GOD IS THE BLESSING
God is good, right? The bible talks about God’s promises and blessings and we eat that stuff up. We praise God for all he has given to us and rightly so. However, are we focused on the blessings of God more than the blessing that God is? Do we see that God himself is the blessing? Paul said in Phil. 3:8, “I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.” Paul saw the value of having Christ in his life over anything else. We need to see that too.
1) If we focus only on the blessings we will…
• …forget about God when we have them.
Being forgetful is frustrating. As I’m getting older I’m realizing it more and more. At least I’m not as bad as the farmer who had a relative come visit him from the city. While they were out walking around the farmer gave a whistle and his dog herded the cattle into the corral and then latched the gate with her paw. "Wow, that’s some dog. What’s her name?" The forgetful farmer thought a minute, and then asked, "What do you call that red flower that smells good and has thorns on the stem?" "A rose?" "That’s it!" The farmer turned and called out to his wife. "Hey Rose, what’s the dog’s name?" Sometimes being forgetful can be comical but when it comes to our relationship with God it’s not good.
Deut. 8:10-20. God knows the nature and heart of man. He warned the Israelites because he wanted them to understand something that wasn’t obvious to them. Because if I put myself there and I heard these words at this time I would probably think to myself, “that won’t happen to me; I would never do that to God”. Just like Peter telling Jesus, “I would never deny knowing you; I would die for you”. And we know how that turned out.
God doesn’t give us warnings for no reason. God saw the potential for pride to set in. Vs. 14, “then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God”. When we focus more on the blessing than the one who blesses we forget that the reason we’re blessed is because of God. We think we are blessed because of our own strength and ability. That’s why he says in vs. 18, “But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth.” I don’t have what I have because of me; I have it because of God.
“Abraham Lincoln said, "We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us."”
Pride gets in the way of recognizing God as the giver and sustainer of all we have. Persisting in that pride will destroy us. Vs. 19-20. If we remain proud; if we remain focused and fixated on all our blessings and neglect God then he will start to take away the blessings. He will destroy the material abundance; he will strip it away from us to try to get our attention.
We will also start to lose our spiritual blessings. The blessings of love, joy, peace, patience, etc. we had when we were focused on God will dissipate. If what God tries to do to get our attention doesn’t work and we persist in our disobedience we are at risk for being destroyed. This is the danger of focusing on the blessings of God without focusing on the blessing of God himself.
• …walk away from God when we don’t.
Psalm 73:1-5. Asaph reveals he almost fell away from God because he got caught up in how he saw the wicked “blessed” and the righteous suffering.
Then he reveals how he feels his obedience has been in vain (12-14). As if to say, “What good has it done me to live for God? I’m suffering and the ones that don’t care about you are skipping along without a care in the world.”
He tried to understand and figure it out but to no avail (16). That is-until he went to church and then he began to see things more clearly (17-20).
He admits his grieved and bitter heart produced foolish reactions before God (21-22).
Then he understood how great God is that even though he was acting foolishly God didn’t let him go (23-24).
Then Asaph comes to an epiphany where he realizes that if he has God he has everything (25-28). [portion-sustainer and preserver of life] Even if he suffered the rest of his life he knew that at the end of it all he would be taken into glory. Even if for the rest of his life the wicked enjoyed a life of health, wealth and prosperity and him a life of illness and poverty he would still be better off simply because he had God in his life and they didn’t.
This can help us. We’ve all held the same frustrations as Asaph. We see the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer and we stomp our feet and shake our fist and yell, “It’s not fair!” And when we carry this attitude with us we become sad and depressed. We become embittered and angry people. We feel our devotion has gotten us nowhere; it has done us no good to serve God. Continuing in that attitude draws us away from God. We slip away; we lose our foothold.
Envy the wicked long enough and we will join back up with them. We will walk away from God and hook back up with the wicked. This will be the result if we are focused more on the blessings than the blesser.
Asaph came to his senses. He realized the remedy was to stay close to God. In doing so he would see things in the proper perspective. Can we be like Asaph? Can we say, ‘If I have God I have everything’? Can we be content simply with the blessing of being able to have the love of God? Can we be satisfied with having a relationship with God and not be so focused on receiving blessings from God? I hope that when we have the kinds of frustrations that Asaph talked about we will come before God and realize what we have.
When we focus on the giver of the blessing more than the blessing then we will be blessed. But when our focus is on the blessings rather than on the maker of those blessings then we will be frustrated because we will never be satisfied. We make God obligated to us and his purpose is to bless me. We try to make God play by our rules. ‘If I do a good deed you give me a blessing; that’s how it works’.
I’m not saying God won’t bless our faithfulness and obedience but we shouldn’t be faithful and obedient for the purpose of God blessing us-we need to be faithful and obedient simply because he is God. If we lose sight of God as the blessing and become focused only on the blessings then we will begin making comparisons. If we do that we will get upset wondering why God is blessing all these other people more than me. Then I will form a resentment against God. Eventually, because my focus is only on what I don’t have, I will conclude living for God is not worth it and I will turn and walk away from God.
2) The blessing of seeing that God is the blessing.
Gen. 15:1-6. God made a covenant with Abram (Abraham) in which he started off by letting him know that he himself is Abraham’s reward. Yes, in his old age Abraham would receive land and descendents beyond anyone’s ability to count. However, God wanted him to know that above all else he is the blessing.
In chapter 17 God promises Abraham a son through his wife Sarah, even though they were very old. God said it would be an everlasting covenant. But then God throws Abraham a curveball.
Gen. 22:1-13. (1-2): Abraham went 100 years without a son and God tells him he’s going to give him a son and that he will have descendents more numerous than the stars in the sky. And then the fulfillment of the promise comes-Isaac is born. And now God pulls the rug out from under Abraham. Sacrifice Isaac? What about the promise? What about the covenant? God’s going back on his word. Not only was Abraham losing Isaac but God wants him to be the one to do it. It would’ve been bad enough if Isaac died some tragic death but to find out it was going to happen by his father’s hand? Seriously?
But what does Abraham do? He obeys (3).
So he sets out and carries out the plan that he does not understand. But, Abraham trusts God and he believes that God is going to do something to save the day (4-8).
But if God was going to save the day he was taking his sweet time (9-10).
But, just in the nick of time, God came through (11-13). “Now I know that you fear God, because you did not withhold from me your only son”.
When God is the blessing he takes first place in our lives; even over our children-who are a blessing from God. When we first look at God himself as our great reward instead of just the blessings he gives us as our great reward then it will show in our devotion to him. Abraham remembered what God had told him-that God himself was Abraham’s great reward.
And because Abraham considered God to be his great reward he was greatly rewarded. 14-18. Abraham didn’t hold back from God and God rewarded him for it. When we focus more on the blessing than we do the blesser we miss out. We miss out on the relationship we could be having with God. We miss out on the greater joy the blessing brings because of our love for the one who gave it to us.
We should be happy when God rewards us. We are supposed to enjoy the blessings he gives us. But we have to be careful that we don’t become more attached to the blessing than we do the blesser. We have to be careful not to make anything the priority over God. When we see that God is the blessing then we will truly be blessed.
