The Heart Of God In Us: How God Works All Things For Good

We hear it in sermons, on social media, even on coffee mugs: “God works all things for good.”
But when life breaks open, when prayers seem to fail, that line can feel thin.

Romans 8:28 is a deep promise, not a shallow slogan. In the original Greek, in its real context, Paul is talking about the heart of God, the Holy Spirit inside us, and how God is forming us into true sons and daughters who see the world like Jesus. This is where God works all things for good becomes more than a comfort phrase. It becomes the story of our whole life, and even our eternity.

In this post we walk slowly through what Romans 8:28 really means, what it means to love God, how the Holy Spirit is the very heart of God shared with us, and how being born again lets us begin to see this broken world through the eyes of Jesus. Life will not always feel good, but God’s promise is that God works all things for good in a way that reaches deeper than our comfort and lasts longer than our lifetime.

Understanding Romans 8:28

If we look at Romans 8:28 in the original Greek, we see three key words:

• panta means “all things”
• synergei means “work together” or “cooperate”
• eis agathon means “into good” or “for good”

The verse could be read, “We know that for those who love God, all things are working together into good, for those who are called according to His purpose.”

Paul is writing to believers, people who already have the Holy Spirit, in a chapter filled with talk about suffering, weakness, groaning, and glory. He is not saying every event is good. He is saying God works all things for good inside a life that belongs to Him.

What “All Things Work Together For Good” Really Means

When Paul says “all things,” he means every part of our story:
joy, pain, sin, failure, trauma, victory, waiting, and even the years we feel stuck.

We can picture “work together” like a puzzle or a recipe. One piece on the table looks random and ugly. A spoonful of salt by itself tastes harsh. But in the hands of a wise Creator, every piece, every ingredient, is pulled into a larger design. A translation commentary on Romans 8:28 points out that the focus is not on each thing being good, but on God making the whole story good.

“Good” then does not just mean comfort, success, or getting what we want. In Romans 8, the good is tied to being shaped into the image of Christ, sharing His glory, and living as children of God. When we say God works all things for good, we are saying He uses every part of our life to draw us deeper into His heart and make us more like His Son.

Who The Promise Is For: Those Who Love God And Are Called

Romans 8:28 is not a general promise for the whole world. Paul writes, “for those who love God, for those who are called according to His purpose.”

In simple words, this promise is for:

• people who belong to Jesus
• people who trust Him and want His will
• people who have heard His call and said yes

We are not perfect people. We are people who keep coming back, who keep turning toward Him. This promise that God works all things for good wraps around those who love Him and walk in His calling. In the next sections we will look more closely at what it means to really love God.

What Does It Mean To Love God From The Heart?

To “love God” in Scripture is not a vague warm feeling. It is a whole-life response to who He is.

Deuteronomy 6:5 calls us to love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our strength. Jesus repeats this as the greatest command. In John 14:15 He says, “If you love Me, you will keep My commands.” In 1 John, love for God shows up as trust in His Son and walking in His light.

So when Romans 8:28 says God works all things for good for those who love Him, it is not talking about people who admire God from a distance. It is talking about people whose inner life is turned toward Him.

Biblical Love Is More Than A Feeling

In the Bible, love always moves. It acts.

We see this in everyday life. If we say we love someone but never show up, never listen, and never change anything for them, our words ring hollow. In the same way, love for God is not just a mood we feel during a worship song.

Biblical love looks like:

• choosing God again when life hurts
• staying with Him when we do not understand
• saying “Your way, not mine” when our desires clash with His Word

This kind of steady love is where we begin to see how God works all things for good. When we cling to Him in the middle of confusion, we often only feel the storm. But many of us can look back and see how those storms cracked open pride, exposed idols, and pulled us closer to His heart.

Loving God Through Trust, Obedience, And Desire For His Will

We can think of three simple marks of loving God:

1. Trust in Jesus and His cross. We lean our full weight on what He did, not on our goodness.
2. Obedience as response. We follow His commands, not to earn love, but because we are already loved.
3. Desire for His will. Something in us starts to say, “Father, I want what You want, even when I struggle.”

This love grows over time. The Holy Spirit waters it, often through trials. As we pass through hard seasons, and God works all things for good, our trust deepens, our obedience matures, and our desire shifts from “bless my plan” to “use my life.”

The Heart Of God: Spirit, Heart, And The Holy Spirit Living In Us

When we talk about the “heart of God,” we are talking about His inner life. His love, His thoughts, His will, His desires.

In the Bible, the heart is the center of thinking, feeling, and choosing. The spirit is the deepest part of a person, the part that can know God. These ideas overlap. So when Scripture speaks of God giving us a new heart and a new spirit, it is describing God sharing His own inner life with us.

The Holy Spirit is not a separate thing from the heart of God. The Holy Spirit is God’s own heart, His living presence, coming to live inside us. That is how God works all things for good from the inside out.

How The Bible Connects Spirit And Heart

God promises in Ezekiel 36:26, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you.” You can see several translations of this promise in Ezekiel 36:26–32. In this passage, God does not just give new rules. He gives a new inner life.

Our human spirit is the deepest part of us. Our heart is where we feel and choose. When we are far from God, the Bible says our heart is hard, like stone. When God gives us a new heart and puts His Spirit in us, He makes that hard inner place soft and alive.

The Holy Spirit thinks with the Father, desires with the Father, feels with the Father. That is why, when we let the Spirit rule our heart, we start to see life more like God sees it. We begin to believe, even through tears, that God works all things for good in ways we cannot yet see.

Resources like this explanation of what it means to receive a new heart can help us see how deep this promise runs.

The Holy Spirit As The Heart Of God Shared With Us

The Holy Spirit is not a vague energy. He is personal. He carries God’s love, God’s wisdom, and God’s desires into us.

When the Spirit fills us:

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• we start to care about what God cares about
• we begin to hate what destroys people and hurts His heart
• we learn to cry “Abba, Father” like Romans 8:15 says

Romans 8 links the Spirit with our identity as children of God. It also links the Spirit with our hope in suffering. As the Spirit reminds us we are loved sons and daughters, God works all things for good by using every hard place to grow us in that identity.

If we want to go deeper on how the Spirit shapes our thinking, we can also look at a born-again view of the mind in Living with a clear mind in Ephesians 4:17–19.

Born Again: Receiving God’s Spirit And Becoming True Children Of God

To be born again is not just to get a new label. It is to receive a new life.

When we come to Jesus, trust Him, and confess Him as Lord, God forgives our sin and sends His Spirit to live in us. This is more than God handing us a rule book and saying, “Try harder.” It is God placing His own heart inside us.

At that moment, God works all things for good in a new way. He is no longer just working around us. He is working within us as a Father forming His child.

If we want a simple crash course on being born again, this explanation of born again faith is helpful.

What Happens In Our Spirit When We Are Born Again

When we are born again, several things happen in our spirit:

1. We turn toward Jesus and trust Him.
2. God wipes our guilt through the Blood of Christ.
3. The Holy Spirit comes to live inside our spirit.
4. Our inner person becomes new, even if our habits and feelings still need time to catch up.

When we talk about sanctification, we are really talking about how God walks us through the long, sometimes slow, re-training of our hearts, and in that process we start to see how God works all things for good even when our progress feels painfully small.

Some of us drop certain sins almost overnight, and we think that is how it should always go, but then we hit an old habit or a deep stronghold that will not fall after a single prayer, and we have to learn, often with tears, that God works all things for good even through repeated failure and starting over.

The Bible uses the word hagiasmos for sanctification, which points to being set apart for God, and this setting apart does not erase our history in one moment, it invites our history, our trauma, our bad reflexes, into a process where God works all things for good in ways we rarely see in real time. Some of us carry addictions, family patterns, or wounds that go back decades, so when we get born again our spirit is made new, but our mind and body still run on old scripts, and in that slow rewriting, God works all things for good by turning even our worst battles into testimonies of mercy.

We may look at someone who seems to grow faster and feel shame, but God is not running a race chart, He is doing heart surgery, and in that hidden work God works all things for good in a way that fits our story, not someone else’s timeline. Sometimes God lets us feel the weight of a stronghold so we learn to hate it, not just fear the consequences, and even that long, aching hatred of sin becomes part of how God works all things for good because it drives us closer to His heart instead of to our own willpower.

We can think of a child who keeps trying to stick scissors in an outlet, and a patient parent who never gives up, and in every warning, every pulled hand, every tearful talk afterward, God works all things for good by teaching not only obedience, but trust in the One who guards us.

Old habits often die slow because God is not only removing the behavior, He is healing the lie underneath it, and in that deep healing God works all things for good by turning former strongholds into places where we later counsel and comfort others.

When we fall again, we can either run from God in shame or run to Him with our mess, and each time we choose to come back, even with shaky faith, God works all things for good by shaping in us a stubborn, childlike dependence that success alone could never form. Over time, often years, we look back and realize that the very sins that once made us feel disqualified have become the backdrop where we now see most clearly how God works all things for good, not by skipping over our weakness, but by entering it with us and refusing to let it have the last word.

In that sense, God gives us His heart. Not that we become God, but that His Spirit begins to shape our desires from the inside. A helpful reflection on this can be found in the spiritual significance of the breath of life in Genesis 2:7.

From that point on, even when our outside life looks messy, God works all things for good as He uses every day, every failure, and every victory to grow the new life He has placed in us.

More Than Copying Jesus: Sharing The Same Spirit As The Son

We often think following Jesus means trying hard to act like Him. We ask, “What would Jesus do?” and then strain to copy that.

There is a deeper truth. Romans 8:29 says we are “conformed to the image of His Son.” This is not just about copying Jesus from the outside. It is about sharing the same Spirit who lives in Jesus.

Romans 8:14 says, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” You can see different translations and notes on this in Romans 8:14 at Bible Hub. The Spirit who led Jesus is the Spirit who now leads us.

So we are not just fans of Jesus. We are family. God works all things for good as a Father who is shaping His sons and daughters to think like Jesus, feel like Jesus, and see like Jesus, from the inside out.

Seeing The World Like Jesus: God’s Long-Term Good And The Hope Of Eternity

Romans 8 is honest about suffering. Creation is groaning. Our bodies are groaning. We wait for full redemption.

The heart of God sees all of this at once. He sees the brokenness and the beauty. He sees the cross and the resurrection, the present pain and the coming new creation. When His Spirit lives in us, He trains us to look at this same world through the eyes of Jesus.

This is where the promise that God works all things for good stretches out past this short life and into eternity.

How The Heart Of God Sees This Broken World

God sees every injustice, every hidden wound, every secret sin. He also sees every person He loves, every tear that falls, every small act of faith that no one else notices.

His heart is full of mercy and truth at the same time. So the Spirit in us teaches us to:

• look at people with compassion, even when they fail
• hate evil without losing love for sinners
• trust that God works all things for good even when evil seems louder than His voice

Writers who reflect on the Holy Spirit and the heart, like in this discussion of the Spirit and the heart, remind us that without the Spirit we cannot see this way at all.

Learning To See Like Jesus In This Life And The Next

As we walk with the Spirit day by day, our sight slowly changes. We start to value people over things. We begin to forgive faster. We look for God’s hand even in hard news.

We will not get all the way there in this life. There is simply not enough time for us to fully see as Jesus sees and love as He loves. That is why we need eternity. God plans to keep teaching us forever.

One day we will look back over our story with perfect clarity. We will see every moment where God works all things for good in ways we missed at the time. We will see how our suffering was not wasted, how our failures became doors to mercy, and how our small yes to God echoed into His great eternal plan.

Conclusion: Welcoming The Heart Of God Into Our Story

Romans 8:28 is more than a slogan. It is a window into the heart of a Father who gives us His Spirit, teaches us to love Him, and shapes us as true sons and daughters. We have seen that God works all things for good by using every part of our life to draw us into Christ’s image, share His own heart with us, and train us to see the world like Jesus.

As we respond, we can make a simple choice today: to trust that God works all things for good in our story, to love Him with all our heart, and to welcome His Spirit deeper into every corner of our daily life. We will not see the full picture yet, but we walk forward with hope, knowing the heart of God Himself lives within us and will carry this work into eternity.