The Journey: Blessing

The Journey
Blessing
Psalm 134

Introduction: I like to travel and visit new places. You may have had an experience like mine where you read about a place, it looks so attractive and interesting so you plan and save to go. But when you get there you’ve been fooled. The glowing description doesn’t measure up. You’re disappointed and a little angry at falling for their tricks. Sometimes people wonder about that with our spiritual journey. Is it worth the hardship of the journey? What awaits us? Will we be disappointed?

I. The Invitation
The journey through the psalms of ascent has reached its destination. It began with repentance, a turning from something so we could travel and reach a place where God can be worshipped. Along the way there has been trial, suffering, joy, fellowship, all the good and bad that life can throw at us. Now we are invited to “bless the Lord”.

The word “bless” is central to this short closing psalm. We use the word in various ways from what we say when someone sneezes to a way to say good-bye. I often close my letters with “God bless.” But for people on the journey toward God the psalmist invites them, invites us to bless the Lord. The question is how do you bless God?

Blessing, at least in biblical terms, is an act of giving. In scripture we see parents giving a blessing to their children by laying their hands on them and then saying words that in one sense predict or declare their future. Blessing is given in many ways by action but also by our words. Paul is clear that what we say has tremendous impact on those around us, Eph. 4:29. As parents we either bless our children or curse them. Too many parents do not realize the power of their words on their children. Their words become in some ways self-fulfilling prophecies. Tell a child that they are bad long enough and they will become what you tell them.

But the invitation in the psalm is to bless the Lord. How do you do that? After all God is supposed to bless us. God is the one with all the power. How can a weak creature like me bless God? The word in the NIV translation is “praise” but that is not very good way to translate this word. The word is used of what God does for us. But God does not just bless us with things, however good they may be. God ultimately wants to share himself with us, share his grace and generosity. As one person observed blessing is a sharing of what is in the soul.

The picture of parent and child is one we may be able to best relate. How does a parent bless a child? Providing food, clothing and shelter is part of it but a child wants and needs more. The child needs the parent to come down to their level, to stoop down and be interested in toy cars and dolls, to forget about jobs, sports, and house keeping and to enter their world and share ourselves with them. God does that, has done that in Jesus and even now continues to enter our world in order to be with us.

Then we are invited to bless God. How do children bless their parents? They give back to us what we have shared with them. If we have shared love and patience then, most of the time, that is what we will receive. Children bless their parents in the lives they live, or at times they do not bless us, Prov. 15:20; 19:26.

We have made the journey toward God and now we are called to bless the Lord. What is in our soul? What have we learned from his discipline? How has God blessed us? The answer is in how we live, the choices we make, the love we share with others. It comes in how we speak about God to others.

II. The Command
The psalmist and other pilgrims had traveled days or even months to reach Jerusalem to worship. For many the experience must have been overwhelming with tens of thousands of pilgrims and the magnificent temple. They must have had countless stories to share about the journey and its hardships and blessings. But this was not the reason they had made the journey. They may have been tired and not wanted to bless the Lord but that is why they had come.

There is probably no more difficult time to praise God than the middle of the night. There were priests on duty around the clock but those with the midnight shift must have found it difficult. The command is to lift your hands and bless the Lord, a physical act that helped the worshipper to worship. We can find all kinds of reasons not to bless the Lord. We are tired. We had a fight with our spouse or the kids or the parents. We want to talk to our friends because the journey is hard. But worship does not depend on our emotions. They are a part of worship to be sure but if we only worshipped when we felt like it then we would rarely do so. Some think it is hypocritical to come to worship when we don’t feel like it but that is not hypocrisy. God does not demand that we come with our smiley face in place; he only asks that we come with what we have. If blessing another is a sharing what is in our soul then we bless the Lord when we share our sorrows as wells as our joys, our defeats as well as our victories. When we share with God it is not that the sorrow or joy is taken away but that God shares in it with us. God wants us to share what is in our souls and he will share what is in his soul.

III. God’s Blessing
The psalm begins calling us to bless the Lord and ends with, “May the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.” The Lord desires to bless people. As Maker of heaven and earth we often place blessing in the categories of physical and spiritual blessings. While we recognize the value of the spiritual it is usually the physical that we are most concerned about. God is concerned also about the physical, after all he created it and he created us with the physical needs that we have. God created the spirit in us also and he answers those needs primarily through Jesus. God’s heart is filled with love that is expressed in grace and generosity.

But God’s blessing is more than these things that we are often focused on. God wants to share himself with us. This is beyond our comprehension. Why would the maker of heaven and earth desire to share himself with me when I am so small and so insignificant? The fact is God creates us so he can share himself with us and we with him. Jesus said it this way, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17:3) When God shares his soul with us then we are changed, transformed by that sharing. What is in God’s soul? We often think of love, grace, and mercy as being the soul of God. But there is also sorrow in God’s soul. If we shared in God’s sorrow then maybe our vision would be more like God’s.

The Journey of the Psalms of Ascent is a journey to God. It is a journey that God invites all to join. You won’t be disappointed when you arrive because it will be beyond all that you can express or imagine. God invites you to begin; we invite you to join us in the way.

Livonia Church of Christ: August 6, 2006