I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.
~ Genesis 12:2
I know it’s been a few weeks since we completed our Journeying through Genesis series, but because of the busy-ness of Lent I wasn’t able to write a post on each week’s educational series. Right now it’s still March, and we haven’t tackled our third week of Genesis yet, but I can’t wait.
Because in our third week on Genesis we start really looking into all this stuff about promise, reading through chapters 12-26, there is so much going on between God and humanity, particularly with Abraham and Isaac.
There’s a lot of blessings, a lot of promises, and it’s always amazing to me that we can point to these promises that God makes to Abraham, and they are promises we have inherited. As Christians we believe we inherited the promises to Abraham through Jesus – and the best part?
The promise is to use us, to work through us, God blesses us so that we can be a blessing to others.
And we talk about that a lot – the being blessed to be a blessing, and even though to me I see it as such a gift, I wonder if sometimes we don’t have difficulty seeing the way we are blessed – and then also being a blessing to others.
If you search on Instagram #blessed you end up with a lot of pictures of people who are on vacation, a surprising amount of new car photos, and more people in swimsuits than I think is necessarily appropriate.
Now plenty of other Christian writers have written about the #blessed phenomenon, and written better less pregnancy-fogged posts about it – but I think that it’s something we all sort of do, we equate being blessed to feeling good, to new or exciting things in our lives, and often we might even equate being blessed to material things in our lives like new cars or “healthy” finances.
But when God tells Abraham that he is blessed to be a blessing, he doesn’t give him new shoes and a bunch of money – in fact Abraham doesn’t even really have a home, him and Sara lead this nomadic existence traveling from place to place for most of their story, but God’s blessing comes in the form of family, in the form of a promise of relationship – and we are promised that relationship too.
It’s in this relationship with God that we are blessed, that we know the love and mercy we have been given, and are able to go out into the world to share it with others. I think that’s a big part of this blessed-to-be-a-blessing, and as we begin to move out of this Lenten season and look towards Easter, I hope that we can find news ways to be a blessing to others.
What are ways that you feel blessed by God? How does your relationship with God change the way you care for others? What ways might you be a blessing to someone else? Stay tuned for Journeying through Genesis – Week 4 on April 25th.
