Blessing from the Beginning // Blessed to be a Blessing, Part 1

They say that God is a God of Blessing. Is He? I mean – does God really want to bless you and me and if He does, how does that happen?

The words "God" and "Blessing" somehow seem to go naturally together. In fact, God is a God who wants to bless us … or is he? Each one of us can look back on our lives and point to some times of great joy and blessing, and times of hurt and disappointment and sorrow and loneliness. When it seemed that if there is a God who blesses, well he must of deserted us or at least that's how it can feel. What do you think?

If God is God, is He a God of blessing or is that just some unbalanced kind of secular view of God that's crept in? Or is God a god who really doesn't care about us? For me at least getting a real handle of what God’s up to in my life, what his plans are, is kind of where the rubber of faith hits the road of life.

Why is this whole thing of God’s blessing so important? I think, at least I see a lot of misunderstanding about God and his heart and where He stands on blessing us. There seems to be two extremes, two opposite ends of the spectrum where people take extreme views.

At one end it goes something like this, "God wants to bless me therefore I should believe him for the next new Mercedes and the next million dollars and the next bigger house". In effect, "God is some sort of sugar daddy, it's all about me, I am at centre stage, I name it and I claim it". And you know something? Lots of Christians teach it and lots more believe it!

The problem I have with that is, when I compare that on the one hand to Jesus on the cross – He lost everything for you and me, even the clothes on his back; beaten and brutalised, he lost his life. And this sort of 'God is a sugar daddy' end of the spectrum really jars with the cross, doesn't it? And it leads to some of the worst excesses – the telly-evangelists pressuring people for money and flying around in private jets. Is that where this understanding of blessing should end up, do you think?

Now the other end of the spectrum says you have to be poor to serve God. Money is evil! We just had someone ring up at midnight the other night and leave a message on the phone to say, "How dare you sell a CD and then how dare you ask for support for your ministry. Money is evil; people who have money are evil." I was talking to a man in India recently and of course India is a land of huge extremes; you have the very rich and you have many, many very, very poor people. And he was very critical of this particular Christian leader who just had a nice house in a nice suburb, he believed it was wrong.

You see, I look at that end of the spectrum and I go to the Bible and I read about Abraham. Abraham was the man that God chose to engage with first. Abraham was rich, King Solomon one of the wisest men that ever walked the earth, he was very rich, he was full of God’s wisdom.

You can see the problem. At the one end you can have people getting these extreme prosperity views in their heads. Thinking it's all about them and their material wealth and it plays right into the hands of the world – me, me, me! The next plasma TV; the next big car; if you don't have that then well ... obviously you don't have enough faith. On the other hand this perception that you have to be poor to be a Christian, well if that were the case, who would ever fund the work of the Lord on this planet.

I mean, God has always chosen to fund his work through his people. I know some very, very wealthy Christian business people who do an enormous amount to fund the work of the Kingdom of God. Talk of the pure monetary thing is the reality of tragedy and pain and suffering and a lot of times it's indiscriminate. Earthquakes, tsunamis, a young person who loves Jesus and dies at the age of eighteen with cancer, car crashes and divorce and retrenchment, all that stuff of life, we all experience those things, are you with m