Pastor’s Pulpit
By Pastor Tom Davidson
When doctrine is rightly understood it will naturally (supernaturally) lead to doxology (short form of expressing praise to God). When we discover Who God is and what He’s accomplished for us in His Son, we can’t help but bless His holy name. The aim of His act of blessing is to evoke in our hearts the love that praises. We receive first, and then, moved by His mercies, we give. In all things we should speak well of Him, whether in the midst of pain, struggle, trials, frustration, opposition or adversity. Speak well of Him. And we can speak well of Him in all such circumstances when we recall to our minds that He is always good, independent of what we’re experiencing or how we might feel.
Doesn’t it strike you as absolutely amazing that the creature can even bless the Creator? What a high and holy privilege believers have and yet far too many often allow this to “atrophy” because of infrequent use. Have you blessed the Lord today? Paul begins in Ephesians 1, with the One who’s behind all these blessings, our God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. That’s his starting point. And when a man begins with God you know that what he’s going to say is in line with reality. Our problem is we don’t start our thinking with God; we tend to start it with ourselves, with our experience, which is only a partial view of truth. So we immediately narrow the range of our vision to what we’re going through and what’s happening to us, and we don’t see this in relationship to the whole reality of life around us. So we get a twisted and deformed idea of what’s happening. The only proper way to view truth is to see it in relationship to all truth everywhere. And there’s only one way to do that, and that’s to start with God. Only God is great enough to encompass all truth. This is the difference between what the Bible calls “natural” thinking, as done by “the natural man,” and the “spiritual” thinking of “the spiritual man.” Natural thinking is always limited, always wrong to some degree, because it isn’t large enough and broad enough to handle all the facts. But spiritual thinking is always God-centered, and, therefore, true, and to the extent that it’s spiritual, it’s true in every way. We need to learn to be spiritual thinkers about ourselves.
When the subject is God, His speaking is action, for God’s speech is energy released. When God is said to bless us, He acts for our good as He sees our need and not necessarily our desire. Therefore, He blesses us by intervening. God sent His Son to bless us, to intervene in our lives with what He planned to do for us. Ephesians 1:3, referring to God who blessed us with all spiritual blessings, means the one who intervened and acted so that our spirits might be made conformable to His Spirit. When we bless God we speak well of Him. When God blesses us, He bestows good to us. We bless Him with words. He blesses us with deeds! All we can do is to speak well of Him because in ourselves we have nothing good to give. And remember that to obey is better than sacrifice (1 Samuel 15:22), so don’t praise Him with your lips and walk unworthily in your life. Stated another way, God can’t bless us for our goodness, because we have none. He blesses us with His abundant goodness. Our heavenly Father lavishes us with every goodness, every good gift and blessing. That’s His gracious nature and our great need.
Support authors and subscribe to content
Subscribe to read the entire article.
