Blessings and Punishments
You ever have a plan and that plan gets totally changed without any input from you? That happened to me today.
Today, for me, is early on Election Day. In fact, the polls have only been opened for an hour so the chatter is still muted. But everyone is aware that the chatter will explode as the day develops.
My plan was to write a devotional focusing on blessings as a contrarian measure to my expectations of today. But as I was driving to my first stop of the day, I realized that blessings are meaningless without consequences.
Parenting style, which is different today than when my wife and I were parents of a young child, are focused on reward and consequences and avoiding the corporal punishment that our son and we experienced as children. So, our granddaughter, who has to be in the running for the kid with the most stuff (clothes, toys, books), when she misbehaves, gets an explanation of why the action is wrong. If that doesn’t fix the behavior, eventually, something (toy, books, etc) that she values is taken away from her. The opposite happens too in that if she’s good, the stuff is given back (or when Mom & Dad deem the stuff has been taken away long enough). She has gotten to the point that she realizes that the consequence is only temporary and the motivation for her to fix the behavior is waning. They, her parents, are trying to figure out their next steps…
“Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him. The righteous has enough to satisfy his appetite, but the belly of the wicked suffers want.” - Proverbs 13:24-25 ESV
My intended devotion was going to start out commenting on the largest blessing of Christ sacrificing himself for our sins. Then I was going to add my wife and son and the rest of the family. Then a home and food to eat. Then y’all as my church family. And I was going to end with the song reference of blessings too numerous to count (Counting My Blessings by Steph Schuster).
“A faithful man will abound with blessings, but whoever hastens to be rich will not go unpunished.” - Proverbs 28:20
But all those would not be blessings if there wasn’t consequences of situations where they could go away. Be careful, I’m not stating this in the way Job’s friends were trying to convince him that he sinned in the book of Job.
“And he said to them, ‘Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?’ (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, ‘What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.’” - Mark 7:18-23 ESV
“But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,” - Romans 3:21-24
Maybe I am going to end this by talking about my first listed blessing and the only one of them that is really important.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.” - John 3:16-21
Regardless of who wins, I pray you are healthy and happy to be a part of God’s plan.
