Friday, February 12, 2010

Cycle #18 - $1302.72

When it rains it pours… This weekend I secured Cycle #18. Seven more to go and I reach my goal. But yes, these next seven will pose stiffer challenges with each step. For this cycle I needed to reach $1302.72. I needed $651.36 more to get there. It happened… I received a check for $700 as an honorarium for teaching a class. I wasn’t expecting this much so it was a sweet surprise. I’m blessed!

I don’t know why exactly, but I’ve always had a hard time swallowing the notion that God really does want to bless me financially. Psycho-analyze me all you want. It’s just a kind of steady-state reality for me. Blessing seem hard to justify. And this exercise is major step of faith for me.

But I’ve been digging in the Bible lately looking for answers about blessings. I think I’ve found three primary roots for understanding why God wants to bless us, here and now, down to earth, with real stuff.

Viewed rightly through a Hebraic lens, the Bible makes no absolute distinction between spiritual and material blessing. God lavishes practical love on his people, now and forever. For Jesus’ followers, forever begins today. Eternal life is an already/not yet reality. The spotty descriptions of Heaven – our “not yet” reward – portray a realm of unimaginable luxury. The “already” blessings here and now include a “first fruits” of this same abundance. This “already/not yet” insight is the theological underpinning for our belief and practice of healing. God heals today; he will heal absolutely someday. This same understanding might help us grasp and appropriate what prosperity looks like in our time between the times.

There seem to be three reasons God materially blesses. The first is personal. God is a Father, a doting Papa who loves to give gifts we can both use and enjoy. “See how great a love the father has lavished on us…” writes John (I John 3:1). This love is incarnational, down to earth, practical. John writes again, “I pray that you may prosper, and be in health, even as your soul prospers” (III John 2). Love is tangible.

Maybe my unwillingness to embrace prosperity proves again the flipside message of Jesus’ “Prodigal Son” parable? The true prodigal in the story may be the older brother who does not grasp that his father has already given him everything. He bemoans that he hasn’t had a party of his own. His father chides him. “Son, just head out to the field and get your own fatted calf. It’s already yours!” Ironically, it’s the older brother who is the son acting like a servant!

God throws extravagant parties. Think of the wild, wasteful splendor of daffodils and tropical fish no one will ever see and the brilliant galactic storms in star clusters 10 million light years away. Even more the Father loves to shower His children with usable favor, gifts that bring real, testable and tangible joys. He blesses us because he can and must by his nature.

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