A New Understanding of Blessing // Blessed to be a Blessing
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.
New Zealand