Bible Study – Are You a Bucket or a Hose? – Genesis 12: 1-9
Written by Dave Urbanski
God wants to bless you. How many of you are already blessed? Alright. So you already experienced the blessing of God. God wants to bless you more. The word ‘blessing’ is this idea of gift. God wants to give you gifts. He wants to bless you with these gifts. When we say bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name, when we’re saying, “Lord, I want to bless you,” what we’re saying is I want to give you gifts. I want to give you gifts of worship. I want to give you gifts of song. I want to give you gifts of praise. I want to give you the gift of my heart, my life. That’s blessing the Lord when we use it that way.
Now we’re going to look in Genesis 12 at a man who was blessed, Abraham. God had a particular blessing attached to his name that was his packaged blessing. Abraham’s blessing. We’re going to learn from it. We’re going to get some illustrations for how God would have us be blessed. But that was his blessing. Each one of us could stand up and talk about the blessing that God has given to us and how He’s worked in our lives.
Let me just point out that one of the reasons that God wants to bless us is because He wants us to be wowed with His greatness. So that we will say, “Praise the Lord for the blessings He’s given us.” That’s one of the reasons. Think about blessing, not just from your perspective for a moment, about the things you get. But think about it from God’s perspective. Why is He blessing? One reason is to wow us with His goodness so that we’ll be impressed with Him and we’ll worship Him and we’ll praise Him. That’s one of the reasons He blesses us.
That’s what we’re going to see in Abraham’s life today. And that’s what God wants to do with each of us. Just imagine God has all these blessings with your name on them ready to give them to you. He wants to pass them onto you in your life.
Now in case you misunderstand me here, when I talk about the gifts that God gives and the blessing that He wants you to have more of, I don’t want you to think that everything then is going to be rosy, everything is going to be fine. So I’m going to take you one verse into next week. Next week’s message will take us into the next verses. I just want you to read verse 10. Notice it says in verse 10 – Now there was a famine in the land. You’re going, “Whoa, wait a minute! I thought he was being blessed.” You’ve got to understand we live in a world that’s broken. We as believers experience pain and challenges in our lives, just like other people experience pain and challenges in their lives. There are certain decisions that we make and choices that we make that free us up from some of the pain that other people experience because we’re following the Lord and His directives. But that doesn’t mean that we escape all of the pain in the world. You’re going to have challenges, you’re going to have struggles, relational struggles, health struggles, financial struggles. You’re going to experience those.
You see you just have to understand that the blessing of the Lord is not all about everything going well. It’s about God giving you gifts that are appropriate in that moment. And sometimes the gifts that God gives you are those gifts of encouragement, those gifts of comfort. The blessings that He gives to you are the ones that are hope. Those ones of encouragement that God wants you to have inside of your heart. That’s what we’re going to see in this passage.
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