v 2 I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to others.
This promise to Abraham has often been at the heart of prayers. I don’t mean it is a prayer for personal blessing, and certainly not one for fame (!), but it is a request to make us a blessing to other people in some way. Hebrew thinking always linked worship with service for God – so much so that the same Hebrew word was used for both ideas! God-focussed worship included being a blessing to other people through service. What we tend to regard as two separate aspects of our Christian lives are inseparable twins!
So once again, something for you to reflect on today. Can you get your head round the notion that helping someone with their shopping is an act of worship? Or that the urgent request to assist an elderly neighbour on a Sunday morning can be every bit as much an act of worship as turning up at Church to sing hymns? Do you recall the (very) old hymn that includes this:
Teach me, my God and King, in all things thee to see,
and what I do in anything to do it as for thee.
A servant with this clause makes drudgery divine:
who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, makes that and the action fine.
There is no genuine division between what we (wrongly) perceive as sacred and secular, and there is no division either between worship and service.
Will you include this in your prayers today?
Lord, as a part of my worship, please make me a blessing to those I meet today!
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