Blessed are You

A Sermon Delivered at All Saints Anglican Church, Barboursville, WV
2/11/07

Today, in our culture, the idea of Blessing has come tepid and almost meaningless. We use the expression ‘Well, bless my soul…’ People say ‘God Bless You’ when you sneeze. We sometimes hear folks say ‘I am wonderfully blessed’ or ‘That was a real blessing to me’.

Normally, what we mean by this is that I got a nice warm feeling from it and I was encouraged. Sometimes we also mean that we had an increased sense of God at work in our lives, bringing us something that was unexpected and enriched our lives.

Wikipedia gives this meaing:
A blessing (from to bless, Old English bleodsian or bletsian) originally meant "sprinkling with blood" during the pagan sacrifices, the Blóts. A blessing, (also used to refer to bestowing of such) is the infusion of something with holiness, divine will, or one's hopes.

The New Testament word for Blessing is ‘Eulogeo’, to speak well. This is where we get our word Eulogy- a good word. ‘Benediction’ would be a Latin synonym. This sense of the word is to “speak well”; to praise or celebrate with praises, to invoke blessing upon someone or to consecrate a thing with solemn prayers.


The Hebrew word is Berachah: It is found in Deuteronomy 28: 1-14. Here, blessing means material prosperity and peace. It comes about as a result of obeying God and is His special favor bestowed upon his people. Blessing is every good thing: Peace with the peoples around Israel, seasonal rain, agricultural abundance, numerous healthy children and livestock, personal health and the ability to enjoy all these gifts freely. This is Blessing

In our Gospel reading, Jesus speaks praise or blessing upon certain groups of people – those who are poor, the hungry, those who weep, those who are hated and reviled for the sake of the Son of Man.

Immediately our red flags go up. These are not happy conditions! How could this be of God if He is interested in my happiness?! … The answer is that Blessedness is not mere happiness or comfort. It is something far stronger than that.

The immediate context of Jesus proclaiming the Beatitudes is that he was teaching the people. They had come from all around to hear him and there was a great crowd assembled. But they didn’t come just to hear him preach; they also sought him for healing. They were trying to touch him because power was coming out from him and people were being healed! So in order to understand the Beatitude blessings, we have to take the healing power into account.


We talked a few weeks ago about the year of Jubilee and how Jesus read Isaiah 61 in the Synagogue of Capernaum and proclaimed that this Scripture was fulfilled in their hearing that day. In this passage, Jesus is doing the stuff of the Jubilee ministry and his comments about blessing are an amplification of the Year of Jubilee.

The Beatitude Blessings are proclamations that the Kingdom of God had come into our midst. Jesus is saying that fulfillment is in Him, in believing that he is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. As we believe in Him, the poor receive the Kingdom. The hungry are filled. Those who weep laugh, and those who are persecuted rejoice. It happens now, but there is also a future fulfillment in mind: our reward is in Heaven.

Likewise, there are woes up ahead. The rich will be without consolation, the full will be hungry, those who laugh will mourn, and those who receive praise are classed with the false prophets. Whoever seeks to fill himself up with the things of the world will not receive the blessings of the Kingdom of Heaven. In other words, if all you want is Stuff, that’s all you get.

The Scriptures set up a contrast between the upright and the wicked. Psalm 1 and Jeremiah 17 sound remarkably similar: The good man delights in the law of the Lord, meditating and pondering it day and night. The wicked pursue their selfish pleasures.

The upright are rooted and grounded in the Word of God and so are like trees planted beside flowing water. They are green, well-watered and they prosper even in drought.

The wicked shall not stand before God’s ultimate judgment. They are like dry tumble-weed in the dusty desert pushed along by an unmerciful wind.

One the one hand, we can say that the blessing of God comes upon people when they acknowledge him as God and worship Him. To put it crudely, there is a sort of quid pro quo here: you do this for me, and I’ll do that for you.
Nevertheless, Blessing is not all sweetness and light, for James tells us that we are blessed when we persevere under trial (Jas 1:12), “for once he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to those who love Him.” And the words of Jesus come back to ring in our ears as well: Blessed are you when people hate you and defame you on account of Him. Your reward in heaven is great! There is a Blessing for those who stand up well under persecution and trial!


Yet there is something much more as well, and that is what we mean when we talk about Covenant. God spoke to Abraham in Genesis, chapters 15-17, calling Abraham to follow him to a promised land. God told him He would increase his descendents and that he would be the father of many nations. Kings would come out of his line and all the peoples of the world would be blessed through him. The Covenant of God with Abraham – and later the Covenant with Israel as a nation ( ) established the Jews as God’s own special people, but also charged this people with being a blessing to the rest of the world.

Because the Jewish nation did not fulfill its destiny to be the blessing to the ends of the earth, God turned from them and took the Gospel to the Gentiles, in order to fulfill the promise to bless all the nations of the world through Christ.

And as we said before, this blessing is two-fold. It comes to us immediately upon believing in Jesus as Savior and Lord. We begin to receive all the benefits of obeying God now in this life. But we also look forward to the ultimate fulfillment of the Kingdom when we go to live with God and the Peaceable Kingdom becomes a reality.

There is also another tantalizing blessing that comes to certain groups of people: Revival and Transformation. Down through history, and even right now in our own day, there are people who experience the special presence of God in Revival. In Fiji, in the Canadian Arctic, in Guatemala, and in Cali Columbia to name of few, people are turning to God in their desperation and are experiencing transformation of their societies that they could not have begun to imagine just a few years ago.

In one community, Almolonga, in Guatemala, the people had a long history of worshipping Mayan idol Maximon. They had a huge problem with drug and alcohol abuse, the jails were full continually, they had no real functioning school system and they could not grow enough food to feed themselves. In desperation, the people decided en masse to break their covenant with the old god and to follow Christ. Immediately then began to experience a revival.

Virtually the entire town became Christian overnight. The problems with addictions dried up, the jails emptied out and were closed for lack of occupancy, and the people began growing and harvesting their own food. Their crops were superabundant and they now export food to other towns. The Blessings of repentance, revival and community transformation have come to them.

This same kind of thing is happening in different parts of the world right now. Many would like to experience it here and now. Our guest from last week, Garry Adkins, told us about Mission Tri-State. This group of pastors and community leaders desperately desire to see the blessings of transformation come to our area. They gather to pray to God for revival, to repent of their sins and those of our country, and to ask God to Bless us by transforming our community.

Folks, this is what we want and need: the Blessing of God in our personal lives and in our community at large. We attract God’s blessing by submitting ourselves to Him in obedience and through humble repentance. And when the Blessing comes, we don’t just hoard it for ourselves, but we share the blessings of God with our neighbors.

This basic impulse to share with others our own blessings is what has sometimes been called the Social Gospel. The Social Gospel has been practiced by the mainline churches and is an attempt to live out the Gospel reality by making our world a more just place. Too often, however, the Social Gospel has become merely social programs lacking true spiritual power or meaning. The experience of the past 150 years of Social Gospel has taught us that mere social programs are not enough to solve financial and racial inequalities.

Rather, for True transformation of society to take place, we need the super-natural power of God to revive us and to bring us the blessings of Kingdom life here and now. This is why we want to link with Mission Tri-State and pray for God to rain down his Holy Spirit upon us. The problems of our world cannot be solved by pro-social entrepreneurship, but rather must depend upon the infilling power of the Holy Spirit to lead and guide us each step of the way.

I’ve included Psalm 67 on our reading sheet today. Please join with me in reciting it together.

Prayer: O God, you who bless us exceedingly abundantly above all we can think or ask, grant us the grace of your reviving and transforming power. Help us to be lead of you as we seek to do your will that, we may push back the gates of Hell and your Kingdom may come here on earth as it is in Heaven, through Jesus Christ our Lord, AMEN.