I am blessed
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I am Blessed
Genesis 1, 16-21
Online Sermon:
http://www.mckeesfamily.com/?page_id=3567
(Matthew 6:19-21). Since life is described as a "mist that
appears for a little while and then vanishes" (James 4:14), true
blessings must be sought elsewhere. To comprehend God's
definition of blessings, let's review the story of how God created
everything that exists.
The Creation Blessing
What does it genuinely mean to be blessed? The
interpretation of this term varies among individuals. Some use
it casually in conversation as a simple expression of good
wishes. For others, being blessed entails having excellent
health, abundant material possessions, or possessing beauty,
popularity, or power greater than others. While these can be
considered significant
gifts from God and signs
of divine favor, are they
not merely glimpses of a
more profound and
beautiful definition? If
this weren't the case,
why did the Apostle
Paul, who endured
imprisonment, severe floggings, repeated beatings with rods,
and three shipwrecks, boast in the goodness of the Lord and view
himself as blessed (2 Corinthians 11:20-33)? Why did Job, who
lost all his earthly possessions and children, humble himself,
worship, and praise God (Job 1)? Surely, being blessed
transcends the accumulation of "treasures on earth, where moths
and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal"
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In the beginning the “earth was formless and empty;
darkness was over the surface of the deep” (1:2). On day one of
creation “God said let there be light” and He separated the light
from the darkness thus creating day and night (1:3-5). On day
two God said, ‘let there be a vault between the waters to separate
water from water,” thus creating the sky (1:6-8). On day three
God said, “let the water under the sky gather in to one place and
let dry ground appear,” and land and the seas were formed (1:910). God said, “let land produce vegetation” and the plants and
trees were formed to “to bear fruit with seed in it, according to
their various kinds” (1:11-13). On day four God said, “let there
be lights in the vault of the sky to separate day from night and
let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years,
and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the
earth,” thus creating the sun, moon, and stars in the sky (1:1419). On day five God said, “let the water teem with living
creatures, and let the birds fly above the earth across the vault of
the sky,” thus creating the “great creatures of the sea” and “every
winged bird according to its kind” (1:20-23). And on day six
God said, “let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so
that they might rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the
sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the
creatures that move along the ground” (1:24-27). “And God saw
all that He had made, and it was very good” (1:31) and “by the
seventh day God finished the work He had been doing; so, on
the seventh day He rested from all His work (2:2).
To know that all things both seen, and unseen have their
origin in God (Colossians 1:16) is the key reason we as humans
say we are blessed! Our existence did not happen by chance but
occurred by the commands our loving Creator! And even
though the earth became so “corrupt in God’s sight” (Genesis
6:11) that He had to destroy it with a flood due to every
inclination of the human heart becoming evil (Genesis 8:21), and
though “the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah” became “so
great and their sin so grievous” (Genesis 18:20) that God reigned
down burning sulfur from the heavens on their lands (Genesis
19:23-24), and though Apostle Paul openly declares, “there is no
one righteous, not even one” (Romans 3:10); this in no way
negates the goodness of what God has created! The world and
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everything in it are not as the ancient Gnostics would have us
believe an evil prison that traps the divine sparks of God’s
created image-bearers. Nor are we created as a byproduct of
angry gods who merely wanted slaves to do their bidding and
chant endless praises to feed their egos. And though the “god of
this age” (2 Corinthians 4:4) roars around like a lion seeking
whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8), this does not mean he has
successfully taken captive every living creature that was ever
created. Genesis reveals to us that a sovereign God loved created
everything with a purpose. He loves those created in His image
so much that He sent His one and only son Jesus to atone for
their sins (John 3:16). We are truly blessed for God invites each
and everyone of us to be eternally adopted into His family!
To accept one being blessed is not always an easy task.
After God finished creating everything, He said all that He had
made was “very good.” Though most Christians accept this as
being true how many of them still struggle to see themselves as
“good” in the Lord’s eyes and not a heaping mess of sin and
disappointment? To accept the truth that one is blessed requires
one to successfully view one’s identity and purpose based on the
stories given in the Bible. Mission is only successful when its
identity and purpose are based on the stories given in the Bible.
In the book, Bible
and
Mission:
Christian witness
in a Postmodern
World, Richard
Bauckham
defines
a
metanarrative1 as
being “an attempt
to tell a single
story about the whole of human history in order to attribute a
single and integrated meaning to the whole.”2 The bible is the
only story that qualifies as a metanarrative because only God,
the creator and sustainer of the universe, can explain the purpose
of one’s existence. It is each person’s responsibility to examine
his or her life in the context of God’s revelation. “Not only is
self tied to knowledge of God, but we know ourselves truthfully
only when we know ourselves in relation to God. We know who
we are when we can place ourselves – locate our stories – within
God’s story.”3 To see how radically our story differs from what
God has planned for our lives let’s review the story of a woman
named Hagar.
1
This is a term created and defined by the author.
2
Richard Bauckham, Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World,
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2003), 87.
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God has a Glorious Future for Me!
In Genesis we are told of the calling and blessing of
Abram. God told him He would “make him into a great nation,
and I will bless you” (12:2) with “descendants as numerous as
the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore (22:17).
Though Abram believed in the Lord and was “credited to him as
righteousness” (15:6),
after ten long years of
being in the land of
Canaan
and
not
bearing any children,
he gave into his wife’s
request to sleep with
an Egyptian slave
named Haggar so that
they might “build a
family through her”
(16:1-2). To be a female and slave in the ancient world meant
one possessed no intrinsic value, have no freedom, and certainly
not a great future so to be asked to bear Abram’s child was quite
a blessing indeed!4 Hagar bore a son, Ishmael, seemingly
fulfilling the blessing and family promise. However, tension
3
Stanley Haeurwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre
Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1983), 27.
4
Taken from Blessed Broken Given series from Sermon Central.
arose as Sarai began to despise Hagar (Genesis 16:4-6). The
situation intensified when, at the age of 99, Abram received
news from the Lord that Sarai would conceive and give birth to
another son, Isaac (Genesis 17). As time passed, conflicts arose
between Ishmael and Isaac. Eventually, Sarah observed Ishmael
mocking, leading her to insist that both Hagar and Ishmael be
banished to wander in the Desert of Beersheba. In a moment of
desperation, Hagar, near death, placed her son under a bush, sat
down at a distance, and wept (Genesis 21). In her anguish, she
likely pondered how things could possibly get any worse.
The grand narrative of God’s word is that He loves us
deeply and for those who put their trust in Him “we know that
in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who
have been called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28).
While watching a child dying before one’s very eyes is certainly
bleak, this is not where the story ends! When Hagar was
pregnant and she fled because Sarai was mistreating her, an
angel of the Lord appeared and told her about a narrative for her
life that was truly amazing. The angel said, “I will increase your
descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count”
(16:9). The same God who gave life to Sarai’s dead womb was
about to do another miracle and from Ishmael make him into a
great nation! How shocked would have Hagar been to realize
that especially in one of the darkest moments of her life God was
amid her storms. The same God who loves us enough to create
the universe and send His son Jesus to die on the cross did so not
to condemn but to save us (John 3:17). No matter how bad our
circumstances become “not even death nor life, neither angels of
demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,
neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will
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be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus
our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39)! If we truly believe God is our
portion (Psalms 16:5-11) then we will know of our blessings that
are unspeakable, glorious, and eternal!