Southminster Presbyterian Church

Two interesting things happened last week that had me pondering the idea of "blessings" and being blessed by God.

The first happened last Thursday when I visited our local Christian bookstore in order to purchase bibles for our Confirmands.  This store puts several items at the checkout counter that are discounted to $5.  CDs, books, etc. As the cashier is ringing me up, he asks, "Can you be blessed with any of our $5 items today?" That whole idea of being blessed by having the opportunity to spend more money really caught my attention.  I'm just not sure that's how "blessings" are supposed to work.  And to have such a magnificent biblical truth reduced to a marketing slogan really bugged me.

The second happened the next day when I drove from my house in South County to a church in Clayton, a distance of about 9 miles.  Green lights, all the way, baby!  I had to have passed through two dozen intersections.  To put it in perspective, I made it well over halfway home with green lights, then stopped at every one of the remaining 6 lights.  That's a little more typical.  On the way to Clayton, as I'm delighting in this green-light situation, the thought passes through my mind, "Wow, God is really blessing me today.  He must love me."  Really?  So God loved and blessed me less on my way home?

But that's how we think, isn't it?  When things are easy or good, God is blessing us. So what are we to do with verses like James 1:2, "Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds." Or the Beatitudes, where Jesus lists out those who are blessed by God: the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, the persecuted.  Maybe using "blessings" in marketing slogans or in reference to green lights is severely cheapening our understanding of blessings.

In fact, these passages together with 1 Corinthians 9:22-23 ("To the weak I became weak...I do it all for the sake of the Gospel, that I may share in its blessings"), seem to indicate that it is our suffering and our struggles - particularly when we suffer for the sake of the Gospel - that indicate that God is blessing us.  And a look at the word used for blessing in the Beatitudes bears this out.  That word, makarios, means "to be a privileged recipient of divine favor."  I don't know about you, but I certainly don't feel like a privileged recipient of divine favor when life gets hard, or when I'm struggling, or when I catch a lot of red lights.

The apostles really did see life this way, though.  The more they suffered for the Gospel, the more they were blessed by God.  Why?  Because they knew that the more they suffered, the more like Christ they became - Christ who suffered more than any of us ever will.  And there was nothing they wanted more, no greater blessing, then to become as much like Christ as possible, even if it meant dying. Paul makes that explicitly clear in Philippians 3:10-11: "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead."  Wow.  Sharing in his sufferings.  Becoming like him in his death.  All in order to know Christ and attain resurrection from the dead.  In other words, all in order to be blessed by God.

And we think we've been blessed when we get a raise, or catch a big sale at our favorite store, or get green lights.  Maybe the problem is that our idea of "being blessed" has been corrupted by our modern, capitalistic, materialistic, consumerist desires.  Our need for stuff, our pursuit of the "American Dream."  I wonder what would happen if we were to turn our thinking around, if we were to embrace a more biblical perspective of "blessings."  Maybe we'd find something better than a good deal, and a fulness of life that we'd otherwise be missing.

Next week is Holy Week, the time between the joyous and triumphant -and short-lived- celebration on Palm Sunday and the joyous and triumphant -and eternal- celebration of Christ's victory over death and sin on Easter Sunday.  Of course, the path to that ultimate victory was traced through betrayal, and humiliation, and suffering, and abandonment, and pain, and even death.  Maybe the fulness of God's blessings come through a similar path for us also.  The apostles certainly thought so. Are you bold enough to ask God to bless you in this way?

May God bless each one of us -in the fullest and truest sense of the word-  as we continue to seek His face and be formed in the image of His son, Jesus Christ.