Costly Blessings

Luke 1:28 NKJV

And having come in, the angel said to her, “Rejoice, highly favored one, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women!”[a]

Genesis 12:1-7

12 Now the Lord had said to Abram:“Get out of your country,

From your family

And from your father’s house, To a land that I will show you. 2 I will make you a great nation; I will bless you And make your name great; And you shall be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, And I will curse him who curses you; And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

4 So Abram departed as the Lord had spoken to him, and Lot went with him. And Abram wasseventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 5 Then Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the people whom they had acquired in Haran, and they departed to go to the land of Canaan. So they came to the land of Canaan. 6 Abram passed through the land to the place of Shechem, as far as the terebinth tree of Moreh.[a] And the Canaanites were then in the land.

7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your descendants I will give this land.” And there he built an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

“Count your blessings. Name them one by one. Count your many blessings see what God has done”. Those are the words a favorite hymns of thanks, “Count Your Blessings” from the Baptist Hymnal. The truth is, if we really tried to count our blessings, we just couldn’t. There are far too many ways that God has been good to us to count. But when we look back. How many of our blessings came at great cost?

For Abraham, the cost of being blessed beyond belief by God, would be that he would have to trust God and leave everything he knew. God called him to leave his family, all his cousins, aunts, uncles, parents and grandparents, and go with just his wife and his animals to a place that God would show him. Leaving your family was something you just didn’t do back then. Your family was your entire community and God was telling Abraham to have faith that if he left his family, that God would be his family, his community, his guide, his map. God basically said “start over, start walking and I’ll tell you when you get there.” And when he got to the place that God had chosen for him…if he followed through, God promised Abraham more family than there were stars in the sky!

And what about Mary and Joseph? It’s hard to name all of the ways that they sacrificed in order that Jesus might be born and raised to adulthood. They risked losing family and standing in society over the controversy of a child born out of wedlock. They risked their lives as well, for surely Herod would not just have killed Jesus when he found him. They had to be completely in sync with God’s leading to know when a dream to go to Egypt wasn’t just a dream but a command to “Go. Now. Quickly.”

But blessings were different back then. Blessings weren’t something that you counted once a year. To be blessed by God, was to be chosen and set apart for something great…your blessing was who you were; your entire way of life. A blessing from God was passed on from generation to generation. If you were blessed, your entire family would be blessed. That made saying no to God’s offer of a blessing a lot more difficult than it might be for us today. Today we have so much, what’s one more blessing?

The truth is, we think that we can do so much on our own, that we often forget to ask God what God wants to do in our lives. God wants to lead us on a path of blessing, a blessing that is special and just for us, but first we must trust in Him and be open to wherever He leads.

This Christmas, God is calling us to live into the mystery of his blessing. It is a blessing that we can’t hold or plan for, but rather an unexpected blessing that will change everything. A blessing that can’t fit under a tree.

Prayer: Holy God may we be willing to go, to move, to listen when you offer your blessing, even when it comes at great cost. - Amen