When God Commands A Blessing (Part 3)
“When I fed the 5,000 with five loaves of bread, how many baskets of leftovers did you pick up afterward?” “Twelve,” they said. Mark 8:19
God will provide for your needs as you remain faithful to Him but there is another level of blessing beyond “We’re able to pay all our bills.” In Deuteronomy 28, God said that He would “command a blessing on your storehouse.” There’s the bag level of not enough, the barrel level of just enough but then there’s a third level- the basket level. This basket level can be seen in the story of the loaves and the fishes. There was a young boy who had a basket of five pieces of bread and two fish. And there arose a great need. Five thousand people needed to be fed. The boy willingly gave his basket to Jesus and he blessed it and multiplied it in an incredible way.
You would have thought that feeding the crowd of 5,000 would have been enough but Jesus took it to the next level. Jesus made sure that the young boy came away with 12 baskets more than he gave away! You can’t out give God. When you bless others God blesses you. That’s the kind of God that He is.
So when you first start out there’s the bag level which is all about you trying to “hold onto what is yours.” Then there’s the barrel level of having just enough which means you and your family are provided for but there is yet another place that God wants you to get to. The basket level moves beyond “I need to meet the needs of my family” to “God has prospered me beyond that and now I have a heart for the community.” God wants you to have the prosperity and margin in your finances to see beyond your family and to be able to help minister to others.
God is looking for people He can trust with that kind of success. Deuteronomy 8:18 teaches us not to forget that God is the one who gives you the ability to attain wealth and He has blessed you for a purpose. You are blessed to be a blessing, not to bury and hoard the wealth He has entrusted to you.
The fourth level of blessing is the barn level. We see this in the life of Joseph. After enduring many hardships and proving to be a man of exceptional character, God raised Joseph up. God arranged for Joseph to interpret Pharaoh’s dream that a famine was soon coming to the land. And Joseph came up with a plan to build barns and fill them full of food to be ready for the years ahead. And when the famine came, Joseph was able to provide for many nations and save a generation of people.
God wants to take you from a “just me” bag mentality, to a barrel of “me and my house,” to a basket “for the whole community.” But then ultimately God wants to bless some people to such a degree that they can touch the nations. They can help make Jesus’ name famous throughout the whole earth. God wants you to be able to leave a legacy that is exceedingly, abundantly above all you can ask or imagine. His plans for you are way bigger than your own.
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