A few years back I had a neighbor helping me with some stuff on my roof. We had a ladder which lead the way onto the roof in front of the garage. As I walked into my garage I happened to walk underneath the ladder. After having walked underneath this ladder, my neighbor responded, “I can tell you are a man of God.”
We got a good laugh out of it, but there is an important lesson here. It is the difference between being lucky and being blessed. As a believer, I do not consider myself a lucky man. I consider myself a blessed man. Luck involves chance while blessing involves the providence of God.
With Jesus in my life, I don’t need luck. I have got everything I need and more. And with Jesus there is no such thing as bad luck. We don’t need to worry about walking underneath a ladder, breaking a mirror, or having a black cat walk across our path. With God we know that nothing happens by chance. There are no coincidences. What we might call coincidences I see as God incidents.
It is also important to know that spiritual disciplines are not a way of earning luck. It is easy for many to fall into the mindset that God is going to somehow going to give greater blessing if we do the “right” thing. How many people see reciting the Lord’s Prayer as a way to get God to be more favorably disposed toward them? It doesn’t work that way.
This Sunday we will explore the Beatitudes found in the Sermon on the Mount. It is the beginning of a 4 week message series about the greatest sermon every preached. The Beatitudes are 9 blessings Jesus spoke over his disciples to begin this sermon. Through these Beatitudes we discover what it means to be blessed and how blessing is discovered. The amazing thing about these blessings is that we will discover there is very little we can do to earn them. They come out of the heart and character of God. You just might already be in the perfect right place for God grace to rain down on you.
If you cannot make Sunday worship, you can always listen online at gs4nj.org/messages.
God’s Blessings,
Pastor Phil
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