Psalm 128
English
Standard Version (ESV)
Blessed
Is Everyone Who Fears the Lord
A
Song of Ascents.
128
Blessed
is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways!
2 You shall eat the fruit
of the labor of your hands; you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with
you.
3 Your wife will be like a
fruitful vine
within your house; your children will be like olive shoots
around
your table.
4 Behold, thus shall the
man be blessed
who fears the Lord.
5 The Lord bless you from
Zion! May you see the prosperity of
Jerusalem
all the days of your life!
6 May you see your
children's children!
Peace be upon Israel!
I don’t believe
that what we have or don’t have in this world is an indication of how much God
loves or blesses us. You cannot measure
God’s love and His blessings with money or things. In fact He is very much against the thought
of being lovers of money. Jesus says in
Matthew 6:24, “No
one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other,
or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God
and money.” (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+6%3A24&version=ESV)
However,
God is all for us working, using the hands that He gave us to earn our keep in
this world. If you notice, the man in
this passage clearly worked because it said that he ate the “fruit of his
labor,” it said nothing about being a rich, fat glutton. It said nothing about eating caviar or
drinking the finest wine in town. It
speaks of sitting around the table with your family and enjoying a meal
together. It speaks of living to a ripe
old age so that you can enjoy your grandchildren. It speaks of family.
Often
times we can get so caught up in the world of success that we forget about our
family. We forget about the important
things of God and about our obligation to share with our children the love of
God. Many homes today are absent of a
father or a mother because people put their focus on things and not on God and
each other.
Many
times people get confused with what it really means to be blessed by God. When I lost my job several years ago due to
budget cuts, some people believed it was because I was not doing the will of
God. That if I would just draw closer to
God I would be blessed by Him. When in
fact, I had felt more in the will of God than I ever had doing the job that I
did. Every step of the way I felt He was
guiding me and directing me. Losing my
job was not to me a sign that I had failed Him yet a friend told my husband
that was exactly what was wrong. To me,
Psalm 128 counteracts that belief. While
I was without a job, God provided for our family, we were blessed. We may not have had all the money we had been
accustomed to but our bills were paid and there was still even money in savings. This world is not about making money or
seeing how much money we can save or spend, it is about using our gifts and
talents to please and honor Him. He will
supply our needs and bless us but we need to put forth the effort to
labor. We were always intended to work,
even in the Garden Adam and Eve had a job to do.
Go
forth into this world and work but as you do so, seek Him first, with all your
heart, and then enjoy the fruit, that He allows you to harvest, with your
family.
Seeking
Him with all my heart,
Sheila
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