Reclaiming the Lost Art of Blessing

Tina Boesch

Aren’t we glad to be here in Indianapolis this week? I can’t tell you what an honor it is to start off with you guys in this first breakout session. I don’t know about you, but I am so ready to behold and believe y’all don’t we need a refresher. That’s part of what this time is about. I pray that every single session will be soul nourishing for you. I know some of us may have come tired. Some of you are coming straight off of flights and have your luggage in the room. Some of you may be hungry because you did not have time to eat because the lines were so long for check in whatever state you’re coming in, I hope you’ll find the permission right now to just take a deep breath and know that we are going to spend time in the Word, and I pray that it is like water for your Soul. My family and I actually lived for about 14 years in the Middle East. My husband and I were the International Mission Board for almost 20 years. All three of our kids were born overseas. It’s a big part of the my story that has shaped me in a lot of profound ways. If I ask you guys for a favorite vacation memory, I bet something would come to mind for each one of you. For me, hands down, I wouldn’t even have to think about it. The last spring before our family left Turkey, we had been living there for 14 years. That’s where two of my kids were born. It’s where I had done life with women. My oldest daughter, Lois, who turns 20 at the end of the month, was two months old when we moved to the city, so all of her memories were shaped there. But our kids had not really seen a lot of the Turkish countryside, because when we had a chance for a vacation, we tried to go see family, and so our last spring in Turkey, we decided to take a road trip, an epic road trip. We rented a van, we had a young couple who was traveling with us, and we went to drive all the way through a the parts of Asia Minor, where Paul would have been, where we had the birth of some of the first Christian churches, the churches of the revelation. And the morning we were in Ephesus, no one was there, and so we’re sitting in the amphitheater. And the reason I wanted to go to these places before we left Turkey was because I wanted my kids to know for sure that when we open our Bibles and when we read a book like Ephesians, it is written to people who lived in a real places, in a real time in history, that experienced some of the same doubts and confusion, that we do, some of the same struggles, but that these things really happened. And so when you’re in Ephesus, what are you going to read Ephesians? Right? And so that’s how we’re going to open our time this morning, because when Paul blesses churches, he is has some specific reasons for those blessings in mind. Often, Paul’s prayers will develop themes that he’s going to be talking about in his letters, and Ephesians is no different. So we’re going to open our time together, and this conference with one of my favorite blessings that Paul authored for the church in Ephesus is in chapter three. For this reason, I kneel before the Father from whom every family in heaven on earth is named. And we’ll come back to that idea of the families of the earth when we hit Genesis 12, for whom every family in heaven on earth is named. I pray that he may grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power in your inner being through His Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, and I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints, what is the height and the length and the width and the depth of God’s love and to know God’s love that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God, Lord, may it be so, I pray that we would be able to see the fullness of the blessing that we have in Christ today, Lord, and gain a vision for the way that we step into your beautiful story so that your blessing intended for all the families of the earth would flow through us in Jesus name. All right, y’all so when we read a blessing like that, I wonder, when I was walking the streets of Ephesus, you know, we came down out of that amphitheater, and from there we could see the road that would have led to the poor. Part of Ephesus, turn left, and you can walk down a road that goes by the agora, where you can imagine that people like Priscilla and Aquila may have bought supplies for their tent making business. Or maybe John, who spent a lot of time in Ephesus, may have bought bread or olive oil for his dinner. Who knows? We can imagine? I mean, we know that Timothy spent time in Ephesus. Paul spent at least three years in Ephesus. Priscilla and Aquila were there. Apollo so many people that we read about in Acts spent time planting churches in this city. When you walk by the agora, then you come to an gorgeous if you see pictures of Ephesus, you’ll see this the library of Celsus. And it’s just a facade. But out front there are four columns, four statues that represent virtues that would have been really significant in this culture at this time, Sophia, wisdom. There’s another statue that has the word Arete, which means excellence, moral excellence. Another statue that says enoya, which is thought. Another statue for episteme, knowledge. Do you know what is not there? Love, agape, love for a culture that valued wisdom, knowledge, all good things, right? All good things, Paul is going to pray that they know the agape, the height, the breadth, the length, the width, the depth of God’s love. That does what it surpasses knowledge. Now, one of the reasons I was dialed into this idea of blessing was because when we moved to Turkey, you start learning language, right? And one of the things about crossing cultures, it’ll waken you up to something that you may have missed in your own culture. It kind of shakes you out of your patterns. One of the things that you learn immediately in Turkish is that there are some of these blessings that you’re using day in and day out. There are also blessings for special occasions. One point, my sister had just had a baby, my language helper came over, and she had met my sister on several occasions. And she said, Tina, before we were going to call Katie so we could talk to her about the baby, get to see the get to see the new baby. And my friend said, Hey, wait before we call. Can you tell me what you would say in English for the birth of a new baby? What blessing? And I had to think about that. And I said, Honestly, we just say congratulations. And then she looked serious, and she said, No. She said, I mean, what would you say as a Christian, as a blessing for a new baby? And you know, this was a friend who comes from a very traditional Muslim family, very committed in her faith, and she had been watching me and a number of our other colleagues for a long time, and she had a lot of questions about Christianity, about whether it was good, about whether God was good, about whether what we believed was True. And I knew this was an important witnessing moment, and I didn’t know what to say. And so I said, Honestly, we mostly say congratulations. And so when a Turk disagrees with you, they do something very specific. They do this, it’s like a click and a head lift. So she looks at me, and she goes, she said, You say congratulations for everything. Congratulations is not a blessing.

Tina Boesch

And y’all, that phrase, that observation, congratulations, is not a blessing. Was like a shock to me, and that moment when I thought, I need to understand this, Lord, what is a blessing? Are there biblical blessings that I can share with my Muslim friends and neighbors that will help them see the goodness of being related to you in Christ. What are those blessings? And as I dug into Scripture y’all, I started reading, especially initially, Paul’s letters, to find, are there some blessings that are in scripture that I can begin to pray for and with literally communicate to my Muslim neighbors, especially for holidays, for the birds of babies, all these momentous times in their lives, but in Turkish culture, for the blessing for the baby, for instance, would be ani le Baba levid Soon, which means May the baby grow up together with its mother and father, which is a beautiful blessing for the longevity of the family, the togetherness of the family for a couple getting married. Biryas took the cojan. May you do life, May you grow old together sleeping on the same pillow. Isn’t that beautiful? There are all these beautiful blessings. So I wanted to know, how can I speak blessing in a way that also draws friends and neighbors to Christ? Best. So that sent me on a law, a multi year search to find and understand not just how to bless, but what is the meaning of blessing in the Bible. One of the reasons I ignored the theme, even though I knew it was there, was because it’d been many times co opted by the prosperity gospel. You know, because I had such a resistance or reaction to prosperity gospel, I didn’t I read past those passages. But y’all, we can get into as much theological error by ignoring a theme as we can by over emphasizing it. So one of the things I learned is that blessing really is an essential part of the way that God relates through the story of Scripture. So today, during our time, we are going to look at three aspects of blessing that we find in the biblical text, especially looking at three of the most significant blessings in the life of Israel that would have shaped someone like Paul’s understanding of blessing. Then we’re going to look at four contexts for blessing that we find in the biblical text. And then we’re going to look at five steps for blessing, incorporating blessing into our lives and relationships. So it’s a lot to cover, but we’re going to get through as much of it as we can. All right, y’all so first time, if I ask you, what is the first place you see blessing in the Bible, I bet you would guess Genesis, and you would be right, because the very first time we see God blessing is in the context of the creation narrative. In fact, when we get y’all are probably may know that there’s this pattern that we see in the first six days of creation, right? God speaks something comes into being. God looks at it, says, It’s very good. Evening, morning, a new day dawns. Well, when we get to days five, six and seven, there is a new dynamic that breaks into that creation narrative, and that is blessing. We learn that God is a God who initiates blessing. He is the source of blessing. So on day one, on day five, when he creates the fish and the birds, he blesses them. God creates them, and He blesses them. Now on day six, when he creates man and woman, the text says, And God blessed them, and God said to them. So when God cries, there’s a subtle shift where now God is speaking with Adam and Eve. So the first thing I want you guys to notice about blessing in the Bible is that it is relational. So we have a tendency in our culture to think of blessing as a possession, as a thing, as something we receive. But first and foremost, blessing when God speaks, it is the opening of a dialog. He speaks blessing to Adam and Eve. And that is critical. When you’re in relational cultures like the Middle East, you feel this innately. You know, in our western secularized culture, we think we can have a relationship that’s neither for or against. You know, that’s sort of neutral. But in cultures like these, blessing initiates and establishes a relationship. There are no neutral relationships. So God is initiating blessing that is the first, literally, the first way he relates to man and woman. And think about even the content of the blessing is relational. Y’all, God blessed them. We’re in 128 of Genesis, And God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. What happens when you’re fruitful and you multiply? This is the blessing of intimacy. It is the blessing of family, the fruitfulness and multiplication create flourishing life on Earth. They create families, communities, social networks, relationships. God is blessing humanity with relationships, and he’s doing it through a way of relating that is framed by blessing. So blessing is relational, and the psalmist innately understands that the right response to God’s blessing is what to bless the Lord. Think about Psalm 104 Bless the Lord. O my soul and all it is within me. Bless His holy name. Psalm 34 I will bless the Lord at all times this praise will continually be in on my lips, so we have this back and forth dialog with the Lord that is sustained by blessing. All right, y’all so we have learned blessing is relational. It is a way God initially relates to humanity, and we will see this pattern of blessing will be continued throughout the biblical narrative. Second thing I want y’all to see is that blessing is future and outward focused, and there’s nowhere we see this more clearly than God’s call and blessing of Abraham. So in Genesis 12, we see God reach out and say to Abram and say, go from your country. Your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you, and then what does God say? And I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you. I will make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt, and all the families of the earth, all the families of the earth, all the peoples of the earth, all the ethnic the ethnic groups of the earth, will be blessed through you. So y’all can see this repetitive nature, one of the ways that blessing is different from Thanksgiving, which is also a way we relate to the Lord, is that Thanksgiving is a backward look like I’m looking back and reflecting on the goodness of God in the past. Blessing is future oriented. I’m looking forward to a future that can only be realized in the presence and in the relationship with the Lord. So blessing is future focused. We see that in this future tense that we get repeatedly through God’s blessing of Abraham. What we also see is that is outward focused, y’all, is this blessing for Abraham? No. I mean, yes, he is going to benefit from it. This is a good that God is doing for him, but it is not something that he possesses and can claim as having a right to. Instead, it has got something, a good that God is doing through him, so that he will be a blessing, and he will be a vehicle, a mediator of God’s blessing for all the families of the earth. It is so significant that in Paul, that Paul, in Galatians, three, eight and nine, lifts this blessing, and he calls it the proto Luang Galion, the Gospel beforehand. He calls it the gospel spoken beforehand. Why? Because in this blessing, we get repeatedly, five times the Hebrew root for bless, which is Barak, b, r, k. So we get five times that root. Do you know how many times the word curse has appeared in Genesis? And up until this point, exactly five. In this blessing, we have a reversal of the curse of sin and death that was a result of Adam and Eve’s rebellion and rejection of the Lord’s God, of the good boundaries God laid out for living in their world. Now we see that God has chosen a man, a family, through whom his blessing is going to go out to all the families of the earth. It is outward focused, and God is inviting Abraham to become a part of the stream of blessing that’s going to flow out and redeem creation. Now it’s interesting to me that all the families of the earth, that word earth there is the same. Do you remember when Adam and Eve take the fruit, they eat it as a result, the curse of sin and death is part of God’s judgment on their rejection of the good boundaries. Remember, there is the ground will be cursed because of you. Is what God says. And that word for Earth, the ground the Earth is the same Hebrew word we find here in this text, all the families of the earth. This is the reversal the promise, the blessing, the hope of a reversal of the curse through someone in Abraham’s line. Now, y’all in Abraham’s lifetime, what part of this blessing Did he see realized

Tina Boesch

only the birth of son Isaac, the child of promise. And if we wonder if God’s blessing is something we possess and hold, just think about what God asks of Abraham. Later in the narrative, he will ask Abraham what Take your son, your only son, the son whom you love, and sacrifice him to me, God is saying the one part of the blessing that I promised you, I am now asking you to let go hold with open hands. And Abraham steps out in faith, and that is the reason we see him as the father of the faithful, and it’s the reason that Paul leans on that story of Abraham so often when he is expounding the gospel, but it shows us that blessing is not something we possess. It is something we open receive with thanks as a manifestation of God’s grace in our lives and hold with open hands, knowing that it is something God can use to bless others and draw into His kingdom. So blessing is relational. It is future and outward focused, and blessing ultimately, we know y’all. It’s an expression of God’s grace that is fully realized ultimately in Christ alone. So to see. I want us to go to a blessing that’s probably the most familiar. There’s a wonderful song of it number six, may God bless you and keep you. Y’all familiar with this one. May God bless you and keep you, may his face shine on you and be gracious to you. May He look on you with favor and give you peace. Now what I want to do, though, is think about that blessing and think about the context. So you all know one of the most basic tools of Scripture, of hermeneutics, of Scripture interpretation, is that scripture interprets scripture. So if we want to understand a passage, the words used in it, or what’s going on in it, we want to look for where we find those words and concepts in other places in Scripture. So if we look at the blessing of number six, and you can find the whole of it in 22 to 27 of number six, we have to remember what’s happening in the life of Israel at this time. So Israel has just been delivered from slavery in Egypt, the family of Abraham has been fruitful and multiplied in the land of Egypt, where they went, where God was able to provide for them during a famine, and they had become slaves, and now God has rescued them from slavery in Egypt, they have seen his presence going before them in a pillar of cloud and in fire by night, and they have watched God rescue them again and again. They have seen Moses go up onto Sinai into the cloud and receive the law and come back. They have made an idol in his absence and rejected the Lord and still Moses furious, right, goes back up, receives the law again, comes down. By the time we get to numbers. Numbers in the Hebrew would have been called in the wilderness. That’s actually the name of the book in the Hebrews. And so we can see the tide to Exodus, to numbers a little more clearly when we realize now we’re going to read about what’s happening in the wilderness while the people are journeying with God in the tabernacle. So the tabernacle has been built, and now God is speaking and meeting with Moses in that tabernacle, the first part of the blessing, may God bless you and keep you. That is continuous with God’s relationship with the people up until this time, his blessing of Adam and Eve his the protection he promises Abraham when he blesses him in Genesis five, repeatedly, we see God’s protection as part of his blessing. What would have been totally unexpected, totally shocking to the people at Sinai would have been to hear God author this blessing, which he commanded to be prayed over the people every time they met for worship. May God’s face shine on you and be gracious to you. You guys. Go back with me. What is happening? Remember, and if we were to turn back to Exodus 33 we could read about Moses going up to Sinai and meeting with the Lord for 40 days. And the people can’t even get near the mountain. Remember, like they are very distant, only Moses is able to meet with the Lord face to face. When Moses comes down from the mountain, his face is shining. His face is shining, and the people are afraid of the reflected shine on Moses’s face because he’s been in the presence of the Lord. He’s seen the Lord’s glory, and it is reflecting off of him. So they ask him to veil his face, put a veil over it, because they can’t even look on reflected shine. And every time Moses goes into the tabernacle and he comes out, he has to veil his face, because he is reflecting the shine God’s blessing authored for his people. May God’s face shine on you. Suggests that he intends for all of his people to enjoy the same kind of nearness, closeness that Moses did with him when he spoke to him face to face. Y’all, it is a shocking blessing. No priest would have ever written this because they would have said this is not possible. None of us can be in God’s presence except Moses. May God’s face shine on you and be gracious to you. May He look on you, turned his countenance on you with and with favor and give you peace. Y’all, my daughter, I’m to have a terrible reputation in my home for being like present, but not really there. You know, like things are happening around me, but I’m not really hearing what’s going on. I’m like, one track. Tina is what my kids call me. So my littlest, Naomi, is our only extrovert in a family of all introverts. And so one time I’m clicking away at my computer, I’m really, like, engaged, and she has been talking to me. I haven’t even noticed or acknowledged her presence. I’m right there. We’re sitting right beside each other. So finally, I feel these little hands on my face, and she turns my face. She says, Mom, look at me when I’m speaking to you. Look at me in the eyes. God is saying. That I want you to pray this blessing over my people, may God look on you with favor. This is about more than presence. It is about attentive presence. It is about knowing that God is not just with us. He is actually attending to us. He sees us and when we are in His presence, in that way, we experience Shalom, the peace of the Lord that is more than the absence of conflict. It is this holistic well being of healed and right relationships. I mean y’all what a blessing this blessing is so in Paul that when he opens and closes letters and he says Grace and peace to you, it’s quite likely that’s a shorthand for this whole blessing. It is the expectation that we will see God face to face. Now the priests are praying this over the people of God every time they meet at the tabernacle, and when they do, all the people fall face down like this is the climax of their worship. Service is to receive this blessing. It continues to be a absolutely routine part of Israel’s worship through the period of the temple and well into the synagogue era. So this is a blessing Jesus knows and has received. Think with me to Matthew 17, when Jesus invites Peter and John and James to walk up with him to a high mountain, which would have evoked the sense of Sinai and y’all, what happens? Do you remember Jesus? All of a sudden, his whole being is transfigured, is changed. Matthew 17 two he was transfigured in front of them, and his face shown like the sun

Tina Boesch

in John’s gospel, in the PROLOG John’s Gospel is the only one we don’t get into account of the Transfiguration, because he gives us a glimpse of it in the first chapter of his gospel, when he tells us the word in the beginning was the Word. Word was with God. The Word was God, he was in the beginning. And then all that past tense turns on, the verb shine. It’s shining now because he had seen Jesus’s shining face a fulfillment of the blessing he had prayed his whole life. May God’s face shine on you. His disciples were seeing it in real time, and Paul understands the significance of that moment when he says, in Second Corinthians, four six for God, who said, Let light shine out of the darkness has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ. Y’all we are the fulfillment of a blessing spoken to a people all 3000 years ago in the desert, and repeated and repeated. It’s such a beautiful vision of what is possible. So blessing is an expression of God’s grace, and we see it fully realized in Christ. And I just want to point out that the people of Israel, did they deserve this blessing? Y’all not at all. I mean, if we look at the whole narrative of what’s happening in the desert, we see it in Exodus, in numbers. Y’all, they’re stiff necked. They’re doubting God’s goodness. They’re doubting his provision. They’re grumbling. They’re not content. They they have a taste for what they experienced in Egypt, especially like cucumbers and pomegranates, and they’re disappointed constantly. So do they deserve the blessing? Have they earned? It? Is it merited? No, and we are just like them. And still, God says, May God bless you and keep you. This is the blessing he wants his people to experience in His presence. All right, y’all so I love the Irish poet John O’Donoghue comment that a blessing awakens future wholeness. We use the word foreshadow for the imperfect representation of something that is yet to come. We could say that blessing for brightens the way it gives us a vision of what is possible with God. That’s what God’s doing in the desert. He is giving them a picture of his heart for them, what He wants His people to experience in His presence. So now I feel like we’re at a good time where we can kind of define blessing a little bit. So the first really good study of blessing in the Bible was written by a German theologian named Claus Westermann, and he defines God’s blessing as the vital effective force that sustains life. God’s blessing is the vital effective force that sustains life. Now, since, in the time since I started studying blessing, there are a lot of. That are wonderful resources that have been published in the time. Crossway has a great series of short studies in biblical theology, and there’s one on divine blessing by an author named William Osborne, and he says that divine blessing is God’s creatures experiencing fullness of life, both physically and spiritually in His presence. So that’s the state of being blessed. Now when God calls the Levites, the priests, to be mediators of his blessing to the people. Now we have people blessing people, and we can look at lots of other places in Genesis where this is happening, but people are now called to be a mediator of God’s blessing out to other people. So when that happens, and this is an important, I think, thing for us to grasp, blessing is a relational form. Remember, it’s relational. Blessing is always a part, an aspect of the way we relate to other people. Blessing is a relational form of intercession that involves envisioning, faithfully praying for communicating it needs to be expressed. Y’all. A lot of times, our prayers are internal. I’m praying for you, but I have no idea what you’re praying. So blessing actually is about communicating to another and and this is critical to actively seeking future good to be realized in someone’s life with the faith that God alone can accomplish it. With the faith that God alone can accomplish it, God alone is the source of blessing. So when we are blessing someone, it is with the faith that God alone can accomplish this good that I wanted to see realized in their lives. Now we’re going to go through this real quick, because I don’t think it’ll be a surprise to you guys, but it’s important to see that there really are four contexts for blessing in the Bible. The first is the home, the family. So Genesis, 49 we get to see this great moment when Jacob blesses his children and grandchildren in 4928 and this was what their father said to them. He blessed them, and He blessed each one with a suitable blessing. The suitability of the blessing suggests that sometimes there are blessings that can be tailored for particular people. When my son, Michael was born, we named him Micah because we loved the verse, may you sorry, did somebody say it? Yes, may you do justly love mercy and walk humbly with God. So every night, I mean, up until Micah was too old to want to be prayed over by his mother, I would sit on his bed and put my hand on his head or his shoulder and say, Son, may you do justly, may you love mercy and may you walk humbly with the Lord. For my daughter, Naomi, her before blood time before bedtime. Blessing is borrowed from the Psalms. May you sleep in the shelter of the shadow of God’s wings. May you wake in the light of His love, and may goodness and mercy follow you all the days of your life, so that you will live in God’s presence forever. Now she has heard that 1000s of times, and still she’s 11, and still she she likes for me to be there to pray that over her, and when I’m traveling, I’ll call her to pray that with her, that blessing. So the home is a natural place where we express blessing. When my daughter Lois turned 18, I put together a book of her of all the blessings we had prayed for her over the years, alongside photos of her, which she took with her to Scotland when she moved to go to university there. So she took with her a document of the blessings, the prayers that our family had prayed over her throughout her whole 18 years with us. So the home is a natural and biblical context for blessing. Second, the church, the family of faith. We’ve already looked at the blessing God authored to be prayed in Deuteronomy, God actually says that the two functions of the priests priesthood are to serve Him and to speak blessing over the people. So it’s a critical part, actually, of the priesthood we see in Orthodox and Catholic faiths where that’s been retained as a special function of the priests. But that’s not true for us as evangelical believers. Why? Because in first Peter two, we find out that we are a royal priesthood, right? A chosen people,

Tina Boesch

a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. So the doctrine of the priesthood of believers suggests that we each are entering into the call to bless others in the name of the Lord. So the family of faith is absolutely a place where. Experience God’s blessing in community, the community that is not believing yet, friends and neighbors in Luke 10, when God Jesus calls the 72 to go out into the community before him to prepare the way for him. You know what he sends them out with. He says, don’t take anything but go with this blessing, he says to them in Luke 10, whatever house you enter, first, say peace to this house. Shalom to this house that flourishing, that is holistic. I met a couple on a plane once when I was going home for my mom’s actually cancer treatments. She had just gotten a mastectomy, was about to start chemotherapy, and this family helped me, because I had was traveling with my two year old without an extra ticket for her. So in order to eat at all on a flight, I needed to give my daughter to someone else. So this couple turned out to be from a from a village where we had there were no known believers, and so they helped me with my daughter. And then I we went to visit them later in Turkey, and when they had a birth of a daughter, I sent them a written blessing out of the psalms for their new baby. And my friend called me and she said, Tina, we loved the gift you sent, but the blessing, where is it from? I said, it’s straight out of the zebor, which is the name for the Psalms in Turkish. And she said, Do you have one? Where can I get one? And I said, the next time you come to the city, I would love to give you one as a gift. So I had it wrapped in fabric, because Muslims are really careful about how they handle what they believe is a holy book. So I had it wrapped in fabric. She unwrapped it, kissed it, touched it to her forehead, handed it to me, and she said, Show me the blessing for my daughter. So it gave us an opportunity to open to the Psalms, to read that blessing for her daughter, for me, to explain the way the Bible is structured, because it’s really different from the Quran. We have a collection of different books written over time, opportunity to talk about that with her, and then she took that Bible home, and over many years, her family has come to believe. And now I wouldn’t say that moment, there were so many things the Lord used to bring their family to faith, but a blessing opened the door and helped her see the good that God wanted for her and for her family, so community, friends, fourth, and this is critical enemies. We’re called to bless our enemies and y’all this was such a shock and a surprise to the disciples that Jesus had to teach on us more than one time. But I love the passage and for brevity in Luke 10, Jesus says, Love your enemies do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who abuse you. Now, this teaching, first of all, I love how you can see the total orientation of the self for the good of another blessing is what we say, and it is positioned within this larger framework of loving my internal disposition, loving my enemy, doing good what I do externally to those who hate you, bless What I say to those who curse you, and then pray what I say to the Lord, pray for those who abuse you. Do you guys see how Jesus is challenging us to have a total orientation of the self towards the good, even of those who we do not see as friends and family, even to those who we are struggling to love even to those who may be critical of us, who may have hurt us in ways that orientation of ourselves should still be for their good. We are still called to bless them. David Bosch, in his book transforming mission, calls this the most characteristic saying of Jesus, because it is repeated so many times in early Christian sources, it became a foundational way of witness in the ancient world, where this kind of love was totally unknown. No one blessed those who cursed them. Everyone had a reciprocal nature of relationships, right? Where, if you do good to me, I’ll do good to you. If you do evil to me, I’m going to curse you. Jesus is calling us to a whole new orientation, whole new way of life that would radically, radically affect the witness into the world of the way that God’s blessing flows through us. Now if you think about these four contexts, the home, the church, community, friends and family, even extended to enemies. Do you guys see that There literally is no context in which we’re not called to bless literally every person we should be a river of God’s blessing to do. I think in the last five minutes, we are going to run through some of these steps to blessing. So I just want to give you guys some ideas of the ways that you can apply these things to our life. Would love to challenge you. I think it’s so fascinating to read Jacob’s transformation from someone who stole his father’s blessing, manipulated a situation to steal his blessing in Genesis, 27 to become the man that blesses his children, his grandchildren, Ephraim and Manasseh, with an incredible blessing. He says, I never expected to see your face. And behold, God has let me see your offspring. We have been told in that passage already that Jacob is blind by this point. In fact, the phrase used is the same as the phrase we get in the passage about Isaac blessing. His eyes were dim so that he could not see. We’ve just been told that about Jacob too. And yet, Jacob says, I have been able to see your your grandchildren. That leads to a beautiful blessing of two twins. Remember, Isaac had two twins to bless, and he was trying to just bless one, right? Things don’t go very well when the people of God start blessing each other, it actually fractures relationship, which that the opposite of what blessing should do, because it was exclusive y’all. Blessing is an expression of grace. It isn’t earned, and that means when we bless people, it’s an expression of God’s grace, they don’t deserve it. So we see, Jacob has grown through several instances of encountering God along the way, and now he understands that blessing is an expression of grace, and He blesses both the boys, both the twins.

Tina Boesch

But the first thing I want you to guys to see about blessing is first that you have to have focused attention. You have to see the person that you’re blessing. So start with prayer that God would allow you to see the person that you want to bless, see their weaknesses, see their strengths. How can you affirm those? How can you give them a positive view vision of what can be with the Lord? So blessing first begins with seeing second blessing begins with seeking the Lord in worship and prayer in Hebrews 11, when the author of Hebrews is talking about this moment in Jacob’s life, says, By faith, Jacob, when dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph. Joseph bowing in worship over the head of his staff while Jacob is blessing, he is worshiping the Lord. Our way of blessing happens in the context of our relationship with the Lord too. It is that relationship that is fueling and empowering blessing through the Holy Spirit in Christ. So seeking God in prayer and worship is an essential step to actually being a blessing to anyone else. Third search scripture, y’all, if we want to be sure that we’re blessing in accordance with the Lord’s will, then we can be sure we are doing that if we are drawing from Scripture. We had some friends when we were in Turkey, Toby and Leo had worked with us for many years, and they were getting ready to transition to the States. It was a big transition in their lives. Didn’t know what they were going to do. Leo is a weaver, and so weaving is something that was really important to her. And I had been reading through Hosea, and so I wrote for their kind of going away blessing party. I wrote a blessing for them, drawn from the words of Hosea, may the Lord lead you with the cords of kindness and the ties of love, so such a beautiful moment that metaphor and imagery can also be really helpful and blessing. When I was a child, there was a Brazilian pastor that came to our home and he prayed over me that I would become an oak of righteousness, a passage that’s drawn from Isaiah, 61 my mother has reminded me of that many times, not always in ways that feel like blessing. But anyway, I wondered about that, that that imagery stuck with me for a long time. Why an oak you know? Why not an apple tree, you know? Why not a blossoming tree like? Why an oak? Acorns, you know, whatever, you can’t eat them. They’re toxic. So I thought, I don’t know, what does it mean to be an oak of righteousness? Well, one year, we were living in a street in North Carolina, and there were these huge oak trees in our yard, and it was the fall, and so we’re raking up all these leaves with our kids, and what’s underneath all the leaves? Millions of acorns, millions and I started to realize, oh, an oak may not be like a fruit bearing tree or a blossoming tree, but it is a seed bearing tree, and they spread seeds all over the neighborhood, and their roots are deep and wide and they are. Able. It helped me grasp that meaning of the blessing. So imagery can be really powerful in a blessing. Fourth, compose with confidence. I see this in Paul’s prayers all the time. They are incredible. Think, for instance, of his blessing to the church in Colossae and y’all this is a church. Our prayers tend to be reactive. We pray when things are going wrong. That is not the way Paul prays things are going right in Colossi. He is complimenting for them for their spiritual growth, for the fruit that they are bearing. And this is what he prays for them. May you be filled with the knowledge of his will and all spiritual wisdom and understanding so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. Do we have a mediocre discipleship or spirituality, because we don’t really believe that God can do these things? Are we okay with some spiritual wisdom partially pleasing to Him. Is that enough for us? Or do we want what Paul is praying for the church of Colossae, all spiritual wisdom to be filled with knowledge to be fully pleasing and y’all, this is not an outlier prayer. This is the way Paul always prays. Just listen to Philippians. One, may you be filled with the fruit of righteousness. Or first, Thessalonians, five, may God Himself sanctify you through and through, may your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless. Or second, Thessalonians, 316, may the Lord of peace give you peace at all times and in every way. Don’t you guys want peace at all times and in every way, sometimes we don’t pray it because we don’t believe it. We don’t believe it’s possible, but that is what God wants to see in our lives. It is the result of sanctification, and that’s why blessing is future focus and expression of God’s grace. Lastly, you have to communicate the blessing y’all we are not good at communicating the good that God would have for people. In a recent Barna Research, it confirmed that when asked a group of 18 to 34 year olds, 1000s of them in this survey, only 1/3 of them said they were deeply cared for and loved by someone. 1/3 you guys, we are not good at communicating the good, communicating the love, expressing that in a way that makes people feel seen and loved. But that is what the orientation of blessing does, and it is important to know that this is we communicate the blessing in what we pray, in what we speak, but in also in what we do. James is so good on this. Y’all James 215, to 17. If a brother or sister is without clothes and lacks daily food, and one of you says a blessing, Go in peace, stay warm and be fed, but you don’t give them what the body needs, what good is that James is saying? Don’t speak a blessing if you’re not going to do anything to see it realized. So it’s a total orientation of self to the good of others. We could all think of someone who has been this for us. What I think is interesting is Paul prays blessing for the churches that things are going well with, but he also plays blessing for the churches with whom his relationship is strained the New Testament scholar Gordon Fee actually says that one of the most profound theological moments in the entire appalling corpus is his blessing of the Corinthian church in Second Corinthians, 1314, because it is one of the clearest Trinitarian statements we have. And it is a blessing that Paul writes for a church doubting his apostleship, a church that has been questioning his authority, a church with whom his relationship is strained. For that church, Paul says, May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Spirit be with you all. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the spirit, that’s what Paul wants, this church, this church who he’s working to disciple to experience in Christ. The question for us is, are we ready to enter in to this story of blessing? Do we see it as an essential part of our mission in the world? Do we understand the impact it would have? If we interacted with people in a way that is blessing. I’m going to leave you guys because our time together is up, and you have a number of awesome breakouts and sessions to hear and over the next two days. But I want to leave you guys with Psalm 67 as the word that we’re going to go out on the benediction, because I want Lord, may we be women who carry this blessing into the world. May God be gracious to us and bless us. May he make his face shine upon us so that your way may be known on the earth. Your salvation among the peoples. May it be. Thanks y’all.