When It Feels Like God Is Good to Everyone but You

Dannah Gresh: When an unbeliever looks at your life as a Christ-follower, what will they see? Here’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: I wonder how my reactions and my responses to everyday life and to the crises of life—what am I telling the world about what God is like?

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Adorned, for February 10, 2026. I’m Dannah Gresh.

As you look at your circumstances, are you tempted to doubt God’s goodness? Well, keep listening. Nancy’s about to address the real-life challenges that threaten your peace, and she’ll show you why you can still trust God. She’s in a series called "Ruth: The Transforming Power of Redeeming Love."

Nancy: Well, we come to the end of chapter 1. We've been following this family from Bethlehem, then to Moab and now, having lost her husband and two sons, Naomi is coming back to her homeland, coming back to Bethlehem. And she is bringing with her her widowed daughter-in-law, Ruth. And so we come to verse 19 of chapter 1:

So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, "Can this be Naomi?"

"Don't call me Naomi," she told them. "Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter."

This is a play on words. The word "Naomi" means "pleasant." She's saying, "Don't call me pleasant anymore. Call me Mara, which means 'bitter,' becuase the Almight has made my life very bitter."

"I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me."

Now do you find it interesting that she says that she went away full? Do you remember why Naomi and her husband and sons left Bethlehem in the first place? Why? There was a famine. They apparently were pretty desperate (in pretty desperate straits) to make them think they needed to leave their homeland and go to Moab.

But now, in light of what she's experienced since leaving, she's saying, relatively speaking, "Things were pretty good back then. We thought they were pretty terrible. But since we've experienced some of the consequences of those choices, it looks, in retrospect, that we were full." Though, at the time she certainly didn't think so.

Now she's come back to nothing as far as she knows. She left Bethlehem because of a food famine. And now she comes back to Bethlehem with a famine in her soul. And really, that latter famine is the far more serious.

She comes back to her family lands that have been neglected. Apparently, the are overgrown. And now as a poverty-stricken widow, she's going to sell the family inheritance. There is nothing she can do, as far as she knows, to regain her lost inheritance.

And as we see the story of Naomi's poverty and what she goes through now as a widow coming back to Bethlehem, I'm reminded that the effects of sin in our lives are irrecoverable apart from the grace of God. If it weren't for God's grace, this story would have only a very sad ending. But it's the grace of God that is going to recover the consequences and the effects that have been caused by the choices that she and her husband made.

 

Oftentimes, I find that you and I are not really drawn to the Redeemer until we're desperate. That's why it's a loving God who strips us of the things we thought were so important, the things we thought we couldn't live without, so that in our poverty and our destitution, in our need, we might cry out to Him who is really the only One who can provide fullness for our souls.

Now, she says in verse 20 that she feels that both she and God have been misnamed. "Don't call me pleasant; call me bitter. My name doesn't fit me anymore." I can imagine that at one time maybe she really was a pleasant woman. But she certainly isn't now. And she feels that not only she has been misnamed, but God has been misnamed. She uses two different names for God in this paragraph.

She talks about the Lord Jehovah. That's the personal name of God—the covenant God—the God who comes to meet His people at their point of need. And she's saying, "He just doesn't seem like He's done it for me." And then she says, "The Almighty has made my life very bitter. The Almighty has brought misfortune upon me." That's the name you may remember as the name El Shaddai—the name that speaks of God as the All-Sufficient One who pours Himself into the lives of His believing children and meets all of their needs.

She is drawing upon these names of God. And she's saying, "It sounds like God has not lived up to His name. In my life, at least," she is saying, "That's what it seems like. You can call Him Almighty, All-Sufficient, Jehovah. But He certainly doesn't seem to have been that way for me."

Have you ever found yourself feeling like maybe God had not lived up to His name in your life? I mean, He has for everyone else. He does in the theology books and in the Sunday morning sermons. But as you live in the nitty-gritty of everyday life, do you look at some of your life's circumstances and think, It really doesn't seem like He's been all-sufficient. It doesn't seem like He is the one who acts on behalf of His children.

Well, ultimately we see in this passage that all bitterness is directed toward God. Naomi says, "My life has become bitter. And it's the Almighty who has made my life bitter. The Lord has afflicted me. The Almighty has brought misfortune upon me."

There's an interesting verse in Proverbs chapter 19, verse 3 that says, "A man's own folly ruins his life." Another translation says, "The foolishness of man perverts his way or subverts his way."  Man acts foolishly. And then he experiences these catastrophic consequences. And then what happens? His heart rages against the Lord. So a man goes his own way, does his own thing and reaps the consequences and then says, "It's all God's fault" and gets angry at God.

We sow seeds of foolishness and reap the harvest, and then we get mad at God. Our hearts rage against God. That's really what happening with Naomi here.

Naomi has a faulty view of God. When you have a wrong view of God, it will affect every other area of your life. She doesn't see her circumstances as an expression of God's love. She sees God as her enemy. She says, "The hand of the Lord has gone out against me. The Almighty has brought this misfortune against me. He has made my life very bitter."

Now she's right in a sense that God was connected to her circumstances. But God was not her enemy. And God is not your enemy. God does not hate you. God loves you. If you are His child, He has redeemed you. He loves you. He cherishes you.

And when He brings circumstances into your life that are painful, He is seeking to restore and discipline and train and refine you so that your life can be even more fruitful. Naomi didn't see the purposes of God in her suffering. So she blamed God which led to resentment and bitterness. She mistook God's purpose and His motivation.

Centuries ago, John Wesley said that our job is to give the world a right opinion of God.

 

And as I read this passage, I wonder how my reactions and my responses to everyday life and to the crises of life—what am I telling the world about what God is like? What kind of opinion am I giving the world about God.

If the people around, if the only thing they knew about God was how I respond when I'm under pressure, what would they think God is like?

As I've been pondering this passage, I've been convicted among other things that many times my responses to ministry and to the challenges and demands of ministry give the world an opinion that serving God is a burden ,when it really is an incredible high calling and blessing. And I know that in my heart. But under pressure a lot of times, I will react and respond in such a way that, if people were to look at my life, they would think that serving God is no fun. Serving God is a headache, it's a burden. That's the opinion of God that I think my life would sometimes give.

As you mother your children, what does your response is to mothering tell the world about what kind of God you have? Does it say that having children is a burden? A problem? Or does it say that receiving God's gifts and calling is a blessing and a joy?

Now, that doesn't mean that we are supposed to pretend that everything is easy, that there is nothing difficult, that we aren't needy. And we are to bear one another's burdens. But ultimately, we need to keep saying to each other, "Yes, I'm having these circumstances. Yes, I'm being stretched in these ways but the truth is God is still good. And God is faithful. And God is meeting my needs.

What do people think that God is like based on your responses to the circumstances and challenges of life? Now, at this point, Naomi has repented. She's returned home. But she has yet to go through the process of restoration. There is still a pathway ahead of her as there is for all of us. From here until heaven is how long it lasts. It's a process of being conformed to the image of Christ.

So we read in the last verse of this chapter, Naomi returned from Moab accompanied by Ruth, the Moabitess her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning.

So this chapter that had so much sorrow, so much grief, so much heaviness, actually ends in hope. It's harvest time. It's a time for fruitfulness. It's a time for in-gathering. It's a time for blessing and thankfulness.

Really the story that we are reading is about how the empty becomes full. Naomi and Elimelech were empty when they left Bethlehem because of the famine ten years earlier. They thought they were going to find fullness in Moab; but instead, they found more heartache, more sorrow, more loss. Now, having repented, the woman whose heart is truly empty and bereaved—she has a lot of cause to be sorrowful and to be heavy-hearted. But now she is coming back to the place where God can bless her.

That doesn't mean that God is going to cause all her problems to go away. That doesn't mean that she is going to immediately have an easy life. It doesn't mean that you are going to immediately have an easy life once you put your life under the Lordship of Christ and begin to live as a repenter. But, there is this glimmer of hope at the end of this passage.

And we're seeing that, though she doesn't know it, God has made provision just around the corner. God has made provision to restore her fortunes—to restore what has been lost. She doesn't see that, and she doesn't know that. But back home is one who is her redeemer, one who has been given by God an opportunity to redeem her losses. It's her poverty—it's her need that makes her a candidate for this redeemer.

As I read this passage, it says to my heart that I don't have to stay empty. That when I come back to God as an empty, needy, broken sinner, taking responsibility for my own life, for my own choices, that then I become a candidate for God's gracious provision, for the provision of the One who has the right to redeem everything. Close at hand, closer than we realize, there stands One who paid the price to win back all the losses that have been occasioned by our wandering and our sinfulness. He is our Redeemer.

Thank you, Lord, that in the midst of our waywardness and our wandering and our foolishness at times, that You are always drawing our hearts home. And that, as we return, there is hope.

Thank you that in our lives it is harvest time, and there is hope. There is a Redeemer. Though we don't exactly how You are going to resolve circumstances or our situation, we know that if we are in You, we are safe. And that there is the hope that there will be fruitfulness and restoration.

So, Lord, continue to grant us the gift of repentance, to keep us on the pathway of restoration and seeking You and turning to You, and instill faith in our hearts that You are working and moving and that You are accomplishing Your purposes. I pray for Jesus' sake. Amen.  

Dannah: That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth reminding each of us that because of Jesus we can know and believe that God is good. It’s true even when we’re tempted to be bitter about our circumstances.

God’s goodness is a truth Kristen Clark clung to during a dark season of her life. She shared about it on an episode of the Women of the Bible podcast produced by Revive Our Hearts. The team recorded a whole season walking through the book of Ruth, and we’re about to listen to a portion. Here’s Kristen Clark talking with Erin Davis and Gayle Villalba.

Kristen Clark: Yes. Well, my husband and I have been married for nine years. I just assumed, “Oh, we’re going to have this happy life with kids when we want them. We thought we had it all planned out. Two years in, no children. And then pregnancy and miscarriage. Six months later, pregnancy and miscarriage.

Six years go by and nothing. Then around seven-and-half years in, I got pregnant out of the blue—it seemed like it was out of the blue. And just feeling, “Wow! Things are finally looking up. It’s finally going to happen. We’re going to have this family. We’re going to have kids.” And then right before my first trimester finished, I thought, I’ve made it farther than I ever have. Then I miscarried, right before the second trimester

I just remember after that feeling, “God has dealt bitterly with me.” I felt just this darkness, this weight. I wrestled, truly, in my heart like I never have before, with wondering, Is God really good? Does He love me? Does He care for me? I think I was wrestling in my heart with bitterness toward the Lord.

Erin Davis: I know there are going to be women listening to this podcast that are feeling that on some level. Maybe it’s right there on the surface of their heart. They kind of drag themselves to Bible study, and they don’t want to be there because they feel this way that Naomi is feeling, “The Lord has not been good to me. The Lord has dealt bitterly with me.”

Gayle, you work with a lot of pastors’ wives. I wonder what it is in their lives that makes them feel like, “The Lord has not been good to me.”

Gayle Villalba: Many pastors’ wives, I would almost say most pastors’ wives, never felt the call to ministry the way their husbands did. So they find themselves in this role—and it really is a role. I mean, it’s hard. It’s hard work being a pastor’s wife.

Then people hurt you. It feels like when you’re in a pastorate that the church is taking a vote on you every Sunday.

Erin: Oh, I know! I was married to a youth pastor for several years (I’m still married to him.) Every time I would change my hair color I dreaded going to church because there was lots of commentary over it.

Gayle: Oh yes. Someone has an opinion on that.

Erin: It’s like living in a fish bowl. Right?

Gayle: Yes. What I hear often from pastors’ wives is, “I didn’t sign up for this. I had no idea it would be this hard.”

It’s not that God is dealing bitterly with them. It’s that people are being mean, and that’s just hard to deal with.

Erin: As I was reading this part of the book of Ruth, what jumped out at me was, Naomi feels uncomfortable with the people of God. She’s come back into the Promised Land—these are the children of Israel she’s with—and she doesn’t fit there. She doesn’t fit in Moab anymore. She doesn’t even know what her identity is in a sense. She’s changing her name.

I can relate to that. I love the people of God. I do. They are my family, my brothers and sisters. But there are times when I feel like, “Ugh, I don’t fit here.” And sometimes then I translate that to the Lord.

I think if I could rephrase what Naomi is saying, I feel like she’s saying, “The Lord’s abandoned me.”

Gayle: Yes. “Where is He?”

Erin: Yes. “Where is God?” Naomi left physical famine when she was in the Promised Land before, but she kind of returns in a spiritual famine. She’s empty in her heart. I think we can all relate to those kinds of feelings.

We’re going to see Naomi is going to move past this moment where she feels abandoned, but I want women to press in to that. But also, I think we can relate to Naomi here.

And while it’s easy to go, “Naomi, get your act together! God’s good! Why are you changing your name?” I think we can all relate to feeling, “I thought we were better friends than this!”

Kristen: I’m so glad Scripture gives us these insights, showing us what the heart wrestles and the struggles. It’s not a book full of people walking with God in this wonderful, vibrant relationship They’re struggling. They’re wrestling. And that’s how we all are. Right? It’s just relatable. I’m so glad Scripture gives us this picture of the struggle as the story unfolds to see how God works from this place.

Gayle: Right.

Erin: Yes, me, too. That’s why we open our Bibles with eyes wide open going, “Okay, what is really going on here—not the sanitized version?”

So she changes her name from Naomi to what?

Gayle: Bitter.

Erin: To bitter, to Mara, which means "bitter." And what do you take from the text by that name change, Gayle? Do you think she’s saying she’s bitter? Do you think she’s saying the Lord’s bitter? Some combination?

Gayle: I think it’s a combination. I think she’s taking that on as her new identity, which is sad.

Erin: I’ve done that sometimes, too—taken on grief as my identity, taken on sorrow as my identity, taken on hardship as my identity. And Ruth, our heroine of the story, faces a lot of the same trials, but she doesn’t let them mark her in the way that Naomi does.

Gayle: That’s right.

Kristen: Ruth faced tremendous loss. I mean, she lost her husband. I know women have walked through that. So this girl, she had a hard life.

Erin: She did have a hard life. And yet, we don’t hear her saying it in the same way Naomi does, “The Lord’s been bitter to me.” Or, “I thought we were better friends than this.”

Well, she changes her name from pleasantness to bitterness. I wanted us in this session to drill down a little bit on bitterness. So we’re just going to drill down on that topic.

So, Kristen, will you take us to a passage on bitterness that I think we all need to memorize, which is Hebrews 12:15?

Kristen: Yes. It says, “See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no 'root of bitterness' springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled” (ESV).

Erin: You don’t have to have a garden to understand the root. So, with bitterness, you can’t just hack it off at the surface, because the root’s still there, and it’s going to grow back up.

Kristen: I have a plant like that in my backyard. I have chopped that thing down so many times. I have drilled down into the dirt . . . it still grows back.

Erin: It’s because you’re not getting all that root.

Kristen: I can’t find the root! It’s deep! There’s got to be a spiritual analogy for that.

Erin: There is! It’s right here in Hebrews because that’s exactly how bitterness works. But then it gives us this picture that that root springs out and defiles many. It becomes this plant that impacts many, many people. And we see that in the life of Naomi. Right? Her bitterness has implications beyond just Naomi.

So, a question for us to wrestle with is: What is bitterness?

I think of the word picture, like, sucking on a lemon. That sour taste in your mouth, and it’s dry, and you can’t quite get over it. I wonder, do any word pictures or thoughts come to mind about defining what bitterness is?

Gayle: Anger turned inside. You’re punching yourself.

Erin: Versus anger turned outside?

Gayle: Yes.

Kristen: I’ve heard it put as being harbored hurt or just unforgiveness. You’re just not willing to forgive.

Erin: It’s that root, right? It just keeps burrowing and burrowing and burrowing and burrowing because you haven’t yanked it up.

We’ve probably all experienced bitterness. I tend to think women gravitate toward bitterness really easily.

Kristen: Yes, unfortunately.

Erin: When you think of your own lives, can you think of evidences of bitterness in your life? How do you know when that anger has turned inward. Gayle?

Gayle: Well, I lose my joy, and that is horrible. I think it sucks the life out of you. If I’m bitter, I can’t function effectively in anything. I’m just the type of person that it shows on my face if there’s something going on. I’m not a very good pretender. It has residual effects, and my husband knows right away.

Erin: Absolutely. Kristen, when you think of your own life, what do you think of as the evidence there’s a bitterness problem?

Kristen: If I’m bitter toward someone or with God, I see it come out as control, wanting to control the situation, taking it into my own hands and become the judge that will now determine what the right punishment is or what the right circumstance needs to be. And so I just become very controlling. I’m not surrendered, and I’m not entrusting it to the Lord. I’m trying to make happen what I think should happen.

Erin: You’re protecting that hurt a little bit. You’re justifying it.

Kristen: Yes.

Erin: For me, I know I’m bitter when I start replaying the tapes. I just rehash that conversation and rehash that conversation and rehash that conversation or that hurt. I replay it and replay it and replay it. And to me, that is just an indicator—“Hold up! There’s a bitter root there you need to deal with.”

Have you all seen or experienced the impact of one bitter woman? What has been the impact of just one bitter woman, Gayle?

Gayle: Just one? 

Erin: What have you seen the impact of a bitter woman be?

Gayle: I have friends who have gone that road, and actually have health issues and have lost friends, because it’s difficult to be around a person like that.

Erin: It really is. I have a friend who serves communion in nursing homes. She says she can tell when she walks in the door by their posture, the women who are bitter. Isn’t that powerful? Because it is showing up in their health, as you mentioned, in their bodies.

Kristen: Yes. It really affects us from the inside out—physically, emotionally, spiritually, and our demeanor—just everything about us. There’s just a weight that we’re carrying, and it’s heavy, and it’s visible.

Erin: She gives some descriptions of God here that are significant.

So let me read us the verses again, starting in verse 21: “I went away full, and the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi when the LORD has testified against me; and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me” (ESV).

I think it’s so interesting—she’s talking about God a lot.

Gayle: Yes.

Kristen: She hasn’t forgotten God. He’s in the picture.

Erin: She hasn’t come to the point where she says, “There is no God.”

Gayle: That’s right.

Kristen: That’s interesting.

Erin: But she’s calling Him some of these names, like Amighty. “He is big. He could take care of me.”

And then she calls Him Lord. When we see Lord like this in Scripture with the small caps, that means Yahweh, Jehovah, His personal name that meets people at their point of need. So I wonder if she’s saying, “Not only change my name, but the Lord isn’t living up to His names. This is who He says He is, but He didn’t take care of me.”

Gayle: Oh, wow! Right!

Erin: I’ve felt that. I’ve felt, “Yes, You can do this, and I’ve seen You do it for others, but You didn’t do it for me.”

I once heard a Bible teacher say, “God is good. God is good at being God. And God is good to me.” Whew! That is powerful, but I think sometimes, “Yes, God is good. God is good at being God. But I’m not sure He’s good to me.”

Kristen: Yes. I remember feeling. I just resonate with this so much. I know so many women can with her feelings.

I love how the Bible shows this heart wrestle and just, as I shared earlier, after the third miscarriage, I felt like, “The Lord has testified against me. The Almighty has brought calamity upon me.” That’s how I felt. It almost felt cruel. Like, “Why, God would You allow me to . . .”

Erin: It seemed like that pregnancy went so much longer.

Kristen: Yes. The other two were right around six weeks, so, so much earlier. I’d made it through that big hurdle. It felt like a huge leap to get on the other side of six weeks—made it almost to twelve weeks. Then I went in for an ultrasound, and the doctor said, “I’m so sorry. There’s no longer a heartbeat.” That was like a knife in my heart.

In that moment, laying on that table, it was so, so hard. In that moment, that’s how I felt. “The Lord has brought calamity upon me.” I just felt like, “Lord, are You good? You say You are, but look at what You’ve done. This feels cruel. This feels like a mean trick. Why would You even allow me to get pregnant and then take me through this dark, deep valley?”

I wrestled with: Who is God? Who does He say He is? Is He really that God?

I had to do a study. My heart was struggling so much, I knew I needed to do a study on the names and attributes of God. For the next thirty days, I just had to just sit in that: Who does God say He is? What are His names? What do they mean? And then asking the Lord to help my heart believe that because in my emotions and those feelings and that place of grief, I didn’t want to believe that.

But as I went back to the Word and saw who God was, my heart was led by that truth. I was able to finally say, “Yes, You are good. You do good. Blessed by the name of the Lord.”

Erin: Maybe if you’ve been listening to this episode, you’ve identified a bitter root in your own heart. And I want you to know the Word of God is the weed killer that goes to work against that bitter root.

Dannah: That’s Erin Davis talking with Gayle Villalba and Kristen Clark about attacking a root of bitterness. To hear more from the Women of the Bible podcast, visit ReviveOurHearts.com.

And while you’re there, consider making a donation of any amount. When you do, you’ll receive Ruth: Experiencing a Life Restored. That’s the six-week study you’ve been hearing about throughout this series. It’s a good one! I hope you’ll use it yourself or even consider getting a group of women together to learn and grow alongside you. To donate, visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959, and be sure to request your Ruth study when you do. 

Tomorrow, we’re continuing this conversation about bitterness. It’s such an easy pit to fall into—but we don’t have to stay there. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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