"The Blessed Life"
`May the Lord bless you
and protect you.
May the Lord smile on you
and be gracious to you.
May the Lord show you his favor
and give you his peace.' (Numbers 6:24-26 NLT)
What does a blessed life look like? You ask ten different people you may get ten different responses. The world's standard of blessing looks a lot different than God's standard of blessing. God sees & gives blessings differently.
It is amazing what has crept into the church when it comes to being blessed. It almost looks identical to the American dream. It's really just a sanctified version if it. If we were to reduced it down to one word it would have to be STUFF; either that or COMFORT. I'm torn between the two. We have become so overrun with stuff & comfort that we look so much like the world. We are spending our precious time & resources on comfort & stuff that it's often times hard to imagine God's blessing as anything different from what this world has to offer.
Numbers 6 shows us that being blessed by God is actually polar opposite to being blessed by the world. God does not bless his people with stuff. Rather, his blessing includes his presence, grace, & peace! If we have him, his unmerited favor, & his peace, what else do we need? Now that is what it means to be blessed!
We cannot buy his presence, earn his grace, or acquire his peace by our means. This type of blessing is one that we must rely on God for completely! Everything else may seem like a blessing but comfort & stuff are just flimsy facades for the real thing, namely, God himself!
If we have him, his presence, grace, & peace, we will truly know what it is to have a blessed life. Let's give ourselves to this pursuit & leave all the other cheap imitation blessings behind.
All of these things point ultimately to Jesus. Jesus is what it means to be blessed. To have his presence in our lives through the Holy Spirit is what it means to be blessed! To have God's favor on our lives because of his obedience & righteousness in our place is what it means to be blessed. To have God's peace in our lives because of his intercession between us & God is what it means to be blessed.
The blessed life is the life lived for & with Jesus. Jesus > the American dream.
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