Blessed to be a blessing

 Read Genesis 12

Father Abraham had many sons.  He also had a promise and a blessing bestowed upon him by the Lord.

Hear the words of Genesis 12.

The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.

“I will make you into a great nation,
    and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
    and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
    and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
    will be blessed through you.

So, Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Harran. He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Harran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.

Further instructions upon the land promised and circumcision would follow. For now, just note that everything that God promised would come to fruition.  Everything that God told Abram to do took time and some missed turns along the way.

 The first seemed to be passing off his wife as his sister in Egypt.  God cursed the Pharoah even though the Pharoah wasn’t in on the scheme.

Later we know that Abram would not trust God for the promise of the being the Father of many nations and had a son by his servant maiden, Hagar.

Each time, God insisted on doing things his way in his time and not what the short-sightedness of Abram could envision.

I will make this point again in the next service, but we must trust God, to include his methods and timing.  We should be creative and resourceful.  We are, after all, made in this image and likeness and are meant to be creative, but our creativity must not move us away from God’s directions

The blessing of the world would come through the line of Abram.  We know this blessing as Christ Jesus, but Abraham’s line was called to do more.

The line that goes through Isaac and Jacob—Israel was meant to take God's love to the world.  Instead, the alienated the world from God because God had not chosen them as his people.

Let us not make the same mistake.  Let the love of God always shine through us.  The church is called out of the world, to be set apart—made holy, and then sent back into the world.

Let’s don’t leave out that last part.  Let’s take the love of God to the world.  We have been blessed by Christ as children of God.  Let us pay this blessing forward as is the term these days.

We are blessed to be a blessing.

Amen.