(Be) Blessed: Creating a Covenant Lifestyle With GodSample

God’s desire to bless you and His ability to do it in a way that is beyond what we could ask, think, or imagine is pretty amazing. Everything God does is for the betterment of His Kingdom. God blesses us so we can, in turn, be a blessing to others.

When God called Abraham to leave his country, He gave him no details. God simply told Abraham to go, and Abraham went. This was a fulfillment of Abraham’s part of the covenant -- you will be my God.

In return, God tells Abraham that He will make his name great and through his family establish a great nation. God’s plan was to bless not just Abraham and his family, but all the families of the earth establishing a legacy of blessing. This is God’s part of the covenant: and you will be My people.

Abraham responded to God’s directive to “go,” and when he got to Shechem in the land of Canaan, God directed them to stop. They had reached the land God promised to them, and Abraham began to dig wells to sustain them. Abraham established his family in Shechem, and his son Isaac grew up hearing of God’s promises and the covenant God had made through His father. Isaac saw the fruit of his father’s “yes” to the Lord and followed his example. As Isaac grew and served the Lord, the Lord blessed him, and he had a great number of possessions, flocks, herds, and servants -- so much so that the Philistines envied him and filled up Abraham’s wells with dirt. So Isaac got to work re-digging the wells.

Wells were a symbol of a thriving community. They provided a constant, reliable source of water for people in the regions where the weather was dry and hot. Wells were often owned by people who had inherited them from previous generations, and it gave them the right to dwell in the land.

Abraham dug the wells. Isaac re-dug them. Jacob, Isaac’s son, reclaimed them and likely dug some of his own in a nearby area of Canaan. None of these men could have known that hundreds of years later, the well would be a water source for the people of Samaria. A people group who were ostracized by the Jewish community and viewed as outside of God’s covenant and blessing. But God knew.

At a well, a lonely Samaritan woman encountered Jesus, and the radical healing she received caused many in her community to return to God. Now that is a powerful legacy of blessing!

God wants to bless us because He’s a good Father, but it doesn’t end with just us.

When we choose to take up our part in the covenant, we enter into a generations-old promise that is intended for us and our future generations. It becomes the legacy of our “yes.” Whether we are continuing in the flow of generations-old wells, or re-digging those that have been stopped up, the decisions we make today in full obedience to God become the beautiful and powerful legacy for the future. Amen!

This devotional is adapted from the in-depth small group study, “(Be) Blessed: Creating a Covenant Lifestyle with God.” Grab some friends and discover what it means to create a covenant lifestyle and experience all the blessing that comes with it.