Today's Word

Let me ask you a question: do you feel blessed?

You may well come back with a reasonable question of your own,: ‘what do you mean by blessed?’ And I could struggle to answer that precisely, so I will use the Oxford Dictionary definition which goes a long way towards its meaning. Firstly it defines blessed as “made holy or consecrated”. Secondly it defines it as “endowed with divine favour or protection.”

We sometimes use the word in a reasonable but slightly different way, for instance, ‘I have been blessed with grandchildren’. I would suggest that when we use the word about our earthly life, we are effectively saying we have been given something we didn’t expect or have to work for, in other words, a gift.

In Psalm 2 and verse 12, we have the following words which combine all the definitions we have made thus far; “Blessed are they who put their trust in Him (God)”. We may not feel blessed in earthly/worldly terms, we may not even feel blessed in terms of our spiritual life. If the latter is the case, it is down to a weakness in our on-going relationship with God. We really need sometimes to sit down and have a serious review of whether we feel blessed, because the verse above is quite definite, if we have put our trust in God for salvation and are continuing to trust Him on a day-by day basis, then we should and must feel blessed, i.e., we have been endowed with both divine favour and protection, a gift we didn’t work for or deserve.

So perhaps I should rephrase the question: “Do you KNOW and recognise that you have been blessed?”. Because if we have forgotten what a wonderful position we have been brought into through the gift of salvation, then we need to go back to where we came in. 

But the alternative Oxford dictionary definition is ‘made holy or consecrated’. That too is a gift from God because we have been blessed with the righteousness of our Saviour. It is almost like we have been given a holy garment, like one of the priests in the Old Testament. Not only do we need to thank God for the gift of His Son, but also the blessing that He daily gives us as we get to know Him more fully.

Article written by Brian Preston, Elder @SFGH Church