The LORD is on my side; I will not fear. What can man do to me? The LORD is on my side as my helper; I shall look in triumph on those who hate me. (Psalm 118:6-7)
We can find great comfort and encouragement knowing that God is on our side. But what does that mean, exactly? Is He on our side like a boxing coach, shouting encouragement and guidance to us? Is it like being in favor of one sports team over another? Is He always working with our happiness and success in mind?
None of those really touch on what it means for the almighty God of the universe to be on our side. It’s easy to think of God as a means of self-empowerment, but doing so robs us of seeing how good our God is. Today, let’s look at three ways we see that God is always working in our favor.
He’s killing your sin
So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. (Romans 8:12-13)
God hates sin. Because we love God, we also hate sin. Sin is what put Jesus Christ on a brutal cross, paying the penalty for our sin.
Yet despite that, we all know what happens when we try to stop sinning in our own power. No matter how much we hate it, we also find plenty of ways to excuse, rationalize, or minimize the reality of sin in our own lives. If Christ simply saved us and let us go our own way, none of us would want to reject our sin and follow Him.
But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. (John 14:26)
Upon salvation, the Father gives us the Holy Spirit. There are many ideas of what that should look like, but God’s word clarifies that the evidence of the Holy Spirit in our lives is that we will look more like Christ and less like the world that hates Him.
But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. (Galatians 5:16-17)
The Holy Spirit doesn’t enable us to be better people, as though He was adding glitter to a mud puddle. Instead, He makes us better people despite our fleshly desires. He helps us kill sin in our lives by letting us live differently than where our sin nature wants to lead us.
For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. (Romans 8:13)
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. (Colossians 3:5)
There’s simply no way around it. Because God loves us, He wants to kill those things in our lives that we may think are good but that God knows are poison to our lives. And as He kills more sin in our lives, we’ll see Him replace them with something we may not realize we lacked.
He lets you live with joy
As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. (John 15:9-11)
A life spent serving Christ is a life filled with joy. It’s a life spent without the world’s distractions leaving us with feelings like hopelessness, anxiety, jealousy, or anger. Living for Christ fixes our attention on the kingdom of God, regardless of our circumstances.
This is a far cry from the life we think we want God to give us. In a culture so focused on pursuing pleasure in any form, we can easily believe that happiness is the same thing as joy. When we do that, we believe that God is for us when He gives us things the world wants and that He is somehow wrong (or perhaps we don’t have enough faith) if things like suffering or unhappiness are part of our lives.
You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. (James 4:3)
We are warned not to confuse the meanings of joy and happiness. Happiness is an emotion that the world measures by how pleasant our life is going. Happiness is circumstantial and candisappear the moment we lose our job, our health, or a loved one. When we’re asking God for things that will increase our happiness, we’re asking with a sinful heart.
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4-7)
Joy, on the other hand, doesn’t care how the world measures our circumstances. God allows us to place our complete trust in Jesus Christ in every area of our lives. We can live with true joy because we’re trusting in Jesus Christ, the only one in this entire universe who cannot fail us.
Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. (Psalm 73:25-26)
God doesn’t promise that our health won’t fail. The lives of the apostles prove that God doesn’t promise easy living followed by a peaceful death. What He does promise, however, is Himself. God doesn’t give us what we want, but He gives us precisely Who we need to have genuine, lasting, unimaginable joy.
He makes you more like Christ
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. (Galatians 5:22-24)
God gives us the best things. Yet the best things for us aren’t money, health, or even happiness. The best thing we can experience is becoming more like our Savior and less like the world that hates Him. And it’s only through God that we can live the life He wants us to live.
Sin and joy are mortal enemies. When we seek satisfaction in the world, we find ourselves losing our joy. When we focus on Jesus Christ, our joy lets us see sin for the liar it truly is. The more our sinful desires are put to death, the more we’ll see what the whole world is blind to.
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ. (1 Corinthians 2:14-16)
Christ is our everything. Our salvation rests in Him. Our understanding of life comes by seeing through His eyes. Our desires are either rooted in Him or rooted in sin.
Truly following Christ isn’t natural to us. It’s not something we do because we’re good people, and it’s not something we wake up one day and desire. Gaining the “mind of Christ,” seeing the world as our Savior does, can be a long and painful process.
It requires God to dig out all those areas in our lives where we’re enslaved to sin and show us why Christ offers truth and freedom. But in the end, we’ll see our hearts and minds shifting towards caring more about eternal things and less about worldly concerns. And as we see our old selves fading away, we’ll see a new heart with better desires take its place.
Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. (Colossians 3:2)
Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ. (1 Corinthians 11:1)
As we grow in spiritual maturity, we’ll see more areas of our lives orienting towards Christ. In our own limited way, God makes us more like Him by how we think and act. Becoming more like Christ doens’t happen because we act better, but because the Holy Spirit makes us more like Him.
We see God’s goodness and love by how He wants the best for His children. We see Him call us to the best things all throughout the New Testament. If we’re trusting God, we’ll also see that the best thing for us is to turn our attention to Jesus Christ, surrendering all areas of our lives to Him.
God is for us and our frequent need to kill sin. He is for us as He calls us to a true and lasting joy. And above all, God is for us as He makes us more like His son, Jesus Christ.
