Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What If God’s “Good” Isn’t What You Think? | The Gospels | John 18:1-14

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Does God promise you a happy, comfortable life? What should you believe when suffering comes? Why did Jesus willingly walk toward suffering instead of trying to avoid it? In today’s episode, Jensen explores John 18:1-14 and exposes the problem with prosperity-gospel thinking: our greatest good isn’t a comfortable life; it’s the salvation and new life Jesus has already secured for us. Read the Bible with us! This year, we’re exploring the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and it's never too late to join! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passage: John 18:1-14

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jensen Holt McNair. My guess is you've probably heard of manifestation. It's a large cultural movement that is focused on embracing positivity through manifestation. When you expect good and believe good and focus on good, you will manifest it in your life. And there is probably something to the idea that lifting your spirit, staying positive and remaining motivated keeps you on a path towards your goals. When you focus your goals and identify what it is that you want in life, you will work towards that goal. There's like a good chance that your odds of making that thing happen for you will increase. But at the root of manifestation is a belief that through manifestation you can in some way convince the universe to produce the good you're seeking for you. You manifest it. Now, this isn't just a cultural belief.

Manifestation has manifested itself inside the church through the prosperity gospel. Name it and claim it, the word of faith movement, the health and wealth gospel. At its root is the belief that if you remain faithful to God, if you do good things, believe the right things, give the right things, then God will bless you. He will give you a breakthrough, produce good in your life, often via health, wealth, or relational blessing. It's the idea that faithful Christians, when living the way God has called them to live, can expect a comfortable, happy, and blessed life. The more you give, the more you get. A prominent prosperity preacher posted a blog on their website explaining why you should expect good things to happen to you. They write that God is longing to give you a breakthrough,

to do something good for you in your life. The main point of the post is that when we think negatively, God doesn't provide the breakthrough. But if we shift our mindset, if we expect him to move, if we think positively, if we believe fully enough that God will do it, then he will. He will bring good into your life. They write, God wants to do something outrageous. religiously wonderful in your life every moment of every day. But you have to be ready and expect it to happen. The blog ends by encouraging us to declare each morning, God is good and something good is going to happen to me today. This is just the Christian version of manifestation. Except instead of convincing the universe to give us what we want, we're focused on convincing God to give it to us. It puts the pressure on us, though. If we want good things from God, we have to do something to get them. In opposition, if your life is not full of God doing good things, breakthrough, delivering you from negativity, it's because you weren't ready. You didn't expect it, believe enough for it to happen. Now, if you read the Bible through this lens, you can pick verses out of context and create a theology that basically supports this Christian version of manifestation. The problem is that when you map the prosperity gospel onto the actual gospel, onto the life and work of Jesus, it doesn't stand up. In John 18, John tells us the story of Jesus' arrest, an arrest that comes directly following a time spent in prayer. In the Gospel of Luke, we see that Jesus asked that

this cup, this suffering, would be taken from him. He does this in prayer, but ultimately, Jesus prays that God's will would be done. And yet, despite his prayers, Jesus is still arrested. He is still put on trial, mocked, beaten, and unjustly murdered as a criminal. Did Jesus not believe that God could deliver him? Did Jesus not expect good from God? Is that why God didn't answer his prayer? Now, if you map the prosperity gospel onto the life of Jesus, it won't add up because worldly good was not right around the corner for Jesus.

Jesus didn't think that what was good for him was comfort was physical deliverance. He knew that his ultimate good was to live in the will of the Father, wherever that led him in this earthly life, even into suffering. Because Jesus knows something. He knows that humanity cannot earn anything from God. They have tried and they have failed again and again. He knows his purpose is to secure deliverance for God's people out of evil and into good. And in John's gospel, we see clearly through his arrest that Jesus is committed and in control of all the suffering that is happening to him because he knows that suffering is the way to our good. In John 18, verse 4, when Judas shows up to the garden with his soldiers to arrest Jesus,

John writes that Jesus knew what was going to happen to him. So Jesus asks, who is it you want? And when they say Jesus of Nazareth, he replies, I am he. And John tells us that at his words, the soldiers, they fall to the ground. Much like when we see humans come up against the presence of God, God and they cannot stand before him. When Jesus declares I am, he using the language for the I am for Yahweh, he declares his divinity, his authority over the situation. They cannot stand up in his presence. Jesus is in control. Jesus knows what is happening. The suffering that he is facing now

is part of his plan for our good. Now, when the soldiers come, Peter tries to fight. He believes that This is the moment for Jesus to stand up to the Roman Empire. And you know what Jesus does? He tells him to put his sword away. He restates his purpose. Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me? And Jesus goes willingly, in control to his trial and ultimately to the cross and his death. See, Jesus knows what is coming. He knows that suffering and gruesome death await him. He faces separation from God. He faces the way of the sins of the world, and yet he willingly walks into it, in control of the suffering that he will face. Why? Why face suffering? Why walk through horrible torture? Why die? When clearly Jesus is God, he is in control. He could deliver himself. He could defeat the powers of this world easily.

Why add suffering into his story? It's the pinnacle of the gospel. Jesus suffers for our sake, because we could not live the perfect life that he could. He became the sacrificial lamb, the offering for our sin. His death and then resurrection defeated Satan for us. See, the good of Good Friday, the good that came from Jesus' death was spiritual renewal, was the deliverance of all of creation from the curse of sin. It was the crowning of Jesus as king. It wasn't what Peter thought. It wasn't a physical overthrowing of Rome. It wasn't deliverance. from oppression. It wasn't proving the chief priest wrong. It wasn't ruling on a physical throne in Jerusalem. No, the good that came was the advancement of the kingdom of God, the spread of the gospel,

and the first fruits of resurrection. See, the problem with Christian manifestation and the prosperity gospel is that it assumes the good that God wants to give us is a comfortable and abundant life from a perspective that is not found in the Bible. And it is predicated on the belief that we can do something to receive that from him. Now, it is true that God is powerful. It is true that God is good. It is true that God wants you to flourish and live an abundant life. But if we look at the life and death of Jesus, we learn that a powerful, good, flourishing, and abundant life is not what our world envisions when we hear those phrases. Jesus was homeless. He was poor. He was poor. He was tried and convicted and killed as a criminal.

When he died, he had very few followers. He looked like a failure from the world's standards. His resurrection from the dead didn't reverse any of his earthly circumstances, but it secured spiritual riches for himself and all who would surrender to him beyond anything, anything we could ever imagine. In Romans 8, Paul says that God works for the good of those who love him. Now, this is a verse that is often used by the prosperity movement to prove their point. Love God, follow him, obey him, believe that he will work for your good and he will. But,

in the context of the passage, the word good means something radically different than what is being assumed when we take this verse out of context. See, Paul is in the middle of talking about our future glory, our resurrection, the redemption of our bodies as children of God. He is laying out the case that the best thing for us is to live as children of God, to live by the spirit, to be renewed and transformed by his work. And it's all based on the idea that those things happen when we surrender to the person and work of Christ. Our good is to live lives inundated with a spirit, secure in the knowledge that there is no condemnation for those of us who put our hope in Christ because of his sacrificial death and resurrection. Yes, absolutely, God is working all things together for your good.

But the greatest good that could ever be given to you has already been secured by Jesus on the cross. You are a child of God. And you will be given a resurrected body one day just like Jesus. You are loved. You have a purpose. You have a place in the kingdom of God. When God looks at you, he sees the righteousness of Jesus. You have been given the power of the Holy Spirit to fight sin, to live in the way that you are created to live to flourish. That is a gift. It has already been given. it is freely offered. Nothing that you do today or tomorrow will change the reality of that gift, the reality of who you are in Christ. That is the promised good. And you'll notice that it has to do entirely with your internal spiritual health, not your circumstances. See, Christians throughout

the centuries have lived lives that are surrounded by grief, suffering, trial, destitution and homelessness. They've also lived lives that are wealthy, comfortable, and culturally successful. See the outward circumstances that followers of Jesus' face actually have no bearing on whether or not God has worked for their good. No bearing on whether they lived faithful lives or not. The gospel offers freedom from the pressure to perform, to believe hard enough to convince God that you are worthy of his gifts. The gift of the gospel, who you are in Christ, is already secured and freely given to you. It is yours in Christ as you surrender to him. It is true. Each and every day, whether you feel it or not, there is nothing that you can do today to gain more from God.

To the problem with the prosperity gospel is that when suffering hits, when darkness closes in, when prayers aren't answered the way you want them to, you look inward. It's on you. You must not have prayed enough, believed enough, been good enough for God to deliver, to give you the breakthrough you deserved. That is not the gospel. That is antithetical to the gospel. That is exactly what Satan wants you to feel, shame, pressure to perform, fear. You don't need to wait for God to do good things. He has already done them for you. You don't have to convince God to deliver you, he has already secured your deliverance. You are set free in Christ. You are a citizen of heaven in Christ. You will be resurrected alongside Christ. That is your greatest good. When you walk

into suffering, when your prayers aren't answered the way you hope, when life doesn't look like what you wanted, remember Jesus, in control, calm, walking into suffering because he knew his calling. He knew the good that was his. The suffering before him didn't change that, could never take that away. He was secure in the will, plan, and sovereignty of the father, and his submission to the will of the father fulfilled the promises of all the riches of your inheritance. So boldly live in the truth that God has good for you. Not good tied to your circumstance, but good that transcends the horizontal, the suffering, the trials, the success, good that is a gift, freely given, never earned, always secure. You are a child of God. Walk secure in the life you've been given,

whatever it looks like, following the example of Jesus and depending on his life, death, resurrection, and spirit to sustain you today and every day no matter what comes.