What is God’s blessing?
Alec Motyer is very helpful here in his book Journey. He tells us that ‘blessing’ is a broad word for God’s gracious response to our needs. When Christians pray — as we often must when we are ignorant of a friend’s specific needs — ‘Lord, please bless so and so’, we are, in fact, asking the Lord to review our friend’s case and to react appropriately. It is actually not a bad way to pray (so long as it’s not thoughtless) because it brings our friends to God and his wisdom. ‘Blessing’ is the Lord himself drawing near to us in all his boundless sufficiency for every need.
Psalm 133 tells us that where ‘brothers [and sisters] live together in unity … there the LORD bestows his blessing’. As we think about teamwork, our conclusion must be that, in a church, missionary society and especially in a leadership team, we need relationships which are (in and under Christ) harmonious.
This leads us to ask a couple of questions. What does this unity look like? How do we achieve and maintain it? The great passage which addresses these questions is, of course, Philippians 2.
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church members …