Three Blessings And Their Responsibilities
We are a very blessed people. Our nation’s foundation on freedom has allowed us to prosper materially. The Thanksgiving holiday tends to hold a magnifying glass over these material blessings from God. We are right to attribute these blessings as being from God, however, if we are not careful, these same things can blind us from the reality of God’s design.
Part of this reality: the blessings He gives us come with a requirement. To quote the late Stan Lee, “with great power comes great responsibility.”
Or, even better, Jesus says very plainly that the blessings that God has given us means that He expects a tremendous amount from us.
Luke 12:48 “For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more.”
So with this in mind, I want to touch on three of the blessings that God has given us and their respective responsibilities.
Our Children
Psalm 127:3-5
Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
The fruit of the womb is a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior,
So are the children of one’s youth.
Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them;
They fill our lives with joy and chaos, pride and fear, love and sorrow. As we teach them about the world around them, we are given the opportunity to rediscover it through their eyes. I personally feel that they are the greatest material blessings God has bestowed on me.
The passage above calls our children arrows. As they grow older and we let them loose in the world, they will never hit the target unless we ourselves are facing it and aiming them with purpose. As Christian parents, our responsibility, of course, is to guide them to God.
His Word
Psalm 119:16
I will delight myself in Your statutes;
I will not forget Your word.
With divine inspiration and providence, God has provided us with His Word in the form of the Bible. Through it, we know His will, our hope in His sacrifice, and that through it we are saved. Unfortunately, Satan uses the world to drown out the Word in a sea of noise. This blessing gives us the responsibility to rise above the noise and share it with others to the greatest of our ability.
The Ability to Worship
Psalm 122:1
I was glad when they said to me,
“Let us go into the house of the Lord.”
My in-laws spent several years teaching English in China. There they were unable to worship God unless it was at one of the government-sanctioned churches that taught a heavily modified form of Christianity. Instead, they chose to worship and teach the truth in secret despite fear of persecution. Any time they came back to the states, the joy they felt at being able to worship openly was palpable.
What a blessing it is to be able to freely gather together to worship the Lord! Our responsibility is simple, we are to not take for granted our ability to meet with the Saints. (Hebrews 10:24-25) However, do not mistake its simplicity as unimportance. When we come together, we come to encourage, admonish, teach, and correct each other, as well as praise and worship our Living God.
There are so many more blessings that God has bestowed on us. As the song says, “count your many blessings, name them one by one.” But while you’re doing that, don’t forget to take the time to count the responsibilities that come along with them.
