Scroll with me for a second…
- A caravan parked on a red dirt track somewhere in the outback #blessed
- A set of keys held up in front of a SOLD sign. #blessed
- A new car with a bow on the bonnet. #blessed
- A tropical beach, coconut in hand. #blessed
- Kids in matching clothes at the airport. #blessed
We’ve all seen these kinds of posts, and being fully honest, I’ve thought similar things while standing on a beach, or after purchasing a new car. Often the person posting in my feeds is a Christian, someone who loves Jesus, goes to church, prays before meals. They’re not wrong, either. That holiday is a blessing. That house is a gift.
So why doesn’t it sit right? Why do I feel the need to write about it?
Let me be clear before I go any further
I’m not here to take anyone’s holiday photos off them.
I’ve been overseas, I’ve had holidays, and with my passion for photography: filled many SD cards while doing so. These are wonderful things, and every single one of them is a gift from God. To add to that there’s ample evidence in scripture that God blesses his people. The Old Testament is full of it: land, flocks, harvests, children, long life. They were blessed.
“And Isaac sowed in that land and reaped in the same year a hundredfold. The LORD blessed him, and the man became rich, and gained more and more until he became very wealthy.”
Genesis 26:12-13 ESV
“And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the LORD your God. Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground and the fruit of your cattle, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock. Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.”
Deuteronomy 28:2-5 ESV
Those blessings, all our blessings, are from the Lord. You don’t have to look far in the Old Testament to encounter this prosperous language.
But there’s a but. (You knew there would be)
Around the dinner table
When I’m praying with my kids.
At dinner, or before bed, as part of our prayers we thank God for things. A home. Food. Health. Safety. School. Work. Family. These are all wonderful things that we are, rightly, grateful for, and I want my kids to see every one of them as coming from God’s hand.
And then, naturally, we ask for things too. Kids are very good at that part. 😉
But I find myself wrestling with a question: how do we be genuinely thankful for all of this and to know, deep down, that none of it is the main thing? How do we hold these two together?
Because here’s how Paul describes everything else:
Count it all as rubbish
“Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ”
Philippians 3:8 ESV
Rubbish. Refuse. Some translations go even more blunt than that.
Paul had things. Status, education, heritage, reputation. Real things, good things by any worldly measure. And compared to knowing Jesus, he says they’re garbage. He didn’t say they were “less important” or that they were “a close second.” He said rubbish.
So every blessing I thank God for at the dinner table, sits on the rubbish side of that scale when knowing Christ is on the other.
How do we live like that? How do we think like that, in a world absolutely full of good things that we’re genuinely thankful for?
I’m not here to lecture anyone
Let me be clear, because I don’t want this to come across as righteous: I’m not.
I pursue stuff: fountain pens, video games, computers, cameras and really, really good Japanese kitchen knives. I could post a photo of my kitchen knives right now and you’d see a man who loves them, and I do. I use them every single day and I enjoy them every single day, and I can tell the person who made them loves their craft put time and care into making them. It’s amazing what humans are able to make.
(That’s a whole other article about craftsmanship and the image of God. I’ll write it one day.)
So I’m not writing this from a monastery. I’m writing it from a house full of nice things, with a wish list that’s longer than it should be.
That’s sort of my point…
The man who sold everything
I keep coming back to these two small parables from Jesus:
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”
Matthew 13:44-46 ESV
Picture the pearl merchant the next morning. No house. No stock. No caravan. No kitchen knives. He’s got one pearl in his pocket and nothing else.
Is he blessed?
Jesus says he did it in his joy. He’s not sitting in an empty house mourning everything he gave up. He’s the most blessed man in town, and he knows it. If he had an instagram account, and hadn’t sold his phone 😜, that’s the photo: a single, beautiful pearl, an empty room, and the biggest grin you’ve ever seen. #blessed
We are blessed beyond measure. Literally beyond measure.
So when we post the new car with #blessed underneath, it’s not that the car isn’t a blessing. It’s that we’ve picked the smallest blessing in the room to celebrate. It’s a bit like winning the lottery and then telling everyone how excited you are about the free pen they gave you at the counter.
The times we don’t say it…
Here’s an uncomfortable thought:
Have you ever seen someone post a hospital bed with #blessed? A redundancy letter? A car that’s been written off? A sick family member? A holiday ruined by gastro?
No. In our heads, when things are bad, we’re not blessed. We forget our greatest blessing and become worried. We waiting for that blessings to come back.
But if our blessing is Christ, then nothing about that changes when the car gets written off. If everything else fades, disappears, burns or gets taken away, we are still blessed. Always. Constantly. Completely.
Habakkuk knew this:
“Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.”
Habakkuk 3:17-18 ESV
No figs. No grapes. No olives. No crops. No flock. No herd. That’s an agricultural society describing total financial ruin.
Yet I will rejoice. #blessed
A quick aside: this worry / anger when things go wrong can indicate that we don’t have a disposition of thankfulness. A broken car? Thanks for many years with a working car! A redundancy letter? Thankful for God’s provision and for many years of employment.
Daily bread
And of course, Jesus knew we’d get this wrong. When he taught us to pray, he didn’t teach us to ask for a bigger barn. He taught us to ask for today’s bread.
“Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
Matthew 6:31-33 ESV
And Paul, again:
“But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content.”
1 Timothy 6:6-8 ESV
Food and clothes. That’s the bar. Because we have Jesus, and Jesus is the whole thing.
Buckets and waterfalls, again 🪣🌊
If you read my previous post on chasing waterfalls, you’ll recognise this. It’s the bucket problem all over again.
We live right next to the waterfall. We have access to the source, living water, more than we could ever drink. And we stand there staring into our little, leaking buckets, concerned with every drip that lands in them.
It’s a perspective problem. It’s always a perspective problem.
So what are you doing with it?
This is where it turns into a bit of a challenge (for me and for you)
If you’re like me, you probably don’t use hashtags much, and certainly not #blessed. But that doesn’t mean we can’t live our lives highlighting to the world that wrong blessings.
Do we actually enjoy & desire other things more than the blessing we already have in Christ? Do we really believe we’ve got the pearl of great price? Do we really believe we own the field with the treasure in it?
Because if we did, I wonder what our social media posts would really look like.
I wrestle with this. I long to long for Christ more. I’d love my kids to grow up thanking God for their dinner and knowing that if the dinner never came, they’d still be the most blessed people in the world, that if we lost all our things, we’d still have everything.
We are blessed beyond measure.
#blessed