Simple Blessings
“And it will be, because you hear these judgments, and will keep and do them, that Adonai your God will keep to you the covenant and the kindness which He has sworn to your fathers. [He] will love you, and bless you, and multiply you, and will bless the fruit of your womb, and the fruit of your ground, your grain, and your new wine, and your oil, the increase of your oxen, and the wealth of your flock, in the land which He has sworn to your fathers to give to you.” D’varim (Deuteronomy) 7:12-13
The stipulations for the covenant that Adonai cut with Yis’rael are simple: listen to, keep and obey the ways of Adonai, and He will love you—that is, He will bless you and give you increase. As we grow and mature in our faith by hearing His judgments, keeping them and doing them, surely we can expect Adonai’s blessings to be poured out upon us. We need to realize, however, that those blessing may not be exactly what we expect.
When Adonai blesses us, it is not with adornments or other non-utilitarian embellishments. Being blessed does not mean that we have discretionary income, extravagant things, and everything we ever thought we wanted. For Adonai, blessing His people means giving them the essentials of life—and giving those things in great abundance. If we are to truly appreciate Adonai’s blessings, we would do well to shed the shackles of worldly trappings and other things that we had once mistakenly labeled as “important.”
Adonai’s promises are simple—He will bless the fruit of our bodies, the fruit of our ground, and the fruit of our labor. Make no mistake: there is great truth here. We cannot look at our ancestors of old and think that God chose to bless them with such simple things because they were simple people with simple needs. On the contrary, Adonai’s design for His holy ones in all generations was that we would be simple people with simple needs. Complexity of life is not from Him—it is a byproduct of our “civilized” living.
When we allow ourselves to get caught up in the self-made intricacies of life, our values and priorities become confused. Living according to the Scriptures enables us to be objective—to not embrace the values and priorities of the world, but of the Lord. We may live in a “civilized” society, but that does not negate the truth that Adonai has made us and called us to live as simple people, who are not caught up in the ways of the world. Let us allow the Lord to distance us from the unimportant things of life. It’s time to get back to the basics, where being blessed simply means that we have plenty of only what we need….
P R A Y E R
Adonai, purify me; separate me from the trappings of my life. Lord, show me the areas of my life that are truly unimportant—help me to distance myself from them, replacing them with the essentials of living a holy life for You. I bless You, Abba, Father, for loving me and giving me increase according to Your definition alone. I praise Your Name, Adonai, my perfect provider….