How To Receive God’s Blessings

Christians love talking about blessing. Many mega-churches are obsessed with the ‘blessing’ narrative.

When something goes right for us, we say we’ve been blessed. The blessings of God are seen as good favor having been visited upon you, probably for something you’ve done to please God. It’s like a reward.

Where did we get the idea of a performance-based God who gives us good things when we do something good? It certainly isn’t in the Bible.

Many churches in the West subtly propagate a ‘blessing theology.’ It’s not quite the prosperity ‘gospel’, but it’s not far away from it. And it’s mainstream in many of our churches, to the point where we don’t even recognize it.

This idea is proclaimed as a subtle form of “trusting” God. It is believing that if we live right, things will go right — that if we tithe a certain amount, we will receive a financial blessing. The flip side of course is that if life is going badly for me, then I must be doing something wrong; I must have sinned in some way.

Sh*t happens

But life just isn’t like that and it’s not our fault. Jesus said the rain falls on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45). That’s just the way life is.

Unfortunately, the church is so caught up in its ‘blessing theology’ that it falls mainly to secular artists to come out and write honestly about life. Most Christian pop music certainly doesn’t do it.

Listen to John Mellencamp, from his 2009 song, Longest Days:

“Nothing lasts forever,

The best efforts don’t always pay.

Sometimes you get sick and you don’t get better.

That’s when life is short, even in its longest days”

If there was one Bible character who understood this, it was Job. Yes, he received abundant material blessings after suffering, but he is an exception, not the rule. The rule in the Bible is that all its great leaders went through a wilderness experience of some sort, including Jesus. That’s why he is referred to in Isaiah as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, and that it is by his suffering that we are healed. It is not despite his suffering but through his suffering, that salvation is offered to the world.

The ‘blessing-atitudes’

When Jesus talked about blessings, he gave us the Beatitudes. It’s the poor who are blessed, those who mourn, the ones nobody cares about, the ones who always miss out, and the ones for whom something always goes wrong. They are the ones who are blessed by God now.

That’s how God sees blessings. It’s quite different to how much of the church sees them. The people who heard the Sermon on the Mount lived under the oppression of occupation by a foreign power. They were desperate for a messiah to overthrow the might of the Romans. They were constantly told that they were nothing, that they only existed to serve Rome. But Jesus told them they were blessed — that they, the “useless” ones, were the salt of the earth and the light of the world and not to hide their light so that people could see how good God is.

Jesus said the poor and mournful are the ones who really receive God’s blessings. God has special care for them because they’re always trodden on and considered unworthy or sinful.

The reason he said these people are blessed is because it is when you are poor in spirit, when you mourn, and when you are persecuted — in other words, when you are at the end of your rope and have nothing left to hold on to — that you can more clearly see that God is really all you’ve ever had.

Jesus’ blessing of the poor, of course, includes the materially poor. Australian pastor, Tim Costello, tells the story of when he was in Sri Lanka just after the Asian tsunami in 2004. Back in comfortable Australia, people were asking how you could believe in a God who would allow such a disaster to happen. But that wasn’t what the people directly affected by it in Sri Lanka were asking. The people who lost everything over there were answering that question by saying, “How can we not believe in God; God is all we have left!”

Only when we accept that good and bad things happen to us, no matter what type of people we are, do we realize that life is ultimately out of our control. It is then that we can more fully surrender to Christ and more fully realize that nothing in life can be ultimately relied on to give us what we need, except God alone.

And it is this that leads to the joy we really desire in our heart of hearts.

Jesus’ surprising night of joy

This is why the only time Jesus speaks of his own joy is on the night before he dies (John 15:11), the night he is betrayed by one of his closest friends, the night he is denied by an even closer friend, the night all his best friends abandon him in the hour of his greatest need as he endures an unjust trial and the mockery of those who should know better.

It is when we fully surrender to God because we finally know that God is the only one who can satisfy the deepest longing in our hearts that we find the joy we ultimately long for.

The Gospel is not about self-fulfillment; it’s about submitting to the love of God for us and realizing that we often get in the way of that.

When Jesus was asked about who sinned when the tower fell and killed 18 people (Luke 13:4), he said it wasn’t about whether or not anyone sinned. Good and bad things happen to anyone. People who do bad things often get away with it, and people who do good things are often misunderstood and not recognized.

It’s not about reward and punishment. It’s about love. Jesus said to go away and do your good deeds and not worry about whether anyone sees them. It’s about giving to others. Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.

The ‘blessing theology’ that pervades many of our churches is nothing more than a reflection of our individualistic culture. It has very little at all to do with Jesus and following him. The Gospels tell us that Jesus is always on the side of the oppressed. Always. They are the ones who are blessed.

Now, do you really want God’s blessing?