All Things Will One Day Be Made Right

Editor’s Note: 365 Devotions to Embrace What Matters Most is a beautiful daily devotional that reminds us that as long as you’re breathing in and breathing out, you still have time to make the rest of your life matter. Think deeply about what really matters. Then take the necessary steps to begin embracing a life that matters. Enjoy this excerpt.

To Yearn for What Is Right

What’s wrong?
What’s wrong with the world? What’s wrong with people? What’s wrong with you?

Most people ask these questions on too regular a basis. We look at the world and want to pull our hair out for all the senselessness. We can’t imagine the things that people do for the most meaningless reasons — and, to our frustration, why we do what we do may be the greatest mystery of all.
What’s wrong isn’t right, but it can be made right. The world will be made right, but if you’re like most, that’s beyond your scope and control. What about other people? For the most part, you can’t make them right either. But you can look to yourself.
What’s wrong matters. It alerts you to the absence of what is right, and if you’re listening, that absence should alert you to your yearning for what is right.
Truly yearning for what is right is where this journey begins.

Creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth… We wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. — Romans 8:22-23

A Righteous Anger

What makes you angry? Squeaky shopping cart wheels? People who talk during movies? Unwrapping a new music CD? Some people stay angry over these kinds of annoyances.

How about when your baby won’t stop crying? Or when your spouse is late for dinner? Or when your co-worker keeps making the same mistake? That’s the kind of anger most people would admit they need to keep in check.

What about con men who rob innocent investors of their nest eggs? Or husbands who beat wives? Or the latest news about child sex trafficking? Hopefully, that makes you angry. And that’s an anger that can be used.

A righteous anger is an anger that longs for what is wrong to be made right.

It should ignite in you a fire to see the helpless protected, the brokenhearted healed, and the captives freed.

Too often, evil thrives because people aren’t angry enough. Channel your righteous anger into doing something about it.

The Lord became angry with Solomon because his heart had turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel. — 1 Kings 11:9

The Ultimate Wrong Made Right

What about the pain of death?

It is a wretched assault on everything that matters, particularly when the life of a young or innocent person is taken from us. But although grief is our greatest pain, it really isn’t different from any other pain. In our grief, there are still opportunities to be seen.

How precious would life be to us if there were no cost, if there were no limitations or end to it? When we experience death, life becomes a frail and wondrous thing to be enjoyed above all else.

God also saw death as an opportunity. He sent His young and innocent Son to die on the cross so that death would be no more.

Even something as wrong as death matters when we see it as an opportunity to remember that all things will one day be made right.

In the midst of your grief, you can still see as God sees.

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. — 1 Corinthians 13:12

Excerpted with permission from 365 Devotions to Embrace What Matters Most by John Michalak, copyright Zondervan.

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Your Turn

What’s wrong? When you look around you in your own life, in your community, your state, your country — what’s wrong? What evokes your righteous anger? What do you long for the Lord to make right? Come join the conversation on our blog. We would love to hear from you. ~ Devotionals Daily