The blessing of God doesn’t end with you.

We want it to. We want to be blessed for our own sake. But we’re not. Think about Abraham.

Here was a man who was greatly blessed by God. God Himself promised it to be so:

“I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great… I will bless those who bless you, I will curse those who treat you with contempt…” (Genesis 12:2-3).

That’s big time blessing. But isn’t there part of you when you read these verses that wonders why? Why Abraham? What made him so special? Why him, of all the other men on the earth? And why the nation of people that would come from him? Why would they be regarded as God’s chosen people, His special possession?

From the outset, we see the answer. Here is the full text of the two verses quoted above:

“I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, I will curse those who treat you with contempt, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

See it? Abraham and his descendants aren’t blessed at the detriment of the other people on the earth; they were blessed for the sake of everyone else on the earth. When God blessed Abraham, he had the world in mind. The recipients of God’s blessing are meant to be conduits, not cul-de-sacs. They are meant to be hoses, not sponges. Great problems and troubles arise when the people of God choose to be exclusively recipients of the blessing of God.

God’s blessing is meant to flow through His people, not bottleneck with them. So I wonder today about me (and perhaps about you) – are you a conduit or a cul-de-sac?