Today we finish up our BLESS series. We began in January talking about how greatly God has blessed us. We have an abundance of physical blessings, financial blessings, relational blessings, and of course, spiritual blessings. And the question that started this whole conversation is Why? Why has God blessed us so much?
The answer we found was that God has blessed us so that we can be a blessing to the people around us. It’s like we are simply the delivery people – delivering God’s blessings so that He can meet the needs of our community.
So to help us learn how to be an effective delivery person for those blessings, we’ve been using the acronym BLESS.
The B stands for… “Begin with pray.” And it’s a simple prayer – it goes like this… “Here I am send me. Please set up a divine appointment where my blessings can help meet someone else’s needs.”
The L reminds us to listen. We need to actually make the effort to listen to people to find out their needs – and we need to listen to the Holy Spirit as He prompts and nudges us along.
The E stands for Eat. We discovered that Jesus showed people that he loved and accepted them by eating with them. And we can do the same thing. Everybody eats – so what easier way is there to build relationships with the people around us than to eat with them?
Then last Sunday we talked about the first S – which stands for Serve. And this kind of serving isn’t the “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” kind of serving. This kind of serving is where you serve the people around you no matter who they are – no matter how inconvenient it is – no matter how unpleasant it is – no matter what the cost to you is – but you serve them out of love because that’s exactly what Christ did for you. That’s the kind of serving that truly blesses people.
And hopefully, when we begin to bless people in all these ways that we’ve talked about so far…
When we listen to them, when we eat with them, when we serve them… That will lead to opportunities for our final letter S – and that is we can tell them our story!
And I’m excited to talk to you today about telling our story. This is such a key part in being a blessing to the people around us. If we do all those other things, (the listening, the eating, the serving) but miss this one, our community will see us as ‘some very nice people’. But if we do all those other things AND get this one, I know that God will begin to radically change people’s lives through you and me.
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