A Different Perspective Official Podcast

It's easy for someone to say, "You should be a blessing to other people"  But what if we're too busy, or we just don't have anything to bless other people with?  Really – then what?!!
When we talk about God's blessing, what we discover is that it's a two sided transaction. Jesus made it really clear that when God blesses us, the whole point is that we're meant to be a blessing to other people. We are blessed to be a blessing. People sometimes ask me, "Berni, what does that mean? I mean, let's get practical here, what does it mean for me to be a blessing to someone else?" That's a good question.
I don't know what sort of life you lead, some people lead extremely busy lives and other people lead quiet, even lonely lives sometimes. Whichever end of the spectrum we're on, the notion of us being a blessing to other people can seem, well, kind of impossible. How could that ever be?
Throughout the program on the week, we've been talking about living out God's blessing in our lives. God is a god of blessing, you can see that right at the beginning, Genesis, chapter 1, that story of the whole of creation. God created it all, he gave it to you and me, we are co-owners, joint owners in creation because God said, "Here it is, it's all yours, I bless you with it."
And then, just a chapter or two later, in that book of Genesis, we see Adam and Eve. God's given them the whole garden and blessing and they've got a relationship with God and then they do the one thing that God tells them not to do, they turn their backs on God. And as a result they usher in suffering into the world. The rejection of God, the rejection of God, has consequences but still God has a heart to bless us.
We looked the other day at the prayer of Jabez, if you've missed any of these programs hop onto our website, www.adifferentperspective.org and you can listen to it again and we saw how Jabez went to God and asked God specifically for his blessing. And then Jesus puts blessing into perspective, he says it this way. He says:
Give and it will be given to you. A good measure pressed down, shaken together and running over will be poured into your lap.
You can read that in Luke, chapter 6.
For with the measure that you use it will be measured to you.
You see Jesus said being blessed, and blessing other people are two sides of the one coin and if you really want to live out God's blessing, sure go to God and ask him for his blessing and say, "Lord, bless me." And then let that blessing pour out through you to other people around you. You know when we're close to God we have so much to bless other people with.
The danger is though, that we talk in concepts and theory and not in practical realities. What does all this mean? Okay, I accept that God is a god of blessing. Okay I accept that it's a two sided transaction, in from God and out through me, but how does all that work? Can I share again how it works in my life? Over the last dozen or so years I've been walking closely, but let me say imperfectly, with Jesus in my life. I make mistakes just like you do, I have good days and bad days and I'm hoping that where I am now is much closer to God and looking much more like Jesus than it was five years ago. And I've learned about God's blessing in two ways.
Firstly, through His Word the Bible and I thank God I have had some really good teachers, and secondly, by living it out in my life and seeing that it's actually how life is. What God and what Jesus talk about in the Bible, is actually how it happens and when Jesus promises something like:
Give and it will be given to you. A good measure pressed down, shaken together and running over will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured to you.
When Jesus says something like that, they're not just idle words, these are the words of God. He means this stuff and so what I'm sharing with you today is just my experience. You may have a different experience and other people will have different experiences but when it comes to God's blessing pouring out through us, I only know one way to share that with you and that's from life itself.
The one thing that makes my world go round – everything else revolves around that – is the time I spend with God each morning. Before you tell me you're too busy to spend time with God, if you're that busy then I would suggest you don't have time not to spend with God. What happens to me is that I pray and I read God's word and He speaks to me, sometimes He gives me impressions, sometimes there's a chapter in the Bible I'm reading and it leaps out at me and I walk away from that half hour or forty five minutes or hour with a peace and a calm delight that I can't put into words.
For me it happens early in the morning because I'm a morning person and everyone else is in bed and it's a wonderful time for me. Now, okay everyone's different, some people aren't morning people, for some it will be late at night, for others it will be on the train or on the bus, whatever. But when we carve out that time with Him, He shows up and honours that and delights us, and deals with the things in us that He wants to deal with, and puts his finger on the issues or the hurt or the sin that he needs to deal with that leads us gently and firmly forward. And the biggest part of the blessing of God in my life flows in through those times.
First, absolutely first and foremost it's about having a relationship with Jesus Christ and then during the day things happen, difficult situations or a tension, or I just feel a gentle prompting of the Spirit, instead of cursing the person the Spirit of God helps me to bless them, instead of judging them I pray for them. Now for me that stuff doesn't happen if I'm not spending time regularly with God. And every now and then I notice God tee's up a divine appointment with someone who needs his blessing and he chooses me to deliver that blessing, and sometimes I'm not even aware that it's happening.
There was a man I was dealing with last year and didn't believe in God. Tough negotiation to get our programs on that particular radio station, it was just not a comfortable time at all. And I prayed my way through it and I did it and we moved on. And so at the end of last year I sent him an email just to say, "thank you", and he sent me an email back praising God, he'd given his life to Christ. It was just the way the whole interaction happened and the way God used me. I had no idea but Jesus did and the programs that he was putting on his station impacted on him and his family.
I always feel like I'm a bystander when that happens. You know God's up to something, the Holy Spirit is moving and I was clueless but he used it anyway. Can I encourage you to take an inventory of the blessings, the gifts, the skills, the money, the possessions, the time that God has given you. What blessings has God dropped in your lap that you can bless other people with? Everyone's got them, maybe you've got to be creative but everyone has them.
I was talking to an elderly widow, a pensioner, a grandmother and this is a woman of humble means and she said, "What do I have, I don't have anything to give?" And I talked a little while and it turns out her kids were grown up and they had families of their own and they were working so hard and they were so busy. And I said, "What about just spending some time with your grandkids? All this time that you have, time where you're lonely and just go in blessing your kids by taking the grandkids off their hands for a few hours, doesn't have to be big but I have to tell you, your children who are now working hard and have a mortgage and they're struggling under the pressure would be so blessed if you just took the grandkids off their hands for a little while."
It's not rocket science is it? Let me get right in your face. You and I have so many things that we can bless other people with but here's the rub, it's not always convenient, we don't always feel like it. But when we take the blessings that God has given through Jesus Christ and we share them around in little practical ways, it magnifies God. Just remember the words of Jesus:
Give and it will be given to you. A good measure pressed down, shaken together and running over will be poured into your lap. For with the measure that you use, it will be measured to you.

One of the things that Jesus always managed to do – was turn everything on its head.  Love your enemy, is just one of his startling sayings.  And the same is true, when He talked about God's blessing.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to a man called S D Gordon. Sometime in the late 1800's or early 1900's he wrote a book called Quiet Talks on Power. In that book he uses a simple and powerful example to describe the consequences of expecting all of God's blessings to flow into our lives without letting any of them flow out again. He uses the picture of the Dead Sea.
Now the Dead Sea is that body of water where all the rivers flow in but none of them flow out and as a result it's dead. Nothing can live in it, not a thing; no fish, no plants, no birds, and the water is incredibly hard and brackish. He makes this point in his book, that if we expect all of God's blessings to flow in and none of them to flow out then our lives become like the circumference of that Dead Sea. It's an interesting point.
This week on the program we're talking about God's blessing, getting it balanced, and a powerful understanding of exactly what God means by blessing and how it works in our lives.
Now our generation is born to consume. We are consuming the planet right down into the ground, we just can't help ourselves. I know lots of people who try and buy their way to happiness. Hey I used to be one of them. God blessed me with a new car, God blessed me with a salary increase, and I'm going to believe God for more. No doubt God does those things. God's blessed me with things that I've needed along the way and even things that were just kind of 'icing on the cake' kind of things because he felt like it. Now that's nice but they're not the main thing. The Bible says:
The love of money is the root of all evil.
I regularly speak on this subject because quite frankly our failure to get a grip on what God means by blessing is one of the greatest maladies in society today and let me say it really bluntly, even amongst God's own people, people who say, "Yep, I believe in Jesus." If we think that God's blessing is all about stuff flying to us and stopping there, we're missing the whole point.
Over this week we've seen that God started His plan for blessing right from the beginning, right from creation. You know he created all of creation and then he created male and female, man and woman, and he gave everything to them and said, "Here, it's yours. Bless, prosper, go for it, it's all yours." But it didn't take Adam and Eve long to interrupt that blessing. They rejected God, they turned their backs on him and so now we live in a fallen world. We're living out the consequences of humanity's rejection of God.
Why is there suffering? Why is there pain? Because way back then we turned our backs on God and you and I, we've done it too, in our own ways we've turned our backs on God. And yesterday we saw that for blessing really to be a blessing, for Gods blessing really to be Gods blessing, it has to flow in and out. Now I want to continue on with that a bit more today and unpack it a bit more.
If you were with us yesterday you heard me read this passage from the 6th chapter of Luke:
Blessed are you who are poor because yours is the Kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now for you'll be satisfied. Blessed are those who are weeping now because you'll laugh.
Blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject you because of me. Rejoice in that day, leap for joy because great is your reward in heaven for that's how their fathers treated the Prophets but woe to you who are rich for you have already received your comfort.
Woe to you who are well fed for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you for that is how their fathers treated false disciples but I tell you, listen to me, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.
You see, this is the heart of Jesus; this is the heart of God. It's not to have a whole bunch of wealthy people running around saying, "I'm wealthier than you." It's not about people having a big party and say, "Life's good." While there's poor and hungry and starving out there. It's not about fame and fortune and recognition. We're missing the point. Particularly, let me say this, God blesses us so that we can be a blessing to others, we are blessed in order to be a blessing.
You know something? it's like a double sided book-keeping transaction. And when you're doing book keeping (if you've ever studied book keeping) double sided entry into the book, if the two sides of the ledger don't balance, the whole thing's out of whack. And it's a bit like that with God's blessing. If we think it's all about God pouring his material blessing into us, even his spiritual blessing into us but us then not sharing that out, the whole thing gets out of whack.
I know people who believe that their relationship with God is about getting the next BMW or Mercedes. Now I, per say, don't have a problem with people having BMW's or Mercedes but that's not what God's blessing is all about. Jesus, after he said those really challenging words about the poor and the hungry and all these people at the same time going off and having parties, he said this:
Give and it will be given to you.
Just again:
Give and it will be given to you, a good measure pressed down, shaken together and running over will be poured into your lap for with the measure that you use it will be measured to you.
In other words Jesus is saying, "You are blessed to be a blessing". He said it over and over again, he said it another way, you can read it in John, chapter 7, verse 37 in the Bible:
On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice," listen to this, "He stood and said in a loud voice, "If anyone is thirsty let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within them." By this he meant the Spirit.
Can you see it? It's in and out, "If anyone is thirsty, come and drink and if you believe in me streams ..." in fact it literally says, "Rivers of living water will flow from within you." Are you thirsty, looking for that something, you're parched and you're needy? Come to me, says Jesus and drink, put your faith in me and rivers of living water will flow out from you.
One of the greatest passages of the whole Bible. It's powerful; it's the crux of being a Jesus follower. It's saying, "You are blessed to be a blessing". Not just one little river, not just one little creek, it says literally, "Rivers of living water will flow from you" – a Nile and a Ganges and a Murray and a Mississippi and a Thames and a Rhine and a Yangtze and an Amazon. Rivers, huge flood tides of blessing will flow from you.
Get this, it is not always convenient to be a fountain of God's blessing. Have you ever noticed that? It's not, it's not for me. I have to say, leaving my consulting career and a six figure salary, at the time, was a hard decision you know, it wasn't particularly convenient or easy. And some days, shock horror, some days I don't feel like coming to the studio and other days I have to deal with difficult people in ministry and that's life. But here's the rub, the bottom line is that I wouldn't be doing anything else.
I am so blessed because I get to do this. because when I let those rivers flow out through me, there's a flood tide of blessing to other people and it's such an incredible joy, I wouldn't change any of it. The joy for me is telling people about Jesus, loving him and telling people about him, that's the blessing. Nothing, nothing is more important than that. Whoever we are, whatever our gifts are, when we let that blessing flow through us to other people then we really experience the blessing of God.

When we hear someone talking about God's blessing, it's easy to think "You beauty" – and we unroll our shopping list for God.  But if we want to experience God's blessing, we need to understand how He works.
We're talking this week on the program about God's blessing. And I've called this week's series, "Blessed to be a Blessing". We can get a crazy mixed up view of what blessing actually is. You have a look around at the advertising on television, the billboards; everything is screaming at us, "If you buy me you'll be happy. If you buy me that emptiness you feel inside will be gone." Sure it can be fun to buy things and to have things but they never, never fill that inner void do they? They never satisfy.
The advertising industry just keeps on chanting it's mantra, "Buy me and you'll be happy," knowing that if that thing ever made us contented and happy, if it ever filled the void, we wouldn't buy anymore and they'd go broke. God doesn't bless the way the world does, God's blessing is something entirely different, it fills, it lasts and most importantly it overflows. Let's get together for a few minutes and check it out.
We have a natural tendency when we think about God's blessing, "Wow, things are going to get better for me. After all, blessing is divine favour, now, what do I want? New job, a promotion and that would be good, a husband or a wife or a better husband or wife. I know that shiny new car I saw in the glossy weekend magazine last Saturday, that's what I want. I want a holiday; wow I'd like to go business class for once. I'd like to pay my credit card off." We have our shopping lists don't we?
Here's the danger, as we think about God blessing us, we believe the advertising industry and we reduce God's blessing down to some narrow, materialistic, sugar daddy level. It's so easy to do, the me, me, me thing. Let's put that right into perspective, I'd like to read you something that Jesus said, you can find it later in the Bible in Luke, chapter 6, verse 20. Looking at his disciples He said this:
Blessed are you who are poor for yours is the Kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep for you will laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil because of me. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy because great is your reward in heaven for that is how their fathers treated the Prophets.
But woe to you who are rich for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you for that is how their fathers treated the false Prophets.
But I tell you, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek give him the other also. If someone takes your cloak don't stop him from taking your tunic as well. Give to everyone who asks you and if anyone takes what belongs to you don't demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.
Wow, I think Jesus would have failed Marketing 101 here. Does this sound like some sugar daddy version of God's blessing to you, some new car or a bigger house? God has a heart for little people, this stuff that Jesus is talking about here is edgy, it is bad marketing, if you were trying to make a pitch for disciples the marketing machinery would have this sugar coated wouldn't it? They'd sit him down and say, "Look here Jesus …" But Jesus said, "If you want to be a follower of me, it's a tough gig. There's suffering and there's pain and there's rejection and that's a promise of God, hallelujah."
So Berni, what's this got to do with blessing huh? Come on, tell me about the next big flash car and the next big flash house and the promotion and the status and the recognition and the fame and the adulation, where the heck is God's blessing in all of this Berni? Well just a few verses on, in the same breath, Jesus puts the blessing in perspective, he says this:
Give and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over will be poured into your lap, for with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
Mmm, blessing has to do with giving, in fact it's a promise of Jesus. This is how God works. Take the blessings that you already have, take what God's already given you and give it away and with the measure that you give; God will give back to you. You see, here's blessing in action, blessing involves sacrifice and what Jesus is saying in this stuff is that it's not about having a big party now. No, no, no! It's about giving away your blessings to other people and God will bless you back. Whatever we have, whatever we have to give – maybe it's time, maybe it's money, maybe it's concern, maybe it's compassion – all of those things cost us.
When I came to Christ twelve years ago, I was pretty wealthy, not mega rich but by any global standard you'd have to say I was very well off. Pretty flash house, a car, a job and I lost most of it in marriage breakdown and divorce. But what I still had was a good income earning capacity. I was a consultant in the IT Industry and there's good money in that. Now I wasn't comfortable at that stage giving my money away, I just didn't do that. I wanted to hang on to it. I wanted to grow my wealth and get wealthier and wealthier and have a bigger house and a flashier car.
And I learned what it meant to lose everything. You may have heard me once tell the story that there was one week there, early on, when I was going through the whole marriage breakdown thing where I didn't even have enough money to buy food for the next week and the Church that I started going to had a car boot sale, you know, you opened your boot and you had stuff and people came and you sold it and what I sold at that car boot sale paid for my food for that week.
My, how I'd fallen and then I really thanked God because the pastor we had there, a guy called Phil, gave me some really good teaching about blessing and giving and the link between those two and I made a decision. I decided that the resources that I had, that I'd always hung on to and clung on to, in fact they had failed me. All my money, all my skills, all my gifts, there's none of those things that I have that weren't given to me by my Father in heaven, nothing and so I put them at his feet. I decided to radically give my life and what I had. I mean, this whole wealth thing hadn't worked for me so I thought this makes sense to me.
Now I'm not some super good Christian guy, I'm not that at all, it just kind of made sense to me and what I'm sharing with you is the lessons that God taught me in my life. I learned to give radically, firstly of my finances. When you're earning a lot of money and someone talks to you about giving a tenth of it away, a tenth of it happens to be an awful lot when you're earning a lot of money. My gifts, my abilities, I left the consulting job to go onto a ministry salary, you don't get rich doing that.
But this is what I discovered, God's abundant blessing in my life started chasing me down the street. Not success and fame, career and wealth, not that at all. God met all my needs and he's thrown some extras in along the way too but there's something much bigger, much bigger than that; a deep and intimate and personal relationship with God. As I sit down in the cool of the morning as I did this morning and had fellowship with God, I am so blessed; I would give up everything else just for that. For me, that puts life into perspective that puts life into balance. Jesus said:
First seek the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these other things will be added afterwards.
And they were, as we give blessing out, God pours blessing in, it's as simple as that, it's God's way.

They say that God is a God of Blessing.  Hmm.  So how come there's so much suffering in the world?  What went wrong?  How come I have to suffer?  Where's God's blessing then?
The classic dilemma when we talk about God's blessing is, "Well okay, so if God is a god of blessing, how come there is so much suffering in the world? How come I've had to go through this and this and that? How come there are natural disasters? Come on, how come?" And you know something, that's a very real and a very reasonable question. How come?
And it's something that's always in the back of my mind when I talk with people about God's blessing because chances are someone who is listening is going to be suffering right at the moment. And that person may well find any notion of God being a god of blessing, pretty difficult to swallow just now. So let's unpack that just a bit today. How come?
Right from the beginning God was a god of blessing. Yesterday on the program we had a look at the very, very first chapter in the Bible, Genesis chapter 1. And when God creates the first living creatures he blesses them and gets them to multiply and fill the earth. And when God creates us, male and female, he blesses us by handing over the whole creation to us. "Here, take all the birds and the fish and the beasts and have it all, it's yours to use, subdue them, fill the earth, multiply."
And when you look through the Bible, the whole concept of blessing, the word bless, appears over 350 times but at the same time there's plenty of bad stuff that happens to people right through the Bible, and plenty of bad stuff that happens to people today, here and now.
Sometimes we look at them and quietly think, "Well, you know, he deserved that." But other times they're innocent people – really bad things happen and we wonder, "Well, if God is a loving God like those Christians say that He is, this God who wants to bless us, supposedly, if that's who He is, how can He let those things happen to people like that?" That is a really good question.
One of my favourite actors, (I grew up as a baby boomer) one of my favourite television shows of all time is MASH. It's an American program and it ran for, I think, 11 seasons. And the star of MASH is a man called Alan Alda, an actor whom I just enormously admire and respect. He played Hawkeye Pearce in MASH and played a whole bunch of things afterwards. I saw him recently interviewed on a program called, "Inside the Actors Studio". The interviewer was a man called James Lipton and he asks Alan Alda a question like this, he says, "If there is a God, what do you want to say to him when you get to heaven?"
Now, Alan Alda is a really friendly, warm, engaging kind of guy and it's been a really warm and friendly and engaging kind of interview until Lipton asks this question. And Alda's face goes black and dark and serious and he says something like this, "God. God, tell me about the earthquakes and the tsunamis and the suffering. Tell me all that was just a bit of a joke."
And a lot of people feel like that about God. Christians talk about a God of blessings, Christians talk about a God of love but there's a whole bunch of bad stuff happening in this world. How do you explain that away? Okay, why? If God is a god of blessing, how come all this suffering is going on?
So we've looked at God's own account of his creation in Genesis, chapter 1. The very first living creatures he creates he blesses them and says, "Go and multiply and fill the earth." He creates us and he hands the whole thing over to us, enormous blessing. And here are you and I, joint owners in creation because God created us in his own image and he handed the whole thing over to us. And when you stop and think about that that was a huge blessing.
Right at the point of creation, God was in the blessing business. It's profound. It's a plan for us to live in relationship with him. But then something happens. Even though God has given Adam and Eve the Garden of Eden, to keep it, to till it, to be blessed there – He has this perfect plan of blessing – Adam and Eve rebel! They do the one thing that God says, "Don't do this" but eat the apple from this one tree. And there were consequences. Rebellion against God always does have consequences.
And God to the woman said, "Well, I will greatly increase your pains in child bearing. With pain you will give birth to children, your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you." And he turns to Adam and he says, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, you must not eat of it, cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you and you will eat the plants of the field, by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you will return."
Enter pain and suffering into the history of humanity and it's been there for all of humanity ever since. Now you might say to me, "Berni that is just so insensitive. What about when there's a still-born baby? What about the tens of thousands that are killed in a tsunami? What about the young teenager who gets raped and murdered? How can you say that it's sin? How can you say that it's punishment from God? How can you say that?"
Here it is, God made us in His image but when we don't like who He is, when it doesn't suit us, we try and remake him in our own image. God's a god of blessing but that blessing happens when we're in a relationship with Him. It's really well laid out in a part of the Bible and I encourage you to go have a look and read this, Leviticus chapter 26. It's one of the first books of the Old Testament. It's a perfect summary of where God stands on this. The old covenant was the promise between God and his people of Israel and he lays that out in this chapter, let's go there beginning in verse 1. He says:
Don't make idols or set up sacred stones and bow to them because I am the Lord your God. Observe my Sabbaths and have reverence for my sanctuary because I am the Lord your God. If you follow these decrees and you are careful to obey my commands, I'll send you rain in its season and the ground will yield its crops and the trees of the field their fruit. Your threshing will continue until grape harvest and the grape harvest will continue until planting and you'll eat all the food you want and live in your land in safety. I'll grant peace in the land and you'll lie down and no-one will make you afraid and I'll remove the savage beast from the land and the sword will not pass through your land ...
You'll pursue your enemies and they'll fall before you. Five of you will chase a hundred and a hundred of you will chase a thousand and your enemies will fall by the sword before you. I'll look on you with favour, I'll make you fruitful, increase your numbers and I will keep my covenant with you.
You will still be eating last years harvest when you will have to clear it out to make room for the new. I'll put my dwelling place with you, I'll be among you, I'll walk among you. I'll be your God and you will be my people because I'm the God who brought you out of the land of Egypt so that you wouldn't live in slavery anymore BUT if you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands, if you reject me and my decrees and abhor my laws and fail to carry out my commandments and so violate my covenant then I will do this to you. I will bring upon you sudden terror, wasting diseases, fevers that will destroy your sight and drain away your life. You'll plant seed in vain because your enemies will eat it. I'll set my face against you so that you'll be defeated by your enemies. Those who hate you will rule over you and you will flee even when no-one is pursuing you.
You see? God is a god of blessing. God wants to have a relationship with YOU and with me and that's the greatest blessing of all. I was talking to a man recently, my own age, he's a really good businessman. He has three adult sons and he wanted to bless his sons, form a company with them and do this and do that. One by one they rejected him, they turned their backs on him and they walked away and he said, "I wanted to bless them but I couldn't."
The greatest sadness of his life and that's what God's like. God is a god of blessing but when we reject him, when we turn away from him, there are consequences. Now, how do God's blessings still fit into this world that's turned its back on him? Well we'll look at that tomorrow on the program.

They say that God is a God of Blessing.  Is He?  I mean – does God really want to bless you and me and if He does, how does that happen?
The words "God" and "Blessing" somehow seem to go naturally together. In fact, God is a God who wants to bless us … or is he? Each one of us can look back on our lives and point to some times of great joy and blessing, and times of hurt and disappointment and sorrow and loneliness. When it seemed that if there is a God who blesses, well he must of deserted us or at least that's how it can feel. What do you think?
If God is God, is He a God of blessing or is that just some unbalanced kind of secular view of God that's crept in? Or is God a god who really doesn't care about us? For me at least getting a real handle of what God's up to in my life, what his plans are, is kind of where the rubber of faith hits the road of life.
Why is this whole thing of God's blessing so important? I think, at least I see a lot of misunderstanding about God and his heart and where He stands on blessing us. There seems to be two extremes, two opposite ends of the spectrum where people take extreme views.
At one end it goes something like this, "God wants to bless me therefore I should believe him for the next new Mercedes and the next million dollars and the next bigger house". In effect, "God is some sort of sugar daddy, it's all about me, I am at centre stage, I name it and I claim it". And you know something? Lots of Christians teach it and lots more believe it!
The problem I have with that is, when I compare that on the one hand to Jesus on the cross – He lost everything for you and me, even the clothes on his back; beaten and brutalised, he lost his life. And this sort of 'God is a sugar daddy' end of the spectrum really jars with the cross, doesn't it? And it leads to some of the worst excesses – the telly-evangelists pressuring people for money and flying around in private jets. Is that where this understanding of blessing should end up, do you think?
Now the other end of the spectrum says you have to be poor to serve God. Money is evil! We just had someone ring up at midnight the other night and leave a message on the phone to say, "How dare you sell a CD and then how dare you ask for support for your ministry. Money is evil; people who have money are evil." I was talking to a man in India recently and of course India is a land of huge extremes; you have the very rich and you have many, many very, very poor people. And he was very critical of this particular Christian leader who just had a nice house in a nice suburb, he believed it was wrong.
You see, I look at that end of the spectrum and I go to the Bible and I read about Abraham. Abraham was the man that God chose to engage with first. Abraham was rich, King Solomon one of the wisest men that ever walked the earth, he was very rich, he was full of God's wisdom.
You can see the problem. At the one end you can have people getting these extreme prosperity views in their heads. Thinking it's all about them and their material wealth and it plays right into the hands of the world – me, me, me! The next plasma TV; the next big car; if you don't have that then well ... obviously you don't have enough faith. On the other hand this perception that you have to be poor to be a Christian, well if that were the case, who would ever fund the work of the Lord on this planet.
I mean, God has always chosen to fund his work through his people. I know some very, very wealthy Christian business people who do an enormous amount to fund the work of the Kingdom of God. Talk of the pure monetary thing is the reality of tragedy and pain and suffering and a lot of times it's indiscriminate. Earthquakes, tsunamis, a young person who loves Jesus and dies at the age of eighteen with cancer, car crashes and divorce and retrenchment, all that stuff of life, we all experience those things, are you with me?
So what's Gods plan? Does God want to bless you and me or not? Is it okay for us to ask for his blessing? Is it okay to expect his blessing or is that just presumptuous? This is an important question because it is where the rubber hits the road. You get up in the morning and you maybe pray and you look forward to the day, how do you pray? What do you give thanks for? What do you ask for? Is it okay to ask for God's blessing in this difficult situation that's going to happen at work this afternoon? God, where are you in all of that?
That's why we're having a little series this week on the program that I've called 'Blessed to be a Blessing'. I'm a simple man. I just open the Bible, I see what God's saying on the subject, get it in balance. God's Word empowers us and the problem that I often see when people look at this subject of God's blessing is that you can take just one verse and say, "Oh, that's it." And you end up with one of those extreme positions that I was talking about before. But over the course of this week, on the program, we're going to get to look at the whole thing from God's perspective.
Is God a god who blesses? What does blessing mean? The main connotation is God's divine favour – God intervening to make something better or to give us something that will bring joy or happiness. There's financial blessing of course, there's spiritual blessing, there's physical blessing like healing, anything and everything, God's divine favour, his blessing becoming active in our lives. Question is, is God in the blessing business?
When I see the word "bless" or "blesses" or "blessed" or "blessing", 358 times in the Bible and the very first time it appears is in the first chapter of the Bible, Genesis chapter 1, verse 22. Let's go there and have a bit of a look. This is where God creates all of creation. He makes light out of darkness and the heavens and the earth and the oceans and the dry land and the plants and the first time he creates a living creature, this is what He says:
So God created the creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teams according to their kinds and every winged bird according to its kind and God saw that it was good." Now look at this, "God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water and the seas and let the birds increase on the earth.
And the second time the concept of blessing happens in the Bible is just a few verses on in that same chapter, that first chapter of Genesis, verse 26:
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female, he created them.
God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fish in the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
And then God said to them, "I give you every seed bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They'll be yours for food and to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground - everything that has breath of life in it - I give every green plant for food. And it was so.
Let me ask you something: Do you think God is in the blessing business? The whole creation thing, the whole idea of creation is that God created this wondrous, wondrous universe and then he kind of comes along and makes you and me and he makes us part owners, joint owners in the whole of his creation. He gives the whole thing over to us and says, "Look it's yours, you own it, you subdue it, you use it, it's my blessing to you." But as we'll see tomorrow on the program there was something we did that interrupted that blessing, that broke that blessing. And even after we do those things, even after we rebel and turn our back on God, you know something, it doesn't change who God is.