How the Blessing Flows // Blessed to Be a Blessing, Part 2

<p>You often hear people talking about how God’s blessing flows on their lives. But sometimes, we can take a narrow view of what God’s really up to.</p> <h5> </h5> <h5><span style="color: #ff9900; font-size: 14pt;"><strong>A Deep Truth of the Bible</strong></span></h5> <p>It’s great to be with you again today and this is the second message in a series that I have called <em>"Blessed to be a Blessing"</em>. The society in which we live tells us it’s all about <em>"you"</em>; it’s all about <em>"me"</em>. I buy the newspaper reasonably frequently and the one that I buy on Friday, once a month, has a glossy magazine inside it called, <em>"Wish"</em>. It’s full of expensive watches and expensive holidays and expensive dining experiences and coffee and real estate and it’s so glossy; it’s so seductive.</p> <p>Sociologists talk of the phenomenon of <em>"cocooning"</em>; of wrapping ourselves in comfort. For so many people in the West, that’s what they are trying to do. To somehow ignore everything else that’s going on; to hide from all the problems in the world and imagine somehow, that we can be satisfied in the cocoon of luxury. There’s an airline that for a long time, had an advertising campaign for it’s business class and the by-line of the advertising campaign was, “It’s all about you”. And that’s it isn’t it? To cocoon ourselves in these luxury things and experiences and ignore the pain and the starvation and the sickness that’s going on in the rest of the world.</p> <p>There are billions of people in poverty today. There are billions of people who don’t have enough food and some of those people are listening today. I had feed-back recently from a listener in a Liberian refugee camp, in Sierra Leone and there, life is purely about survival – food, water, avoiding disease, keeping away from war. And when I am talking about God’s blessing, the one thing that I’m conscience of is the need to speak into both ends of that spectrum.</p> <p>A man who I really admire, who taught me a lot, a man called Barry Chant, was a