Purposeful Blessing

May God be gracious to us and bless us
    and make his face shine on us –
so that your ways may be known on earth,
    your salvation among all nations. – Psalm 67.3

From David

What are we to do with God’s blessing?

It is good to ask for the Lord’s blessing. I remember being told that prayer shouldn’t just be a list of requests to God. That is absolutely right, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that our Lord is the One who loves to bless us, his children. So let us commit to praying prayers of confession, thanksgiving and adoration, but never let us stop from praying for his blessing.

But we can go further. I was very struck in my Bible reading today about how the singer of Psalm 67 does a riff on the most famous and quoted blessing in the Bible. He starts with the blessing, but half way through he pulls a handbrake turn and inserts, “so that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations”. God’s intention when he blesses us is to bring us happiness, but it is also to bless others. And that blessing has a particular focus: that others would see how great God is.

So a good spiritual exercise, is that when the Lord blesses us by answering our prayers, we then ask him how we can use that blessing, to make his ways and his salvation known to others