Sermon- The Gift of a Blessing”

Now the LORD had said to Abram: “Get out of your country, From your family And from your father’s house, To a land that I will show you. 2 I will make you a great nation; I will bless you And make your name great; And you shall be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, And I will curse him who curses you; And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

8 “Therefore you shall keep every commandment which I command you today, that you may be strong, and go in and possess the land which you cross over to possess, 9 and that you may prolong your days in the land which the LORD swore to give your fathers, to them and their descendants, ‘a land flowing with milk and honey.’ . . . 13 ‘And it shall be that if you earnestly obey My commandments which I command you today, to love the LORD your God and serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul, 14 then I will give you the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the latter rain, that you may gather in your grain, your new wine, and your oil. 15 And I will send grass in your fields for your livestock, that you may eat and be filled.’ 16 “Take heed to yourselves, lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them, 17 lest the LORD’s anger be aroused against you, and He shut up the heavens so that there be no rain, and the land yield no produce, and you perish quickly from the good land which the LORD is giving you. … 26 “Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse: 27 the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you today; 28 and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the LORD your God, but turn aside from the way which I command you today, to go after other gods which you have not known.

“Surely, the smell of my son Is like the smell of a field Which the LORD has blessed. 28 Therefore may God give you Of the dew of heaven, Of the fatness of the earth, And plenty of grain and wine. 29 Let peoples serve you, And nations bow down to you. Be master over your brethren, And let your mother’s sons bow down to you. Cursed be everyone who curses you, And blessed be those who bless you!” … “Behold, your dwelling shall be of the fatness of the earth, And of the dew of heaven from above. 40 By your sword you shall live, And you shall serve your brother; And it shall come to pass, when you become restless, That you shall break his yoke from your neck.”

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, 4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love…

For I have come to ‘set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law’; 36 and ‘a man’s enemies will be those of his own household.’

a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I be exalted above measure. 8 Concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. 9 And He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.”

If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!”

And He looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury…

2 My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, 3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. 4 But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. 5 If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him.

So that I asked a couple guess about a month ago if one of us would want to fill in this week and I said yes because I’ve had this idea for almost a year that I knew I wanted to talk about and so then I remembered around about Tuesday that was this week. So I did already have my idea so you know I thought I’d be good to go and then I promptly realized that my idea was a little bit off so that became part of the sermon so I have tons of scripture but we’re going to read it as I progress so there won’t be a huge reading ahead of time just going to go ahead and say a word of prayer if you’ll join with me. Father we just thank you so much for just welling with us in us and among us we just thank you for your presence in our lives and we thank you so much for the freedom and the time to come together and fellowship in your name and just take joy and and them to swelling in your presence together Lord and having that community of believers to belong to we just thank you for all you do for us all you have given to us and just we ask that you come down now and just give me the right words to say and open hearts to hear what you want the message to be today Lord and we do ask that you be with the Appalachian association going on now and dad he’s preaching there and just stir up the hearts for you there too Lord Jesus’ name amen. All right so I wrote a blog post about a year ago on the subject of blessings and I knew that was what I wanted to talk about today. So we’re going to start off with a little pop quiz to see if you guys know what it took me a while to figure out here so what is a blessing definition examples whatever. OK So what’s an example some of the blessings we receive. Like. The air we breathe. Love of the family. Room. Gary carried. Well and typical academic fashion I tend to be a little bit academic here I went to the dictionary and looked it up so the English word blessing means the act or words of one who blesses to make holy like a priest’s blessing upon something approval so we seek someone’s blessing or a thing conducive to happiness so something that makes us happy so some examples of how we use this word in our everyday life we say the blessing over the food right we ask for a blessing when we’re seeking someone’s approval we frequently say to count our blessings and that means the things we have been given right and that’s one of the ones I hear most often and it was what what really started all this because I was really wanted to I been thinking a lot in the past couple years about how we deal with the things we’re given and how we focus on them and how we should focus on them so I knew that’s what I wanted to talk about today and so I you know started off by opening up the can cordon digitally of course and looking up the word blessing now I just focused on blessing didn’t get into blessed and blessings and blessed because that would have been far too many words but in the New King James version I found eighty nine occurrences of the word blessing sixty nine in the Old Testament twenty in the new. Starting as early as Genesis one when God blessed mankind and told them to be fruitful and multiply this was a blessing given in the the very dawn of time. Genesis is actually incredibly heavy using the word blessing it’s the second most used in the Bible with fourteen occurrences of just blessing not the act of blessing but the now talked only by Deuteronomy when God is handing out the law and. Saying this will be a blessing to you. So I did look up the word used in Hebrew is Barak and it means exact same thing is the Greek word used in the Greek translation and so I’m actually going to focus on the Greek because it’s a little more familiar to me and it will actually be more familiar to you once I tell you what it is so the Greek word whether it’s talking about the noun the blessing or the act of giving the blessing comes from the same root and it’s used all eighty nine times in the Greek Old Testament and in the New Testament so it’s not one of those words that there’s you know five different words we translate the same way it’s all the same word and that Greek word is your logo. The closest English word is eulogy so as a eulogy what you think of when you think of a blessing it sure wasn’t what I thought when I thought of a blessing not what I was imagining but as soon as I looked it up I kind of what the root of this word is Logos so to any Greek scholar logos is a very loaded word it can mean something very simple the word you speak it’s a word or it can mean something a whole lot more for instance the first verse of John and R.K. whole logos. Prost Tom thing on. Logos in the beginning was the Word and the Word was WITH God and the Word was God So this is Logos this is a powerful thing right the logo says what saves us the Logos is what spoke the world into being so logos is a very powerful thing and of course as a writer I deal with words a lot so I tend to focus on these things that that deal with the power of words because they always just appeal to something in my spirit so when I saw all this I say OK so a blessing isn’t the thing we’re given it’s the word we’re given. So then we add that you’ll to the beginning of logos and that makes it very very. Peculiar meaning because you is good so this is good words good speaking praise. So this definition of the Greek word did surprise me a little because I was expecting something that could carry a physicality to it and word doesn’t a word is a spoken thing it is not the thing you speak about so it also those then shed a little bit more light to me on why we say things like Bless the Lord. Because what are we doing we’re speaking good of him we’re praising him we’re saying he is worthy of our praise and I have to admit there have been times in my life when I’ve read these songs and I think and how do we bless the Lord I know how he blesses us because He gives us things he provides for us I can’t give God anything I can’t provide for God All I can give him is my praise but then when I was reading through this and really pondering the meaning of the word I realized that that’s actually the important part the speaking of the praise because there is power in our words and what we do with them. So that’s why we’re called on to bless the Lord because we are giving him our praise that is you will and that is what a blessing is so in the Old Testament of course there is a lot of emphasis on blessing really in ways we don’t we don’t use anymore we don’t do this anymore each of the patriarchs though imparted a blessing upon their children and it was obviously a very important thing because we see Jake up in the east all fighting over the blessing of their father right so they all kind of stem back from the blessing that God gave to Abraham so that will be the first thing I read from Genesis twelve and it says now the Lord had said to Abraham get out of your country from your family and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you I will make you a great nation I will bless you and make your name great you shall be a blessing I will bless those who bless you and I will. Curse him who curses you and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed so that is a lot of good speaking there right that’s a eulogy the kids might not know what are you logy is but it’s something we say commending the good works so someone after they have died most of the time so this is a eulogy while Abraham was still very much alive before he went forth to do these good things so I thought it would be interesting to read this again and substitute out the word blessing which to us can often mean a very physical thing and instead use the word praise I will praise you and make your name great and you shall be a praise I will praise those who praise you and I will curse him who curses you and in you all the families of the earth shall be praised so that gives a very different flavor a little different interpretation and it least it did for me God was definitely promising Abraham a lot he was promising him a homeland an entire nation that would spring from his children he was promising fame and renown and certainly Abraham has that right and we’re still talking about him today but he was also promising something a whole lot greater that Abraham would be a blessing Abraham would be a praise a testament to God into the goodness of God and that’s a pretty amazing thing right God promised him that but how people treated him was how they would be treated and that’s I mean that’s huge Can you imagine if everyone in the world was treated like they treated me so if you like me then when you get favor and if you don’t you don’t that’s what God promised to Abraham so that goes well beyond just the physical things involved in this blessing the land the home the fame the renown that goes toward what Abraham would mean to the world and how he would show the world God. And so that is why we think of Abraham today as being a blessing to the world we know that through him came Jesus and so that’s that’s all. Obviously a really important thing and we look upon that as a gift. So if you follow the tradition of giving blessings through the Old Testament it becomes very clear that there is quite a power to this to these eulogies the good speaking sometimes they’re used as a promise in Deuteronomy eleven God gives us a blessing if the people of Israel if they obey Him So it’s a pretty long section I’m going to read it in in parts so we’re just going to skip over some of the redundant stuff starting in verse eight therefore you shall keep every commandment which I command you today that you may be strong and go in and possess the land which you cross over to possess and that you may prolong your days in the land which the Lord swore to give your fathers to them and their descendants a land flowing with milk and honey then skipping to verse thirteen and it shall be that if you earnestly obey my commandments which I command you today to love the Lord your God and serve Him with all your heart with all your soul then I will give you the rain for your land in its season but early rain and the latter rain that you may gather in your grain your new wine in your oil and I will send grass in your fields for your livestock that you may eat and be filled take heed to yourselves Bless your heart be deceived in you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them less the Lord’s anger be aroused against you and he shut up the heavens so there be no rain and the land yield no produce and you perish quickly from the good land which the Lord has given you and then skip again down to twenty six Behold I set before you today a blessing and a curse the blessing if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you today and the curse if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God but turn aside from the way which I command you today to go after other gods which you have not known so I like seeing the dichotomy here between the two choices God lays out you obey him. And receive the blessing or and you choose to praise him or you disobey and choose a curse so I did look up curse as well it does not have logos and it but it is always a spoken word and it has the idea of bringing down so you’re calling down evil on someone you’re bringing evil down on someone and that’s what God says they will do if they choose to disobey him that by acting in a way that is disobedient they are calling down evil upon themselves. So that was an example of eulogy being a promise we also have examples where it is a prophecy first when I sick gives that famous blessing meant for Esau to Jake up in Genesis twenty seven twenty seven through twenty nine surely the smell of my son is like the smell of a field which the Lord has blessed therefore may God give you of the dew of heaven at the fastness of the earth and plenty of grain and wine let people serve you and nations bow down to you be master over your brethren and let your mother sons bow down to you curse it be everyone who curses you and bless it be those who bless you and so then to Esau in verse thirty nine he says Behold your dwelling shall be of the fattest of the earth and of the dew of heaven from above by your sword you shall live you shall serve your brother and it shall come to pass when you become restless that you shall break his yoke from your neck. So in these actions we see that Isaac is speaking a prophecy over his son with this sons with this blessing he’s invoking a word of power when he says let the people serve you and that’s the same part of speech that we see in Genesis one where God says Let there be light it’s a commanding into being so again an example of the power of the word and he’s also predicting what’s going to happen between these two brothers and really the nations that come come from them similarly years later when it’s Jacob giving the blessings on his deathbed he gives one to eat. Of his sons and their not just on the son themselves but on the role that the tribes are going to play in the future of Israel so again a real power of the spoken word that it can be a promise it can be a prophecy and it can be a praise so that is how the word eulogy is used all throughout the Old Testament and also into the New Testament in every single case you could take out the word blessing and substitute another word that deals with words you could use praise or promise or to speak over. Pulling one example from the New Testament in the fusions one when Paul is greeting the church he says Blessed be the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and without blame before him in love so we could do that substitution again here and say Praise be God who has spoken over us every spiritual promise. But if we talk about blessings we still tend to think of concrete examples and we think about the good ones our families the things God has given us to just stay alive the air we breathe the country we belong to and these are always physical things or at least they’re tied to physical things I know that you know it Thanksgiving time we tend to be thankful for our families and for our freedom and for having the meal spread before us and I just kept wondering well where does that idea come from this idea that a blessing is a physical get God has given us so I went to another of my favorite websites Adam Online dot com which is an Adam ology site in etymology traces not the it’s not a definition it’s not the meaning of the word but it traces the way the meaning of the word has changed over time and the root of the words where it comes from so when I looked up blessing in the etymology. Site I found something very very interesting and that is that English is the only language in the world where blessing has come to mean gift and every other language blessing still means a spoken word a commendation or a praise it has no tie to the physical. So the English word traces its roots back to the Latin version of eulogy which has been a disarray. Benediction is another example of that so if you think about our benedictions it’s something we say sending people out right so it’s another word it’s a prayer and so the old English word for Benny disarray was song which is blessing very literally like it was way back then it was that good word that good speaking But round about the thirteen hundreds the word started to shift and take on this meaning of a physical gift so it started it kept it first the whole pronounce but then it was to make happy prosperous or fortunate So still a bit of a word implied there but we’ve introduced a physical concept and when you trace why it’s a kind of interesting reason and that’s because bless is one letter off from Bliss what is bliss it’s happiness so suddenly to English speakers it became not about what makes us holy or what makes us worthy of praise or the praise we give it became about what makes us happy so what makes us happy gifts we all like gifts right gifts make us happy so that is why the English word blessings started to change so this is a seven hundred year history of the word blessing carrying a physical meaning in English but it is unique to English if you go to another country and talk about blessings like we talk about blessings are going to look at you like you’re crazy because their word doesn’t mean that. So I just found it really interesting that our whole understanding of this word became wrapped up in the fact. That it sounds like another word and there are certainly other occasions where that happens but generally not in a whole biblical principle blessing is a very big principle of the Bible right so after I took a lot of time untangling my terms I realized that I read what I really wanted to talk about was not this spoken word this blessing it was a thing that we call blessings but which might better be called gifts so we are given these physical gifts so another pop quiz everybody what do you consider to be gifts from God. Among. His love the Holy Spirit. Very good a lot of the things we don’t ask for a lot of times the name things like our health in addition to this or the fact that he’s provided a house and a car and put us in this prosperous country so we as Christians are always very careful to name the incorporeal things but if you we generally still do thank him also for these physical things we’ve been given right we are definitely always thankful for the love of our families and obviously families are a gift from God So let’s look real quick at Matthew ten thirty five For I have come to set a man against his father a daughter against her mother and a daughter in law against her mother in law and a man’s enemies will be those of his own household. I deliberately chose a different one it is still true so let’s consider perhaps our health second Corinthians twelve seven three nine Paul says a sword in the flesh was given to me a messenger of St to buffet me lest I be exalted above measure concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me and he said to me My grace is sufficient for you my strength is made perfect in weakness so I know I am deliberately choosing examples that show kind of the opposite side of what we usually think of and there are definitely. Plenty that show the side we usually think of too. And I’m not saying that our families and our health are not gifts from God but I wanted to pull these examples out because they made me ask a question of myself so does God take his gifts away from his faithful children if you are earnestly seeking him does he take away the gifts he’s given you so I want you to kind of hold that question in mind so then we’re going to look in the New Testament now and we’re going to focus on the word gift unlike blessing which was all the same word used over and over all eighty nine times there are three different words in the New Testament that we all to translate all of them as Gift The first is DOMA and it is a very simple thing given an example is in Luke eleven thirteen when Jesus says if you then being evil know how to give good gifts to your children this is what he’s been talking about if your child asks for bread you’re not going to give him a stone if he asks for a fish you’re not going to give him a snake we know how to give gifts to our children how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him. Then the next word we have that can mean gift is a dollar on this is a gift or in offering like in Luke twenty one one Jesus looked up and saw all the rich putting their gifts into the Treasury so this is a gift given to God it’s an offering put down that one is used a lot especially in the book of Acts and it shows up a ton in this book but every time it’s used it’s not speaking of giving your money it is or of money given to you or something like that it is speaking only of the gift of the Holy Spirit so every time dollar on is mentioned in Acts which is a lot it was in there a lot it always meant the gift God gives you of the Holy Spirit. So in Romans Paul talks a lot about gifts and through his other epistles as well he talks about the spiritual gifts the gift of greats. The gift of righteousness the gift of eternal life and this word is not either of the other two it is charisma which literally means a free gift or grace keris means grace charisma means of grace so this is true of all the times Paul uses the word gift he’s talking about these free gifts of grace given by God and there are a couple exceptions where he’s talking more of you know you have prepared this gift you give someone else and that uses one of the other two words but most of the time he’s always talking about the spiritual things those spiritual gifts that were given so these aren’t things we can touch or hold even like our health or our families they’re nothing physical at all so where do we get that idea of the physical things I think a lot of it is because we live in America we live in this prosperous country it’s a rich country it’s a country where it’s hard not to be surrounded by things so we tend to give a lot of thought to them and a lot of focus of our focus goes on them and we do thank God for them we thank God for the house for the car for the paycheck we thank him for the insurance and the security in the retirement fund in the college funds for the kids and we say we’re blessed to have these things we say they’re gifts from God. But I really have been thinking for a couple years now that are those the right words we should be using I’ve already kind of established that blessing might not be the right one because that’s more about the word spoken than the thing promised right it’s about the promise not the result of the promise so what what then can we say about them and this will kind of go back to that question I asked before so I’m not saying at all that the things are good or bad there are things right they’re not in do with a virtue of their own the focus though of my point here is the value we place on them. So are these things a gift going back to that question of does God take his gifts away from his faithful children look at Christians very strong Christians in another country they don’t have enough food to eat have they not been given a blessing Have they not been given a gift what about when we get sick and our health fails is that God removing his gift from us what about when we lose our families is that God removing a gift from us I can’t think that it is I can’t think that God treats his children that way I think the thing then is that we are putting too much focus on the physical side of the gifts rather than the spiritual a couple weeks ago Dad had preached a sermon on that verse in Philippians where Paul says I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me it was a wonderful sermon but when he read the scripture something new jumped out at me that never had before and that was that polls not saying that if you have faith in Christ you’re always going to have enough he’s not saying that at all he’s not saying you’ll have all the food you need you have the health you need you have the family and the support what he’s saying is that when you don’t God still there he’s saying that when you don’t have enough when you lack you can still take joy through Christ that is the strength Christ gives us not just that we overcome but that we can survive when we can’t overcome there are Christians who die of hunger but they can still take that joy in the Lord there are Christians who are martyred for their faith they don’t overcome physically but they can still take that joy in the Lord so if someone loses their job because they’ve cut all these positions at the railroad that’s not God taking a gift away right because what is his gift all through the New Testament his gift is one thing and one thing only and that is the Holy Spirit in the gifts he imparts So it is the drawing close of us to God So every time God gives us a gift it’s sole purpose is to. Enable us to draw closer to him and to be a testament to him to be that blessing to be that prays. So sometimes the things we’re given do help us but that mean we’d have a hard time getting where he wants us to go if we didn’t have a car we’d have a hard time telling anyone about him if we couldn’t get there or if we didn’t have food enough to sustain us to get there so obviously these things are important and definitely Jesus promises us you know don’t worry about the future don’t worry about what you’re going to eat and you’re going to drink God’s going to provide it and that’s definitely true he gives us what we need in order to fulfill our calling to fulfill our ministry and to share about him. But then the question becomes and I guess I have lost my place here but one of the things I just came to redefine in my head was what is the true gift of God is not the things He gives us but it’s what draws me closer to him so do my physical things draw me closer to him sometimes the answer might be yes sometimes the answer might be no but then it makes me ask questions about those things we would never call a gift does heartache draw you closer to God does pain draw you closer to God does happening to beg him for money enough to feed your family the next day draw you closer to God I think you know we don’t ever want to call that a gift but the answer is yes sometimes that does. Now sometimes it doesn’t right sometimes it people lose something then they do view it as God taking a gift away from them and that’s when they cry out and say you know lord what have you done for me. So we all have a choice when those bad things come we can view it as God taking a gift away from us or we can view it as God giving us the gift of drawing closer to him even through these circumstances. I set before you today. A blessing and a curse he says he leaves that choice up to us. So our English word for blessing is tied now to bliss to happiness to a physical joy and we know of course what joy is we know that God provides it on the supernatural level level and we even have that example in James where he says my brother encountered all joy when you fall into various trials knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience but that patience have its perfect work that you may be perfect and complete lacking nothing if any of you lacks wisdom let him ask of God who gives to all liberally and without reproach and it will be given to him so again this lacking nothing this perfection this completeness is speaking of our spirits and our souls and our spiritual things so we don’t ever want to think of trials as gifts from God We don’t want to think of them as a blessing they certainly do not make us happy but this is the kind of radical faith that we are taught through the Bible that Jesus presents to us it’s what he calls us to do to take the world’s idea of happiness and gifts and giving and turn them on their head to realize that when we have him that ultimate gift when we receive the Holy Spirit into our into our souls this all to make gift that God gives us then in him the poor are made rich and the weaker made strong and in Him we find our happiness and our bliss in our joy not in the things we surround ourselves with and not even in the circumstances of our lives but in the growth of our spirits so in him a gift is that carries a grace it’s something that transforms us for mere humanity to sons and daughters of God in him a blessing has nothing to do with whether it makes you happy it has to do with whether it makes you holy and drawls always on the power of that word Jesus he was the one who was in the beginning and through who. When we get to become a praise we get to become a testament of him to the world so we are called to be a good word to the world to be a blessing we are called to be the praise of God And so he’s going to give us according to our spiritual needs so that we can do that and spread that word to the nations so I’m going to end today by speaking an actual blessing a benediction to you Ligia taken from the end of a fusions Peace be to the family of believers and love with faith from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ grace be with all those who have an undying love for our Lord Amen.