Preparing for blessings
by Pastor Tim Castle-Schmidt
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Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ (Ephesians 1:3).
Read Ephesians 1:1–14
To be blessed in the heavenly realms is some kind of shorthand for saying that God is looking with favour on us. God, who is in heaven, looks on us from heaven now and sees us through the eyes of Jesus – he sees us as his own children.
And what do parents do for their children? Provide for their every need. God seeks to bless us from heaven (God’s home) in the present (our current home) and then bring us to the new creation (our eternal destiny).
All of this is God’s blessing that goes with us in every moment. God’s blessings are not just fleeting (here for a moment and then gone) but go with us through our lives, which never end.
Our eternal lives do not just begin after death or at the end of time. They start the moment of our baptism into Jesus and when faith is planted within us. We are already living in eternity now!
That means that in every human moment – good or bad – God is at work bringing blessings to our present and extending it into eternity. In our hard times, God is preparing us for blessings in the future. In our good times, God is preparing us for blessings in the future.
How often haven’t you thought, ‘How am I going to get through this? God is against me’, only to look back and see God was preparing you for an unexpected blessing? Because God sits outside of time and space, yet Jesus is present in time and space through the Holy Spirit, God prepares our blessings from eternity but delivers them in time – now.
We are being prepared for God’s blessing as we prepare for the blessing of the advent of the Messiah. This liminal time – sometimes called ‘the thin space’ – is where heaven touches earth right now, as God’s blessings are poured upon us here in time and space.
Lord Jesus, in this thin space of Advent, when we are drawn into the mystery of your incarnation, prepare us for the blessings of new life, both now and into eternity. Please help us to rest in you as you journey with us through our every moment. Amen.
By his own admission, Tim Castle-Schmidt is a broken man. Broken in body, mind and spirit, he says he is learning that God is at work in and through human brokenness. He says that while God has not ‘fixed’ him, God continues to work through his brokenness to connect with the world. Tim is the Pastor of Nunawading–Waverley Lutheran Church in Melbourne. After spending many years as a teacher in Lutheran schools, he finally listened to God’s call to the pastoral ministry. Tim is passionate about social justice and engaging the church with contemporary society. Tim shares his life with Fiona, Miranda, and a Jack Russell called Otto.
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