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JUNE 1, 2011
THE OTHER KIND OF BLESSING
“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.”
(Matthew 5:11, NIV)
There is much to be said, of course, for material provision. And thus we pray with true thanksgiving for jobs and meals
and homes and cars and rounds of golf on pleasant spring days. We thank God for friends and family and people who favorably cross our paths. We celebrate births and healings. We rejoice when business
transactions go through and stocks split.
We call all these things good.
So we are uncomfortably confronted by the starkness of Jesus’ words early in the Sermon on the Mount. He
pronounced blessing on those who are poor in spirit, those who mourn, those who are meek, and those who are persecuted—things we would never, from our own perspective, call good.
Then Jesus dug deeper.
“You are blessed,” He said, “when people point all their meanness in your direction for no better
reason than that you are mine.”
Suddenly all that other teaching about counting the cost of following Him makes sense. When we attach ourselves to
Jesus, not everything goes swimmingly. In fact, sometimes it goes downright horribly.
That’s hard to remember in the Western world, where our many public systems—running water, electricity,
public parks, and such—provide for even the lowliest citizens. Even a homeless man who knows the many shelters in town can find a warm meal and often a bed if he wants one.
We know little of true misery, be it the physical kind, where the poverty of a nation keeps its people from food,
water, and shelter, or the spiritual kind, where brothers and sisters in Christ are jailed and tortured and killed for their expression of love for Jesus.
We can thank God for that, yes. But we must be so careful not to let the absence of struggle cloud our thinking about
what it means to be blessed. We tend to see blessing as a set of “good” conditions. Jesus pronounced a whole other kind of blessing: the favor of God that transcends our earthly
circumstances. If we can lay hold of that perspective, we will be ready whenever trials come.
--
Jeff Hopper
June 1, 2011
Copyright 2011 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.
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