave you some help to do something, if someone blessed you, it wasn't really the person who blessed you, it was the Lord's love and the Lord's goodness that blessed you through them. They may or may not have realized that when they blessed you, when they helped you, but it was the goodness of the Lord pouring through them to reach you, to help you. That is why it's important for us to give God the glory and God the praise and acknowledge him when good situations occur and blessings, let alone miracles and healings. But when everyday good things occur, we need to be thankful to the Lord for there is no good that did not come from him. Let's look at the book of Lamentations chapter 3 verses 22 to 23. It is because of the Lord's mercy and loving kindness that we are not consumed, because his tender compassions fail not. They are new every morning. Great and abundant is your stability and faithfulness. That word your there is a capital Y, Y-O-U-R. The writer of Lamentations is talking about the stability and faithfulness of the Lord being great and abundant. Now it's noteworthy here that the book of Lamentations is in the Old Testament. It is generally accepted that Jeremiah was the author and that he wrote the book between 586 and 575 B.C. This was shortly after the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem at its temple 575 years before Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit. And yet verse 22 says that it is because of the Lord's mercy and loving kindness that we are not consumed, because his tender compassions fail not. We are not consumed even before Jesus paid for the sin of humanity. The Lord's mercy and loving kindness still were great and immense that the people of the Old Testament times were not consumed because his tender compassions failed not. Now the word consumed according to the Miriam Webster dictionary means to do away with completely, destroy. So it is because of the Lord's mercy and loving kindness that we the human race are not done away with completely and destroyed because his tender compassions fail not. Now for those who breathe their last breath and have rejected Christ to the end of their life, they will be perishing. They will end up in the place that is not heaven but is hell. And they will send themselves there. It's not the Lord sending them there. It is their own rejection of Christ, the place that we were all always destined to go, except when we received the free gift from the Lord of eternal life with him, beginning at the moment of salvation and onward into heaven after our last breath. And that is the gospel of Jesus Christ that we may spread and tell other people about the goodness of our Lord. You see, no one could be saved prior to the cross of Jesus Christ. So all those who lived from Adam and Eve onwards, all the way through the time of Jeremiah, all the way to the tree on which Jesus was crucified, and on to this day, those saved and yet to be saved deserve to be consumed. Why is that? The reason is we rebelled against the Lord on that day at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with Adam and Eve making that decision to disobey the Lord's warning and obey the serpent Satan. You and I, prior to coming to Christ, we were physically born of our mothers, but the lineage went all the way back to Adam and Eve, the Adamic lineage. We disregarded our Creator's warning to not touch that one tree. We squandered, recklessly gave our dominion the Lord gave us over to the devil himself. We departed that day from our Father of all that gives light. James chapter 1 verse 17 says, Every good gift and every perfect free large full gift is from above. It comes down from the Father of all that gives light in the shining of whom there can be no variation, rising or setting, or shadow cast by his turning, as in an eclipse. So you see, we departed from our Lord and we were immediately in darkness, our spirit man inside of us now dead, our minds blinded by the one who seduced us into doing what the Lord expressly warned us not to do, to eat of the fruit of that tree. And to this day the devil still has those same and other evil characteristics. Even Jesus shows us in John chapter 8 verse 44 that we have those same characteristics if we are of our Father the devil. And who are those who are of our Father the devil? Those who have not received the salvation of Jesus Christ and confess Jesus as their Lord. They are still in darkness. So that's why we need to spread this good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ to the lost. Because Jesus said, I came to set the captives free, but he also said that he came to seek and save that which was lost. So while we were lost, before we received the grace of God in the form of his precious free gift of salvation through Christ Jesus and his shed blood, we had a biological father, but also an evil spiritual one. Called Satan. To this day, those who still do not have Christ as their Savior and their Lord continue to have Satan as their father. And to differing degrees, they still act just like him. Satan wants to be seen on the earth. He himself cannot be seen visibly, but he can be seen through his children. And preferably for Satan, without his children even knowing he's there and involved and working through them and using them. They just feel like doing different forms of evil to themselves and to us. So if Satan's desire is to keep people blinded and to seduce his own children into agreeing to evil temptations, to commit various kinds of wickedness, and fleeting satisfactions of a self-centered existence, then how much more can Christ be shown through you, O beloved brother and sister of our Most High God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The presence of Him, our Lord, let it be felt by others who come into contact with you. Let us be different than the world. Let your light so shine. Who said that? Jesus. In Matthew chapter 5, verses 14 to 16, he said, You are the light of the world. He said this to his disciples, You are the light of the world. And of course Jesus is the light. But with Christ in us, the hope of glory, now we are the light. We carry Jesus and we are the light of the world because the world is in darkness. That's why we are the light of the world. So verse 14, You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Verse 15, Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a peck measure, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. Verse 16, Let your light so shine before men that they may see your moral excellence and your praiseworthy, noble, and good deeds and recognize and honor and praise and glorify your Father who is in heaven. Jesus wants you to know he is in you and you are in him. You are in Christ. If you confess Jesus as Lord, if you walk according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh, as it says in Romans chapter 8, verses 1 and 2, you are in him. He wants to flow through you. But with his resurrection power to set everyone else free just like he set you free from the law of sin and of death. As it says again in Romans chapter 8, verses 1 and 2, we cannot keep Jesus just to ourself. We have to tell others about him because if no one told you and me about the Lord, where would we be? We would still be in darkness, in captivity. We would not have any hope. We would be hopeless. Taking advantage of, probably blaming God for a disastrous life. In our ignorance, blaming our creator when it wasn't even his fault. It was all our fault when we went to that tree that day. But the Lord does not want us to condemn ourselves. He wants to deliver us from condemnation because for those who are in Christ Jesus there is now no guilt nor condemnation. For those who are in Christ, who walk according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh. Again, Romans chapter 8, verses 1 and 2. We go to the book of Ephesians chapter 4, verses 17 to 19, of course written by the Apostle Paul. And he says in verse 17, So this I say and solemnly testify in the name of the Lord, as in his presence, that you must no longer live as the heathen the Gentiles do in their perverseness, in the folly, vanity and emptiness of their souls and the futility of their minds. The term futility, in the Greek, refers to emptiness, vanity or purposelessness. According to biblical teaching, the minds of those who do not know Christ are darkened and alienated from the life of the Lord. This futility arises because human reasoning is cut off from divine truth, leading to vain, proud and deceptive thinking that cannot produce eternal value or true righteousness. We, brethren, need the divine truth for our human reasoning. We need to renew our minds to the Word of God, to be transformed and no longer conformed to this world according to the Apostle Paul writing in Romans chapter 12 verse 2. Verse 18 goes on to say their moral understanding is darkened and their reasoning is beclouded. They are alienated, estranged, self-banished from the life of God with no share in it. This is because of the ignorance, the want of knowledge and perception, the willful blindness that is deep-seated in them due to their hardness of heart to the insensitiveness of their moral nature. Verse 19. In their spiritual apathy they have become callous and past feeling and reckless and have abandoned themselves, a prey to unbridled sensuality, eager and greedy to indulge in every form of impurity that their depraved desires may suggest and demand. So in the garden, right after the biggest mistake humankind could ever make, we were contaminated by the poison of the decision to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We became fallen, sinful, unholy, rebelling against God. We will carry on this teaching next week. But remember how good and great the Lord is. He is merciful and graceful. Seek Him with all of your heart. Pray, spend time with Him. Spend time in His word, for His word is sharper than any two-edged sword. So beloved, Catrice and I love you. We care for you. But it's the love of Jesus that cares for you through us. If you would like us to pray for you, get in touch with us. We'd love to hear from you. Our website, touchofgod.world touchofgod.world and then tap on the button that says send prayer request. But until next week, you have a blessed week. Amen.