God Blesses You Not Your Lifestyle

Last week I wrote to you about a different kind of self control. The kind that does not come from clenched fists and held breath, but from identity. From living from inside the heart rather than standing guard at its door. 

This week I want to take that thread one step deeper.

Once we begin to live from identity rather than control, something else begins to shift. The way we understand blessing. The way we understand God. The way we understand the very fabric of the life we are walking through.

Most of us were taught, in one way or another, that God blesses our lifestyles.

If we do the right things, He will reward us. If we say the right prayers, He will open the right doors. If we follow the right formula, life will flow in the direction we want it to flow.

So we spend our years arranging and rearranging our lifestyles, hoping that somewhere in the arranging we will finally land on the version that earns the favour we have been chasing.

I want to gently suggest something else.

God does not bless your lifestyle.

God blesses you.

There is a vast difference between the two.

Every one of us was created equally to bless and to be blessed. This is the deeper truth beneath everything else I want to say today. Not some of us. Not the ones who got it right. Not the ones who arrived. Every single one of us was woven for the same thing. To carry blessing and to receive blessing. To be a vessel of life flowing in both directions.

The world will try to convince you that this is not true. It will sort you into categories of those who deserve and those who do not. It will measure your worth by your output, your achievement, your appearance, your usefulness, your circumstance. It will whisper to you, day after day, that the blessing belongs to certain kinds of lives and not to others.

The fact that the world repeats this lie loudly and often does not make it true either.

You were made to bless and be blessed. This was decided long before you arrived. It cannot be earned and it cannot be lost. It is the ground you are standing on, whether you can feel it beneath your feet or not.

When God created this universe, when He breathed life into being, He set it up to work in a certain way. There is a grain to it. A direction. A current. 

Reality itself has a shape, and that shape was not random. It was woven with intention.

When we cooperate with the way things were set up to work, life flows toward us. Not because we have earned anything. Not because we have been good enough, but because we are running our hand along the grain of the wood.

When we try to force life to move in a different direction, when we attempt to take control and bend reality around our own designs, we are running our hand against the grain, and anyone who has ever worked with wood knows what happens then. The splinters. The friction. The blood.

This is what I believe Gods wrath actually is.

Not a man in the sky waiting to punish us for our mistakes. Not an angry being keeping a list of every place we fell short. But the natural consequence of moving against the way things were created to work.

Most of us, somewhere along the way, stopped believing that the original design was enough. We were told, often without words, that the life we were given was not quite the right one. That we would need to manufacture something else. Something bigger, shinier, more impressive. Something that would finally prove our worth in the eyes of a world that had already decided we needed to prove it.

So we begin to push against the grain. Not out of rebellion. Out of desperation. A quiet desperation to make it. To arrive. To become someone whose life finally looks like it deserves to be blessed.

The painful truth is this. When we live this way, we end up living lives that were never ours in the first place and more than often they create huge heartache and pain for us and those around us.

We chase callings that were never given to us. We build kingdoms we were never asked to build. We arrange and rearrange the outside of our lives in the hope that the right configuration will quiet the ache inside. The longer we walk this road, the further we move from the actual life we were made for.

The pain we experience along the way is not God punishing us for what we are doing or not doing. The pain is the simple, honest feedback of what happens when a human being tries to live against the grain of how they were created to live. The wood is not angry with us. It is just telling us the truth.

When we try to force what was meant to flow, things become stagnant. We end up trying to live in a place that has already become a dead end, and because nothing new can flow into a dead end, we begin to wither there. 

We call it bad luck. We call it a season. We call it spiritual warfare. Sometimes it is simply the wood telling us we have been pushing against its grain for too long.

This is why God blesses you and not your lifestyle.

Here is where most of us get lost.

We have been taught to measure whether God is pleased with us by looking at the outside of our lives. If things are going well, He must be smiling on us. 

If things are falling apart, He must be displeased. If the doors are opening, we are on the right path. If the doors are closing, we must have stepped out of His will.

This way of measuring blinds us to the deeper truth of how God actually moves with us.

Think of Joseph for a moment.

If we had measured God's pleasure with Joseph by the shape of his outer life, we would have come to some strange conclusions.

For fourteen years, Joseph walked through hell. He was betrayed by his brothers. Thrown into a pit. Sold as a slave to a foreign country. 

Falsely accused by a woman he tried to honor. Thrown into a prison cell. Forgotten by the very man he had helped.

From the outside, fourteen years of evidence that God had turned His back.

Fourteen years of every reasonable observer being able to say, whatever Joseph did to deserve this, God is clearly not pleased with him.

Then comes the day Pharaoh calls for him. The dream is interpreted. The robe is placed on his shoulders. The ring is placed on his finger. The chariot is given. The position over all of Egypt is handed to him.

Now, suddenly, every observer would say, ah, now God is pleased with Joseph. Now we can see the blessing. Now the favour is clear. But here is what we miss.

God was just as pleased with Joseph in the pit as He was in the palace.

God was just as near to Joseph in the prison as He was in the throne room.

The blessing did not arrive when the circumstances changed. The blessing had been on Joseph the entire time. On the man. On the heart. On the one walking through it.

Consider this with me for a moment. We have the rare privilege of seeing Joseph's story from beginning to end. We hold the whole arc in our hands, yet even with that gift, so many of us still find ourselves focused on his performance rather than on what God was quietly up to the entire time.

We read his life as though the lesson is his character, his discipline, his refusal to fall. We praise him for what he did and miss what God was doing.

The clues are there, if we are willing to see them. Joseph was anything but perfect. The young man who paraded his dreams in front of brothers who already resented him. The one whose pride helped light the very fire that consumed him. 

Scripture does not hide these things from us. It simply lets them sit there, unhighlighted, while the deeper story unfolds underneath.

God was not waiting for Joseph to become flawless before He moved with him.

God was with him the whole way as he is with you.

This is what I want you to hear today.

The big break is not the blessing. The opportunity is not the blessing. The breakthrough is not the blessing.

You are the blessing.

God is just as present with you in your fourteen years as He is in the moment Pharaoh finally calls your name.

When we measure God's pleasure by our circumstances, we miss Him entirely in the very seasons He is doing His deepest work in us. We assume the silence means displeasure. We assume the delay means we have failed. We assume the difficulty means we have stepped off the path.

So we begin to strive again. To arrange again. To bend the grain of the wood again, to cut the wood in pieces that often leads us to experience a smaller picture of the bigger one God had in mind for us. We do this hoping to manufacture the kind of life that will prove to ourselves that God is finally smiling on us. 

Joseph did not do that.

Somehow, in the pit and in the prison and in the long years of being forgotten, he kept his hand on the grain. He kept cooperating with what was in front of him rather than fighting it. 

He kept showing up in Potiphar's house, in the prison, in the small daily decisions, as though the blessing had never left him.

Because it had not.

Now I want to say something honest here, because I do not want to paint a picture that is not true to the world we actually live in.

We live inside a system where unfavourable things happen. Pain comes. Suffering comes. Loss comes. Things break that we did not break. Storms arrive that we did not invite. This is not a sign that we have done something wrong. This is simply the nature of being alive in a world that is still groaning.

When we are aware of the bigger picture, when we understand the grain of the wood beneath our feet, even what comes unbidden can be used to add momentum to our journey rather than stall it.

The pain becomes a teacher.

The loss becomes a doorway.

The unwelcome thing becomes the very wind that pushes us further into who we were always created to be.

This is the difference between a life lived in control and a life lived in cooperation.

Control fights every wave that does not go its way.

Cooperation reads the water and learns to move with it.

Control tries to bend the grain of the wood.

Cooperation runs its hand along the grain and trusts that it leads somewhere good.

The blessing has been here all along. Not on the lifestyle. 

On you.

On the one walking. On the one breathing. On the one in the pit and the one in the palace, equally loved, equally seen, equally near to the heart of God.

With you in the unfolding!

PS. See you next Sunday!