Tuesday, September 22, 2026 — Good To Everyone

Devotional Thought

“The LORD is good to everyone. He showers compassion on all his creation.”
Psalm 145:9, NLT

David wrote this as a psalm of praise, and praise psalms can be easy to skim — they feel like the warm-up before the real content starts. But read slowly, this one makes a claim most of us don’t actually believe, even though we’d say we do: God is good to everyone. Not just the ones who deserve it. Not just the ones in the room. Everyone.

That’s a bigger claim than it sounds. It’s easy to believe God is good to me, good to my family, good to people who look and vote and worship like I do. It’s harder to sit with the idea that God’s compassion showers on the neighbor who wronged you, the coworker who got the promotion you wanted, the family down the street living a life you don’t approve of. David isn’t writing a psalm about God being fair by our accounting. He’s writing about a goodness too wide to fit inside our ledgers.

This week’s Gospel text (Matthew 20, the workers in the vineyard) is going to push on exactly this nerve — a landowner who pays a full day’s wage to someone who worked one hour, and a crew that worked all day and can’t stomach it. Today’s psalm is the theology underneath that parable, sung six centuries earlier: the Lord is good to everyone. Not fair by the clock. Good, all the way through.

If that unsettles you a little, you’re reading it right.

Going Deeper

Scripture Reading

Psalm 145:1–8, New Living Translation (NLT)

Historical Context

Psalm 145 is the final psalm attributed directly to David and is structured as an acrostic in Hebrew — each verse beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, A to Z. This move shows the author’s careful writing and artistic skill, as well as theological depth. It is as if they are saying God’s goodness can be traced through the entire alphabet of human experience, nothing left out.

Literary Context

The psalm opens Book V’s closing collection of praise psalms (145–150), each one building toward the “let everything that has breath praise the Lord” crescendo of Psalm 150. Verses 1–8 set the tone: this isn’t private gratitude, it’s public testimony meant to be repeated generation to generation (v. 4).

Theological Context

“The Lord is good to everyone” (v. 9, echoed in the tone of vv. 1–8) sits at the heart of what theologians call common grace — the goodness of God extended to all creation, not only to the covenant people or the redeemed. This humbling belief is easy to forget. We might prefer to think of ourselves as the chosen elite – but the truth is that we are recipients of a gift too great to be earned.

Key Insights

1. This praise isn’t private — David writes it to be passed down, “generation to generation” (v. 4). Praise that stays private tends to shrink.
2. The psalm’s structure (an A-to-Z acrostic) suggests completeness: there’s no letter, no category of experience, God’s goodness doesn’t reach.
3. “Good to everyone” is a harder sentence to actually believe than to recite.

Looking In the Mirror

• Is there a person or group of people you quietly exempt from “God is good to everyone”?
• When was the last time you told someone else — out loud — a specific way God had been good to you?
• Does your view of God’s goodness shrink when you’re comparing your situation to someone else’s?

Guided Prayer

Lord, you are good — not good to the people I’ve approved of, but good to everyone, the way this psalm says. Forgive the ways I narrow that down to protect my own sense of fairness. Thank you for specific goodness I can name from today. Help me praise you loud enough that someone else hears it and remembers. And where your goodness toward someone else stings me, show me why, and heal whatever’s underneath that sting. Amen.