by Gloria Copeland
Throughout my years of getting to know God, I have learned that He is absolutely good. He has nothing in Him that even resembles selfishness. Since the first day of Creation, He has always been giving of Himself. Every aspect of His nature flows from His love for His creation and it is all good. Every day of my life is filled with His goodness.
When God sent His Son into the earth, Jesus was anointed to preach good news—and only good news—and to demonstrate the goodness of His Father. He made this very clear the day He stood up among the religious leaders of His hometown, opened the book to the place of the prophet Isaiah, and described His purpose. We read it in Luke 4:18-19: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”
After reading from that book, Jesus closed the book, sat down and proclaimed, “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (verse 21).
True to His Father’s Word, right up through the day He made His way to Calvary, Jesus did nothing but good. He never did an evil work His whole life. He didn’t know how to do evil. Evil wasn’t part of His makeup. It wasn’t in His character. He was anointed to be and do only good—just like His Father.
Below are five truths about the goodness of God to be thankful for.
# 1 – He is eager to do good to all.
It’s surprising the number of people who can read Scripture and determine God to be anything but good. All anyone really needs to do to come to the right conclusion about God’s nature is look at the actions of His Son.
Jesus told His disciples that anyone who had seen Him had seen the Father (John 14:9). He went on to say, “The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works” (verse 10). He told them later, “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise” (John 5:19). What did Jesus see His Father do?
The Old Testament is filled with images of the character of God. Psalm 145:7-10 gives us a great picture of the goodness of our unchanging God: “[All men] shall abundantly utter the memory of thy great goodness, and shall sing of thy righteousness. The Lord is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and of great mercy. The Lord is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works. All thy works shall praise thee, O Lord; and thy saints shall bless thee.”
Let’s look a little more closely at the psalmist’s description of the Lord.
The Lord is gracious. In other words, He is disposed to show favor. That day Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah, He declared that the favor of God was present in their midst.
Full of compassion. According to one Hebrew source, the word compassion means “eager yearning to do good.” The proof of our Father’s motivation to do good is clearly seen in Jesus’ ministry—providing the best wine at a wedding party, healing people with all kinds of diseases, casting out demons from tormented souls and raising people from the dead. He was God in the flesh—doing the goodness He yearned so eagerly to do.
God is slow to anger and of great mercy. So many people think God is sitting on the edge of His seat, just waiting for someone to make a mistake so He can lower the boom. Nothing could be further from the truth. His mercy is great—He is ever ready to forgive. Jesus’ words to everyone He met were words filled with mercy, even when He confronted their sin.
The Lord is good to all. It would not be God’s will to heal or deliver a few people and leave everyone else bound up by the devil. Peter preached in Acts 10:38, “How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.”
His tender mercies are over all His works. Tender mercies means “deep love and affection.” “For God so loved” the world—all His works…He gave His Son. Glory to God! His deep love and affection—His goodness—cover us every moment of every day.
This is the picture of our good God—always giving of Himself.
#2 – Jesus is a picture of the Father.
Now, we’ve heard it said that a picture is worth a thousand words! All anyone needs to do is look at Jesus—the walking, talking, moving picture of God’s goodness in action.
In Matthew 11:2-6, we see that John the Baptist sent his disciples to ask Jesus to identify Himself. Jesus said, “Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.”
In other words, “tell John you hear and see the goodness of God.”
Jesus was created in the image of His Father, and all His ministry and works were expressions of His Father’s goodness!
He said, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father…”(John 14:9).
#3- We are created in His image.
And we are born again in that same image.
Ephesians 2:10 tells us, “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.”
Since the day He ascended to the right hand of His Father, Jesus Christ—the Anointed One and His Anointing—has fulfilled His ministry through His Body, the Church. It is still the ministry of Jesus, and we get to do the actual work of the ministry. The words of Isaiah 61 apply to His Body, just as they did to Jesus.
The same Spirit of the Lord who anointed Jesus anoints you and me. The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead brings us out of spiritual death to life, out of darkness to light. And the Father’s purpose in our being born again is the same as it was for Jesus. We preach the gospel to the poor. We are anointed to announce freedom to captives and recovery of sight to the blind. Just like Jesus, we have the ability to send forth as delivered those who are downtrodden, bruised, crushed and broken down in calamity.
In this Year of Total Fulfillment, the goodness of our Father is flowing through the Body of Christ in unprecedented ways. The devil is fighting hard to keep people thinking God is angry at them, or He’s out to get them. But he is fighting a losing battle, because we are out there preaching that God is good and His mercy endures forever! (Psalm 118:1).
#4 – This is THE day of God’s goodness.
Jesus said to the people in the synagogue that day in Nazareth, “This day….” Total fulfillment of the goodness of God began on that day when Jesus declared His anointing. And it has never ceased. This is still THE day! This is our day!
Jesus said to Zacchaeus in Luke 19:9, “This day is salvation come to this house.” Salvation means deliverance. Every one of us comes into the kingdom of God from the same beginning. We receive pardon. We get deliverance from danger and apprehension—freedom from fear. We receive protection and liberty. We receive provision. We receive health, restoration, soundness and wholeness. We receive God’s love and goodness!
The day we receive the gospel is the day everything changes!
This is the day of God’s grace. We don’t have to do a thing—we can’t do anything—for these favors from God to come to us, except believe and receive.
Thanks to the participation of the Body of Christ, the good news of God’s grace is covering the earth. He is moving freely throughout the earth today in the Church He has established in every corner of the planet. Every day His Body is growing as more people believe and receive.
Our message is the same as Jesus’ was, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). The kingdom of God’s goodness is here!
#5 – God is always ready with goodness.
Jesus was always ready to do and be good! His power was never in the “off” position. He was always “on” by the power of the Spirit. He was always in a healing, delivering mood. He was never in such a hurry that He didn’t have time to give out the goodness of God—lay hands on the sick or cast out demons.
Anyone who came to Him received what they needed, if they simply put their faith out there. They came because they had heard about Him and believed what they heard. They came because they had a need and expected to receive. And He delivered!
Every person who enters the kingdom of God enters a new day—a new way of life! We enter the life where the only thing God desires to do is cover us with His goodness. And once we take our place in that kingdom of “goodness,” we can’t help but tell other people about it.
People come to Healing School at our meetings because they have heard about someone who was healed there. People come to me when they see me in the parking lot at the grocery store because they’ve heard me say God heals today and because I lay hands on the sick. People come to you because they heard you are a Christian who prays for people and things change.
We are surrounded by people with needs of every kind. We just have to stay on the ready, just like Jesus did. We have to be available to them, and be willing to release the anointing of His goodness that God has deposited in us, and let someone make a draw on it.
#6 – God is always ready to pour out His goodness.
By always being ready, we stay in the flow of God who is always ready to give out His absolute goodness. He pours out His goodness to His children through us. His Spirit of goodness was always on in Jesus and He is on in you and me. Just like He did with Jesus, He disperses His goodness through us—His Body in the earth.
Psalm 31:19 in the New Living Translation says, “Your goodness is so great! You have stored up great blessings for those who honor you. You have done so much for those who come to you for protection, blessing them before the watching world.”
How do we stay “on” so we can release God’s goodness into our world? We must simply be receivers.
The 20th century born-again rabbi David Baron commented on this scripture, “Goodness is that attribute of God whereby He loveth to communicate to all who can or will receive it all good. Himself is the fullness of good, the creator of all good. Not in one way, not in one kind of goodness only, but absolutely without beginning, without limit, without measure. He possesseth and embraceth all excellence, all perfection, all blessedness, all good. This good His goodness bestoweth on all and each according to the capacity of each to receive it.”
God is no respecter of persons, but some people have more capacity to receive His good. That’s because they prepare for it more. They believe His Word, and act on His Word more. These people expect it more. They are receivers.
Anyone can be a receiver of His goodness. And we can all increase our capacity to receive. All it takes is our going from faith to faith. Hearing the Word, believing the Word, speaking the Word, acting on the Word—with each step, our capacity increases.
When we open ourselves to receive His goodness without measure, once the flow starts within us, He will make us conduits to allow His goodness to flow to others.
God is not holding back any good thing from anyone. First Corinthians 2:9-10 in The Amplified Bible clearly tells us, “What eye has not seen and ear has not heard and has not entered into the heart of man, [all that] God has prepared (made and keeps ready) for those who love Him [who hold Him in affectionate reverence, promptly obeying Him and gratefully recognizing the benefits He has bestowed]. Yet to us God has unveiled and revealed them by and through His Spirit.”
By the Spirit—by the same anointing that was in and on Jesus and is in and on you and me—we can know all the absolute goodness God has in store for us. Our job is to keep ourselves ready…to simply be “on.” We need to always be ready to tell someone about the good things God has done for us. We should be ready to share the compassion He has given us. We can willingly show His love and deep affection by the mercy we give others as He has given us. And we can graciously give free favors as He has bestowed so many on us.
Every day God brings people across our path who have believed a lie about His nature. He has given us the same mission He gave Jesus, and He has anointed us to do it. Let’s stay “on!” Let’s be ready to tell them the truth—to demonstrate the truth—God is absolutely good!
