Austin Gardner | Restoring the Language of Life to Our Churches

Welcome to followed by mercy with Austin Gardner. This is where we talk about God's grace and mercy that meets us and follows us even in our lowest moments and lifts us to hope again.

No matter what's been broken, here's love still heals. So let's move from pain to praise together because surely goodness and mercy does follow me and pursue me all the days of my life.

We are talking about the biblical power of blessing and how it is my desire to restore the language of life to our churches. I want to go back to us blessing people.

The story of blessing in the Bible starts at the creation and ends at the new creation. I think you're going to be excited to see this today.

One of those powerful words in the Bible is the word blessing. We don't understand it many times because we want to think that blessing means money and comfort and success and prosperity.

But the Bible goes into something a lot deeper than that. For the Bible blessing means God's life and favor and presence flowing into our lives. The Bible is a one long story of God's blessing.

It begins with blessings and it ends with blessings. The entire story of redemption is about God blessing his humanity that he created and how he's good to us.

The first word over humanity was blessing. Let me read this to you and God bless them and sit into them, be fruitful and multiply and replenish their earth and subdue it.

It's funny at Genesis chapter 1 and verse 28 and he's speaking to them and he says God blessed you. Wow.

That's remarkable. He didn't correct them.

His first interaction was a correction. It was blessing. The word blessing means to be in favor of to bestow benefits to declare prosperity of life to speak favor over someone.

It was like speaking life and destiny over someone. God was declaring for Adam and Eve in the beginning their fruitfulness, their authority, their purpose and their relationship.

Humans were created to live under God's blessing. Isn't that exciting? Isn't that thrilling to see that?

Imagine a father, a dad standing over a newborn child saying your life will be full of good. You'll be strong and bring joy.

That's a picture of blessing. God's first words to humanity were life giving words. Remember what Tozer said what the first thing you think about when you think of God is the most important thing about us.

If we see God as angry or harsh, it causes us to misunderstand the opening chapters of the Bible. I misunderstood them for years. I misunderstood those chapters for years. I saw God as angry and kicked out of the garden, but it was God who went to them and brought them back.

God's first action towards humans was generosity and blessing and sin broke the flow of blessing and sanded it into the world, the curse and death and separation, but even in the middle of all of that God was working to restore blessings.

The rest of us has a story of that restoration of our God is towards it. The next thing I call your attention to is how God blesses Abraham and just as 12, 2 and 3 says, I will make up the great nation. I will bless thee.

I will make that in great and of those thou shalt be a blessing. I'll bless and to bless thee and curse and to curse thee and indeed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.

Blessing, blessing, blessing. We're just in Genesis chapter 12. The whole world will be blessed through you. Blessings has a mission. It always does. God blesses people so they'll become channels of blessings to others. It's like a river.

A river doesn't exist for itself. It flows to the land and it brings life and water and nourishment. And we are rivers of blessedness. We exist for the world. God did not bless Abraham just for Abraham. God bless Abraham for the nations.

And then God commands leaders to speak blessings. So you see the first group of people is really going to use Abraham blessings. I'm blessing you to be a blessing. And then in numbers, chapter 6, which we've already spent enough time on, I'll just kind of go through that one quickly.

But you remember what it said, the Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee. The Lord lift up his countless upon thee and give thee peace.

This is known as the priestly blessing. God committed spiritual leaders to speak blessings to his people. Every line of that blessing gets stronger and it builds towards the final word peace.

The last one is peace and he give thee peace. Peace, wholeness, harmony, flourishing, life like God intended, Shalom. Archaeologists discovered that exact blessing written on a silver skull and drew some dating to 600 BC. For over 2,000 years, God's people have spoken these words over others.

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless. Charles Ferguson said that. Then we get to the sun and the Psalms are blessings.

Psalm 11, blessed is the man who walk up not in the castle of the ungodly or stands in the way that sinners are sitting and to see the squirmful.

Psalms teaches what a blessed life looks like, blessed people trust God, reject evil and delight in his word. They line their lives up with God. Jesus redefines blessing.

He began his ministry with blessing statements. Blessed are the pure and heart, but they shall see God. That word blessed means deeply fulfilled, happy, spiritually flourishing, possessing divine favor. It's the life that God intends for people to live. Jesus teaching that blessing is not eternal, external success. It's internal transformation.

The apostles continued the pattern. Paul ends nearly every letter with a blessing. When I was in high school, a young lady in our youth group, she was older. She's already working a full-time job at the bank. Her name was Gail and Gail was so kind and Gail would always write notes. You know, there wasn't text being back then and there wasn't Facebook or any kind of social media, but she'd always write all of the other young people in the.

The youth group, and she'd always ended one of Paul's blessings, like in Philippians 423, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, be with you all. Amen. The focus is on grace. Grace means God's unmerited favor.

I just want you to realize that from the beginning, God has been blessing. And all the way to the end, He's blessing. I kind of skipped over this. I shouldn't have. In Revelation 22, 14, we're now ending the Bible. Blessed are they that do His commandments and they may have the right to the tree of life.

He begins the blessings in Eden and He ends the blessings in the new creation. God restores everything that Santa had destroyed. God causes people to become people who bless others. We bless people when we speak encouragement, when we pray for them, when we point them to Christ, when we build them up spiritually, you understand blessing is the language of the Bible.

From our side, it's Thanksgiving, but we declare blessings of God over other people. I just hope you'll think about this. I've been so accustomed to God fussing at us. These verses are God is loving us. Hope you're enjoying it. We got three or four more. I want to share with you before we change subjects. Again, as we always do.

God bless you. And you know, you know that from the heart, I mean that it's really great. God loves you. God bless you. Continue serving him. If this is doing anything for you, helping you don't share it with somebody else. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to followed by mercy with also Gardner. If today's message spoke to your heart, share it with someone who needs to know God hasn't given up on them.

Remember, your pain is at the end of your story. In Jesus, it can become praise. Thank you.