In Genesis 12 God calls Abram to leave his home and tells him, "I will make of you a great nation and will bless you...you will be a blessing...all the families of the earth will be blessed because of you."
Though there are other meanings to what it is to be "blessed", I want to focus for a moment on something I heard years ago related to one meaning of what it is to be blessed. And that is that we are included in God's family. Applying that to this pronouncement to Abram, we could hear it more or less in this way: "I will make you and yours part of My family; in turn, you will be a visible family attracting all the other families of the earth to My global family..."
Generally our thinking as affluent American Christians is that to be blessed is to have good things happen to us or given to us. We often say things like, "God has been good to me; I've been blessed with everything working out well in this situation..." It's appropriate, of course, to be thankful for good things, but what about people who never have anything good happen to them? What about the followers of Jesus around the world who suffer without any of the simple things humans need to survive?
So I propose that we look at being blessed more in terms of being in relationship, both with the Father of all the families of the earth (see God's Dysfunctional Family) and with all His children. After many years of living and working among diverse peoples outside of the US along with years of studying and teaching scripture, I'm increasingly convinced that God's priority in His kingdom is relationships. He shows from start to finish in scripture that He wants to bless all people; in other words, He wants all people to be included in His family.
And like any good parent, He longs for His children to get along with one another, to be in unity, loving and caring for one another in visible and obvious ways that attract others.
(Next time I'll touch on Jesus' desire for oneness among His followers as seen in His prayer in
John 17).
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You actually make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this topic to be really
ReplyDeletesomething which I think I would never understand. It seems
too complicated and extremely broad for me.
I'm looking forward for your next post, I'll try to get the hang
of it!