Are You A Bucket Or A Hose? - Genesis 12:1-9 Series

God wants to bless you. How many of you are already blessed? Alright. So you already experienced the blessing of God. God wants to bless you more. The word ‘blessing’ is this idea of gift. God wants to give you gifts. He wants to bless you with these gifts. When we say bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name, when we’re saying, “Lord, I want to bless you,” what we’re saying is I want to give you gifts. I want to give you gifts of worship. I want to give you gifts of song. I want to give you gifts of praise. I want to give you the gift of my heart, my life. That’s blessing the Lord when we use it that way.

Now we’re going to look in Genesis 12 at a man who was blessed, Abraham. God had a particular blessing attached to his name that was his packaged blessing. Abraham’s blessing. We’re going to learn from it. We’re going to get some illustrations for how God would have us be blessed. But that was his blessing. Each one of us could stand up and talk about the blessing that God has given to us and how He’s worked in our lives.

I want to first take us to another passage of scripture. I want to take you to a passage in Ephesians. I want you to see what happens with the blessing that God wants to give to us. So if you’ll look with me at Ephesians 1:3-8 it says this: Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.

Let me just point out that one of the reasons that God wants to bless us is because He wants us to be wowed with His greatness. So that we will say, “Praise the Lord for the blessings He’s given us.” That’s one of the reasons. Think about blessing, not just from your perspective for a moment, about the things you get. But think about it from God’s perspective. Why is He blessing? One reason is to wow us with His goodness so that we’ll be impressed with Him and we’ll worship Him and we’ll praise Him. That’s one of the reasons He blesses us.

It says also – For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. What that means is that the blessing that He has has a nametag on it. The gift is a package wrapped with your name on it. You’re chosen. It’s a very specific gift. We're going to look at Abraham and the gift that God gave to him, the blessing that He did in his life. But we have to realize that God is doing different things in each of our lives and He’s chosen us. That means He’s given you a particular blessing.

I suspect this week you’ll be counting your blessings. You’ll be thinking about blessings. This is Thanksgiving week. So I would suggest that another reason that God blesses us is so that we’ll develop gratitude in our hearts. Because gratitude transforms us. It changes us. It helps us to focus outside of ourselves. It's another reason that God blesses us. He gives us this gift of gratitude that we have because we see the blessings around us. He chose us. You have a particular kind of blessing that God has given to you and He wants to expand that. I’m going to show you how He’s going to and wants to expand that today in our lives.

It says – He predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins. See, foundationally the blessing that God has given us is salvation. Making us different than other people. Rescuing us from sin and the darkness and the depression and the brokenness in the world. God has given us something very important.

He continues and says – in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us. I think some people have this view of God’s blessing that He has His hand wrapped around the blessing and that we pry His hand open through our prayers and through our good works and other things so that we can get the blessings of God. That picture is not a good one. I would suggest that God is lavishing it. It’s like it’s pouring out. It’s like a shower of His blessing coming down on us and it’s our job to get under the shower so that we can receive it. If I’m in the bathroom and I want to get clean, I don’t get clean by standing outside of the shower. I don’t clean just by going into the bathroom. I’ve got to get under the shower of God’s blessing. I’ve got to position myself to receive the blessing of God. God has more for you. God has more blessings He wants to give to you and it’s your job to position yourself under the blessing so that you can receive them.