Already Handed Over

There is a woman in that congregation who has prayed the same prayer for nine years.

Not the same words. She is not a woman who repeats herself. But the same request, dressed nine different ways across nine different seasons, and the request is: Lord, would You bless me.

She has prayed it in a hospital corridor. She has prayed it into a steering wheel in a supermarket car park with the shopping melting in the boot. She has prayed it in the good years too, in a garden in June with her feet up, which is the honest bit, because it was never desperation. It was a settled conviction that somewhere ahead of her there was a blessing with her name on it and it had not been handed over yet.

And there is a photograph of her, on the wall of that same building, at the age of twenty-four, in a river, with the water going and her face doing something enormous. And on the day that photograph was taken a man standing waist deep beside her said, out loud, in front of forty people: every spiritual blessing in Christ is yours.

She was there. She heard it. She has walked past the photograph maybe two thousand times.

And every morning for nine years she has got up and asked for it.

The gap between a gift and a possession

I want to be very careful here, because there is a cheap version of this message and it does harm. The cheap version says: you have been praying wrong for nine years. That is a lie, and I am not going to hand it to you.

Every one of those prayers was heard. Not one of them was wasted, and not one of them annoyed Him. Asking is not the mistake. The mistake, if it is even fair to call it one, is much smaller and much more human: nobody ever told you the difference between a gift that is being considered and a gift that has already been signed over and put into your hands.

So let me say what Scripture says. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ (Ephesians 1:3). Look at the tense of that. Not who will bless us. Not who considers blessing us. Has blessed. Past. Completed. Transacted.

You have every spiritual blessing already, in Christ, and it is not pending. That is not a bold reading of the verse, it is the plain one, and the Holy Spirit is described three verses later as the seal and the guarantee on exactly that inheritance (Ephesians 1:13 and 14). He is not the promise of a delivery. He is the deposit on a thing already legally yours.

Asking and receiving are two different motions of the same hand

Here is a picture that has helped more people than any sermon I have preached.

A hand asking and a hand receiving look almost identical. Both are open. Both are extended. And a person can hold one for years without ever converting it into the other, because the difference is not in the hand. It is in what the person believes about the moment.

An asking hand is held out toward a decision that has not been made. A receiving hand is held out toward a thing that is already on its way down into it.

You are not waiting on a decision. You are standing in front of a finished one. The word says He has already blessed, and the same word says God is not a man that He should lie or change His mind about what He has spoken (Numbers 23:19), and it is the Holy Spirit and not your certainty who makes a finished thing land in an ordinary Tuesday. Nine years of asking did not delay it by a day. It simply meant the hand stayed in the first posture.

What a blessing actually is, because half of us have it wrong

Some of us have quietly defined a blessing as an improvement. A better outcome. A door opening. And so we scan the week for evidence and grade God on it.

But the blessing God speaks over a person in Scripture is almost never a change in circumstance first. It is a declaration of relationship and standing that then walks out into circumstance. Bless you and keep you. Face shining. Name placed on. That is not a better week. That is a person being told who they are to God and who God is to them, out loud, on purpose.

You are not blessed on the days the week goes well. You are blessed in Christ, and the week is downstream of that. Scripture says He has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ, and Paul wrote that line while imprisoned, which is not a detail to skip past, and the Spirit who inspired it is the same Spirit in you as you read it. He was not describing his circumstances. He was declaring his standing, and his standing did not move when the door of that cell shut.

And I will say the honest thing too, because we do not sell outcomes here. Receiving this today does not mean the thing you have been carrying resolves this week. It might not. What changes is that you stop approaching God as a woman waiting to find out, and start approaching Him as a woman who already knows.