Bless the LORD, O My Soul

We know that God can bless us, and that He delights to do so; but is there any way that we can bless Him in return?

It appears that there must be, for David is able to declare:

If this is the case, then how are we to go about it? What do we have to do?

To enable us to answer that question, let’s ask another one:

• If I plant flowers in my garden, or vegetables in my vegetable patch, how are they going to bless me?

This assumes, of course, that I can be blessed by my flowers or my vegetables!

My father had a vegetable garden, and every evening during the summer months he would stand for some time by the edge of his garden and inspect the plants to see how they were developing. When all was going well, he was blessed; but if there were problems, he became concerned and knew that he had to take some remedial action.

So, how did the vegetables in my father’s garden bless him?

• By flourishing and being healthy, strong, and fruitful.

Let’s consider another example – parents and children:

• Question: How does the child bless the parent?
• Answer: By being healthy, happy, and an active, contributing member of the family.

Every good parent wants these three things for their child:

• a) to learn the ways of the family and be obedient and compliant
• b) to find personal fulfilment – to become all that they have the potential to become
• c) to be an integral, active, beneficial, and beneficiary member of the family and wider society

Someone has said that a good parent gives their children two things: ROOTS and WINGS.

When a parent sees these qualities and characteristics developing in their child, that parent is blessed.

As Christians, we are the children of God, and God, like every good parent, wants the same for His children, and is blessed when He sees them fulfilled in us.

We’re probably all familiar with the story of Jesus, Martha, and Mary. Here it is in Luke’s Gospel:

Martha being ANXIOUS and TROUBLED did not bless Jesus. Mary quietly ENGAGING with Him did bless Him.

Now, Martha was not doing anything wrong. She had a servant heart and was doing what she always did – she was seeing a need and doing what was required to meet that need.

The problem was that her perception of the need was not the same as Christ’s.

• Martha was seeing the NATURAL need – the people needed to be fed and watered;
• Jesus was seeing the SPIRITUAL need – the people needed the word of God.

The contrast between the two sisters was that:

• Martha’s DOING was good and commendable, but
• Mary’s DEVOTION was NECESSARY.

To put it another way:

• Martha gave Jesus her SERVICE, but
• Mary gave Jesus her ATTENTION.

Through Asaph the priest, God speaks to the people of Israel with a rebuke similar to Christ’s loving rebuke of Martha:

In this psalm, God requires 3 things of Israel:

• Listen to Me
• Walk in My ways
• Be faithful to Me (i.e. pay attention to no strange gods)

When they do these things, God will be blessed, and promises to bless them in return by subduing their enemies and filling their mouths.

When they don’t, He will abandon them to their own counsels, which will result in failure and defeat for them, His hope being that they will return to Him and re-establish their relationship with Him.

Here’s another question for you:

• What can you give to God that will be a blessing to Him, since He already has everything and needs nothing more?

The prophet Micah gives us the answer:

Enoch (whom we meet in Genesis 5:21-24) and Noah (in Genesis chapters 6 to 9) are two men who were particularly commended in that they walked with God. Here is what is said about Noah:

Walking with God is an important way to be a blessing to Him. Look at what he commanded Abram (also known as Abraham) to do:

We can see from this brief exchange that ‘being blameless’ is a necessary companion to ‘walking with God’, or perhaps even an essential element of it. As the prophet Amos says:

There may be places that you or I might want to walk, but if God is not in agreement, He won’t be going. So, if we want to make sure that we’re always walking with Him, then we’ll be checking that our walk is pleasing to Him – that it is a blessing to Him.

One of the ways to be a blessing to God in our walk is to keep walking in the truth, as John the apostle says:

If God’s servant, John, ‘rejoices greatly’, is ‘greatly pleased’, and ‘has no greater joy’ than to see the saints walking in the truth, then I think we can be fairly sure that their Heavenly Father is rejoicing even more when He sees it.

We can also say that if Jesus is the Truth (John 14:6), then ‘walking in the Truth’ is ‘walking with Jesus’, as He Himself invites us to do:

You probably noticed that He doesn’t just want to ‘go for a stroll’. The Lord always has a purpose in whatever He might do. In this case, the walk that He invites us to participate in is the walk of discipleship.

In those days, two horses or two oxen would be yoked together to draw a carriage or a plough. The less experienced animal would ‘learn the ropes’ from the more experienced one.

We learn to walk with God by being yoked to Jesus, who teaches us by the experiences of life how to be a blessing to the Father.

Jesus was able to walk with Mary and Martha, even though Martha at first misunderstood what He wanted of her; but when she learned the lesson, the journey continued.

However, the Pharisees, who made the same mistake as Martha had done, seemed unable, or unwilling, to learn the lesson, and so instead of blessing the Lord and receiving His blessing in return, they exasperated Him and received His stern rebuke:

The mistake that the scribes and Pharisees made was not so much that their focus was on OBEDIENCE, which seemed to have become an end in itself, but that their focus was not on the PERSON of God, or any form of meaningful relationship with Him.

In another place, Jesus rebuked them in the following words:

Why does this matter to God?

Think of it this way: would you be blessed if your child or grandchild, or even your team-mate, always did what was right but never attempted to engage with you as a person?

God did not create us to be robots, but to be His children, to have FELLOWSHIP with Him.

• OBEDIENCE is necessary in order to bless Him;
• SERVICE is necessary in order to bless Him;
• Being BLAMELESS is necessary in order to bless Him;

But none of these in isolation, or even all of them together, is sufficient to bless the Lord.

What blesses God is KNOWING US and us getting to KNOW HIM.

In fact, Jesus tells us that this is what eternal life is all about:

Jesus prophesies that He’ll have lots of followers who’ll want to justify themselves in His sight on the basis of their ministerial C.V., but who’ll be turned away at the door because they never took the trouble to emulate Mary’s quiet, selfless, attentive, personal devotion to Him:

This might seem to us to be an overly severe, even cruel, rejection. Surely these good works deserve to be rewarded.

But God knows the hearts of men and is not taken in by appearances. These hopefuls are probably of the same ilk as those who were exposed by the penetrating words of Asaph in Psalm 78:

The history of both Judaism and Christianity is strewn with the wreckage of lives and communities which started in relationship with God, but ended in having a form of godliness, but denying its power (2 Timothy 3:5), having wandered away from walking WITH God and talking TO God to talking ABOUT God but walking WITHOUT God.

Christ’s rebuke to the church in Ephesus, in Revelation chapter 2, tells the same story:

They were still doing good works, but only out of a sense of duty, and not from the overflow of a heart of love for God. Let us, as individuals and as a community, not become guilty of the same error.

Instead, let us join Mary in doing what she did intuitively, and Martha in what she learned to do through Christ’s instruction, and David in doing what became his daily practice through years of communing with God in the wilderness while watching over his sheep, the practice which Saint Patrick also developed on the slopes of Slemish Mountain in Ulster, as a slave-boy in a foreign land.

This is what David committed himself to do – not because he had to, but because he wanted to; because he loved the Lord his God with everything that was in him, spirit soul and body: