Monday, August 20, 2012

The Meaning of Blessing


One of my pet peeves is the way many Christians use the word “blessing.”  It’s common to hear someone say "I've been blessed," "It was such a blessing" and so on.  It’s become a religious way of saying "I was lucky," or "Boy, I'm glad that I have that.”

To receive a blessing is to have someone bestow favor upon you.  The Old Testament patriarchs like Isaac and Jacob bestowed blessings upon their children before they died.  The blessing may include material possessions like land or cattle.  But more importantly, the blessing was a bestowal of goodness upon the person.  They were endowed with something special that would affect their character and identity.  Being "blessed" doesn't mean simply receiving something good, or even having things work out well for you.  It's even more than acknowledging that God is the one who is responsible for something good in your life.  Being blessed means that you are different person.  You have been changed in a powerful and positive way.  In Matthew 5, Jesus began his famous “Sermon on the Mount” with the beatitudes: a series of descriptions of how we are blessed in various circumstances.  The beatitudes are not about wonderful things coming your way.  They are about how the things that come your way will change you in amazing ways that draw you closer to our Lord.

A lesser-known passage that helps us understand what it means to be blessed is Psalm 67:
“May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us,
that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations.”
The psalmist seeks God’s blessing for himself and his community, but he does so for a very specific purpose.  It’s not about himself and how he will benefit from God’s blessing.  He wants to be blessed so that everyone will come to know God, and that God’s plan will prevail over the world.

To sum all this up, being blessed means that God transforms us in order for others to blessed and transformed themselves.  We may be tempted to cling to God’s blessings and keep them for ourselves, rather than recognizing that the way they change us can be a way for others to be changed as well.  If we hold onto the blessing for ourselves, we block God’s pipeline of grace and joy for the world.

It’s for us as individuals, but it’s also true for us as a church.  The Lord has blessed Old Union in many fantastic ways.  But the blessings are not meant for us alone.  First, they are not simply heavenly goodies that we can enjoy like trick-or-treaters on November 1.  The blessings that God has bestowed upon our congregation are meant to change who we are.  Pray over this question: “How has God transformed Old Union through the blessings he has given to it?”  Second, our church has not been blessed for its own sake.  We have been blessed so that those around us, especially those in our community, can discover God’s blessing for them through us.  Pray over this second question: “How can Old Union’s blessings bring others closer to God?