The Power of Blessing

Everyone likes to be blessed.  Our human nature craves “self-satisfaction”; this is the core of wanting to receive a blessing. That desire to be blessed, though not evil in and of itself, not only brought into humanity the first sin through Adam but is also the very design of man by the will of God that we would seek blessing in a way that honors God.

God gave us the freedom to chose, and that freedom is powered by “self”. The “what’s in it for me” part of every one of us that yearns for reward and blessing.

God does love to bless his people.  In fact, he want to do this more than even the most “positive thinking” crowd can fathom.  However, the way he brings about blessing in this world is very unique.  He wants us to learn to bless each other and when we do this, we will be blessed in return.

We receive blessings from God directly quite a bit more than we are willing to admit.  In fact, we chalk a lot of his blessings up to our own good fortune, hard work or other grand accomplishment.  We miss understand the source of our blessing and thus rob God of the glory due him.

These blessings from God are difficult to trace because God does not walk around and physically hand out blessings.  We can’t see, touch, smell or feel him, although we often recognize his handy work.  I think it is for this reason that we don’t recognize when God blesses us.

That’s where we come in.  God has called us to be a blessing to others.  We are not to sit back and wait for blessings to come to us, we are to bestow blessings on others.  The power of the blessing is not in the receiving of the blessing but in the giving of the blessing.  It is a spiritual law based on the principle of sowing and reaping that is as real as the law of gravity.

You will reap what you sow. 

Many times the reaping comes back to you in the same form as it was sown, but other times it comes in ways that we least would expect.

The power of the blessing is that when you bless someone else, it comes back to you in a greater form.  Blessing is not a zero-sum game.  You don’t give something to someone else and lose it, you end up gaining.  The spiritual law of sowing and reaping says that you will gain more than you give.  This is a concept the world cannot understand because it does not fit into our understanding of the physical world.

Many things Jesus did do not fit into our physical world mindset.  Walking on water is not something that you can repeat in this physical world without overcoming some physical laws against you – gravity, density, viscosity, etc.  But somehow Jesus was able to trump a physical law by using spiritual laws. 

The physical realm, though very real to us, is but a small part in a much larger spiritual realm.  I like to explain it this way:

The spiritual world is like the electromagnetic spectrum

The electromagnetic spectrum consists of a variety of different qualities; the difference between each is simply the wavelength.

In it you have gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet, microwaves, radio waves, etc.  Each of these exist all around you, but you can’t see them, feel them or touch them. Radio waves for example are blasting through your house right now from TV and radio stations, wifi, cell phones, etc.  But you are never really aware of their presence.

But there is one small sliver of the vast electromagnetic spectrum that we hang our very existence on – visible light.  this visible light from the red to the violet is all that we can physically see, but it is only a part of a vast world.

The physical world we live in is only a small sliver in a vast spiritual world.  We can’t see the spiritual world around us, which is a good thing, because it would be like seeing all those radio waves around us.  We would quickly become overwhelmed.

The spiritual world has laws that trump the physical world.  For example, God operates outside of time and space.  Matter does not influence him.  He can also see both the beginning and the end at the same time.  We can’t comprehend that because our vantage point is within the very small sliver of the spiritual world call the physical world.

What does this have to do with blessing? 

When you bless someone, you operate in a method that is rooted not in physical properties, but in spiritual properties.  Blessing touches a vein of the spiritual world that trumps the physical limitations of our existence. 

When you bless another person, you are able to return a blessing to yourself because that process is governed by spiritual laws, not physical ones.  It doesn’t make sense that blessing someone would return a blessing to us in our world, but in God’s world, it makes perfect sense.

As one songwriter wrote about God’s spiritual world, “It’s the inside out, upside down world where you lose to gain and die to live.” – Misty Edwards

So start blessing people.

It not only returns rewards here, but it stores for you treasures in heaven when moth and rust do not destroy.  How can you do it?

Buy some $10 Walmart cards, pray about who to give them to and give them to strangers in need with notes of encouragement.

Do something for someone else anonymously that will cost you time and money, but will be a huge blessing to them. (Jesus says that when you do things like this in secret, God sees and will reward)

Buy a week’s worth of groceries for $30 from Angel Food Ministries and give it away to a family in need.

There are lots of ways to be a blessing to others, and when you do this, you will see that the rewards you receive can’t be measured.