God's Plan from the Beginning // Blessed to Be a Blessing, Part 1

<p>If God is a God of blessing – then what about all the suffering we go through? And anyway, if God does bless, does that just mean a new car and a bigger house?</p> <h5> </h5> <h5><span style="color: #ff9900; font-size: 14pt;"><strong>Does God want to Bless Me?</strong></span></h5> <p>It is just great to be with you again this week and we are starting a new series that I’ve called <em>"Blessed to be a Blessing"</em>. There’s some really important teaching going to happen over these next four weeks on the subject of God’s blessing. Why is that important? Because I see so much misunderstanding about God and His heart and where He stands on blessing us.</p> <p>There seems to be a couple of extreme positions on this whole subject of God’s blessing – two opposite ends of the spectrum, if you like. On the one end, it goes something like this. God wants to bless me, therefore, I should believe Him for the new Mercedes convertible, more money and a bigger house and a big diamond ring. In effect it kind of reduces God down to some sort of sugar daddy: it's all about me, I am at centre stage – I name it and I claim it. And you know something, lots of Christians believe that.</p> <p>Now the problem that I have with that end of the spectrum is that when I take that and I hold it in one hand and I hold the cross of Christ in the other – when I look at Jesus, this Jesus that gave up everything for me; this Jesus who was nailed to a cross, beaten and bruised and brutalised, not even with the clothes on His back – and I compare those two things, you know something, this end of the spectrum over here, jars with that, don’t you think? And it leads to some of the worst excesses – the tele-evangelists pressuring people for money and flying around in their private jets. Is that where that should end up? I mean is that what God’s blessing is all about?</p> <p>The other end of the spectrum is you have to be poor to serve God. Money is evil. In fact, we just had a phone call, just the other evening, in the middle of the night, someone