Words of Hope: I Will Bless
One of my favorite passages of scripture is Psalm 34. What a psalm of solace! Dad and I would pray each word, meditating on it. The first part of verse one says, “I will bless the Lord at all times.” We start with meditating on the word I. What is God speaking to us about this important word? God didn’t create us to have a collective mind but the gift and responsibility for the I, for me, for what God has redeemed me to be. The next word is will. I consider my will, this is the decisional choice, the beautiful gift to choose.
Next comes the word bless. I love the word bless. The Hebrew word for bless is Baruch which Jewish writers explain to mean to increase in joy and peacefulness. Therefore, I bless God by increasing in joy and peacefulness. This meditation thrills my mind and heart. God is blessed by my joy, my deep enjoyment of Him and this incredible world He has made. He is blessed by my peacefulness to live with absolute trust in His work in my life. He is moving and working all things together for good, even the stories of my life of suffering, failure, sin, and mistakes. All these are not beyond God’s redeeming power to restore and therefore I bless Him with my joy and my peace in trusting Him to do these things and accomplish His redemptive power.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. – Ephesians 2:4-7
