WELCOME TO WELLING: for your spiritual health and growth. Three ladies were picking up a menu at a restaurant and each of them put on glasses.
The first lady said, I really only need mine for close reading. The second one remarked, I only use mine when the light is bad. And the third one confessed, I rarely wear mine except when I want to see.
I don’t want us to fit in any of those categories, I always want us to see. To see the blessings that God has given to each one of us, starting with salvation and more. But then see the beneficiaries of our blessings, not simply ourselves, but as a means to the whole world of salvation and more.
I have been in Psalm 67 for you, where the psalmist is making a case that when you are blessed with salvation, and all of us are blessed with more than salvation, we better weight salvation rightly, but also weight the responsibility of salvation even more. Then we become the first link in an aggressive chain-contagion, which is going to reverberate across the whole world where the psalmist is making a case that God has blessed you for the sake of global knowledge. That’s found in stanza one, verses one and two: global knowledge. Verses three and five, they’re like the chorus and I wanted you to write the phrase, “Global praise, Global praise.” That’s why God has blessed us. And then verse four, which is the center of the psalm, in a particular structure, there is global joy because He has blessed us. They can anticipate what God is going to do in the future and have joy now. Otherwise, they’re hopeless, directionless.
But now we come to the finale of the psalm, verses six and seven. The only verse in this whole psalm which is in past tense, and I think that is the right translation of the psalm, is not a prayer. The psalmist says the earth has yielded its produce. The earth has yielded its produce. Now we know for the people of Israel, it was based on salvation. If you go to verse two, it says that Your salvation may be known on the earth, Your saving ways among the nations.
But then much more than that, much more than God’s choice of us, much more than God’s grace gives to us, He has blessed us with so much more. He says, the earth has yielded its produce. I’m only speaking today to those who sense God’s blessing in salvation and more. If you don’t sense God’s blessing, this series does not apply to you. But if you sense God’s blessing, it is blessing beyond: Blessed Beyond. The earth has yielded its produce. God, our God, blesses us. Verse seven: God, our God blesses us. Why? For us to keep all the blessing to ourselves like the man who prayed, God bless me and my wife, my son and his wife, us four and no more? No, no, no. It is God blesses us. Look at the great, climactic end to verse seven: that all the ends of the earth may fear, and put the words “global worship,” that all the ends of the earth may fear Him.
Global worship! It’s redundancy, he could have just said, the ends of the earth, that we’re taking care of the ends of the earth. Actually wherever we are is an end of the earth, in even the most remote part in which we inhabit or visit is the end of the earth.
But the psalmist wants to be sure that all the ends of the earth is what we see. We put on those glasses, not just for reading or when we need light or pretending to see when we cannot see. He says put on the glasses of blessing so that all the ends of the earth … These are global words. It’s the phrase the end of the earth which the Lord Jesus picked up in Acts 1:8 when He was headed into heaven to orchestrate His mission after claiming that all authority was given to Him, the heavens and the Earth.
And when He gave us His final commission to make disciples of all nations by going and baptizing and teaching them to obey, when He claimed that His presence will be with us till the end of time, till all the ends of the earth will have knowledge of Him, He says you will be my witnesses. Not only in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, but into the end, uttermost parts. That’s how you got in, how I got in, when God’s message came to us. And now we get to return the favor of His blessing and more. Blessed Beyond.
Keep wearing your glasses. Because you want to see — you want to see the blessings that God has given to you–but also see the ends of the blessings as the whole world. Why has God blessed you? So that you become the first link in a chain contagion.
The ripple spreads because you have been blessed across the whole world. That’s blessedness. That’s thanksgiving. That’s gratitude. You are not an end. You are the means for the whole world to know of God’s saving ways. God blesses us: for global knowledge, for global praise, for global joy, for global praise and for global worship.
Let’s distribute God’s blessing, with an attitude of grateful dependence.
To pursue His vision for the whole planet: all peoples, all nations, all over the world.