I Am Blessed Series

To accept one being blessed is not always an easy task. After God finished creating everything, He said all that He had made was “very good.” Though most Christians accept this as being true how many of them still struggle to see themselves as “good” in the Lord’s eyes and not a heaping mess of sin and disappointment? To accept the truth that one is blessed requires one to successfully view one’s identity and purpose based on the stories given in the Bible. Mission is only successful when its identity and purpose are based on the stories given in the Bible. In the book, Bible and Mission: Christian witness in a Postmodern World, Richard Bauckham defines a metanarrative as being “an attempt to tell a single story about the whole of human history in order to attribute a single and integrated meaning to the whole.” The bible is the only story that qualifies as a metanarrative because only God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, can explain the purpose of one’s existence. It is each person’s responsibility to examine his or her life in the context of God’s revelation. “Not only is self tied to knowledge of God, but we know ourselves truthfully only when we know ourselves in relation to God. We know who we are when we can place ourselves – locate our stories – within God’s story.” To see how radically our story differs from what God has planned for our lives let’s review the story of a woman named Hagar.

God has a Glorious Future for Me!

In Genesis we are told of the calling and blessing of Abram. God told him He would “make him into a great nation, and I will bless you” (12:2) with “descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore (22:17). Though Abram believed in the Lord and was “credited to him as righteousness” (15:6), after ten long years of being in the land of Canaan and not bearing any children, he gave into his wife’s request to sleep with an Egyptian slave named Haggar so that they might “build a family through her” (16:1-2). To be a female and slave in the ancient world meant one possessed no intrinsic value, have no freedom, and certainly not a great future so to be asked to bear Abram’s child was quite a blessing indeed! Hagar bore a son, Ishmael, seemingly fulfilling the blessing and family promise. However, tension arose as Sarai began to despise Hagar (Genesis 16:4-6). The situation intensified when, at the age of 99, Abram received news from the Lord that Sarai would conceive and give birth to another son, Isaac (Genesis 17). As time passed, conflicts arose between Ishmael and Isaac. Eventually, Sarah observed Ishmael mocking, leading her to insist that both Hagar and Ishmael be banished to wander in the Desert of Beersheba. In a moment of desperation, Hagar, near death, placed her son under a bush, sat down at a distance, and wept (Genesis 21). In her anguish, she likely pondered how things could possibly get any worse.

The grand narrative of God’s word is that He loves us deeply and for those who put their trust in Him “we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). While watching a child dying before one’s very eyes is certainly bleak, this is not where the story ends! When Hagar was pregnant and she fled because Sarai was mistreating her, an angel of the Lord appeared and told her about a narrative for her life that was truly amazing. The angel said, “I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count” (16:9). The same God who gave life to Sarai’s dead womb was about to do another miracle and from Ishmael make him into a great nation! How shocked would have Hagar been to realize that especially in one of the darkest moments of her life God was amid her storms. The same God who loves us enough to create the universe and send His son Jesus to die on the cross did so not to condemn but to save us (John 3:17). No matter how bad our circumstances become “not even death nor life, neither angels of demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39)! If we truly believe God is our portion (Psalms 16:5-11) then we will know of our blessings that are unspeakable, glorious, and eternal!