ABUNDANT LIFE VISION.
GOD BLESS YOU.
Ephesians 1:3: All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. NLT.

God bless you is a saying that is quite common in the Christendom. I see it a lot when someone is being celebrated during his or her birthday. As a matter of fact, I use it to pray for people. It is a simple prayer with a lot of immense possibilities. Over and over, I have explained what God means and I would not dwell much on that in today’s teaching. I want to focus on the meaning of blessing. But for the sake of first time readers, let me talk briefly about God. God is depicted in the Hebrew language as Elohim and Jehovah. Elohim describes God as the all powerful while Jehovah describes him as self-sustaining, unoriginated and eternal being.

What then is blessing? The word bless has many meanings in different places in the bible, I will pick three out of the possible four meanings it has and link it with God. The first meaning of bless is “to speak well of”. This is associated with praising and celebrating God. Luke 1:62-64: So they used gestures to ask the baby’s father what he wanted to name him. [63]He motioned for a writing tablet, and to everyone’s surprise he wrote, “His name is John.” [64]Instantly Zechariah could speak again, and he began praising God. NLT. The second meaning is to “invoke blessings upon a person. What this stands for is that praises and celebration are invoked on the recipient. Romans 12:13-14: When God’s people are in need, be ready to help them. Always be eager to practice hospitality. [14]Bless those who persecute you. Don’t curse them; pray that God will bless them. NLT. It can either come from God or from people but the scope of our teaching today is that God is the one doing the blessing for us. Therefore, God is ensuring that you are celebrated and that you receive praise.

Also, the third meaning is “to cause to prosper, to make happy, to bestow blessings on”. Ephesians 1:3: All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. NLT. Here, we are saying that God ensures that we prosper (spiritually and physically), he makes us happy by giving us the things we desire in accordance to his will which are captured in his word.

Therefore, we have access to the blessings of God as long as we have given our lives to Jesus when we search and lay claim to the blessings of God to us in his word. This is because God is not stingy in his blessings, he blessed us to be fruitful and multiply in Gen 1:28 and ever since, he has been blessing us with rain, sunshine and the likes.

As long as we are in this dispensation, we have access to the blessings of Abraham, spiritual blessings and the blessing of the salvation of our souls. 1 Peter 1:8-11: You love him even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him now, you trust him; and you rejoice with a glorious, inexpressible joy. [9]The reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls. [10]This salvation was something even the prophets wanted to know more about when they prophesied about this gracious salvation prepared for you. [11]They wondered what time or situation the Spirit of Christ within them was talking about when he told them in advance about Christ’s suffering and his great glory afterward. NLT.

God bless you