Be Blessed | The Institute for Creation Research

Be Blessed

During the days of Jesus, being blessed had a different meaning from what Christians understand it to mean today. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament says the word for “blessed” was used by Greeks when talking about gods and their blessedness. Later, it was used to describe how the rich were free from worry.

When Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, He redefined the word for all who listened. All people want to be blessed, and many people looking up at Jesus that day had in mind what being blessed would look like for them. It just wasn’t what they were expecting. In Matthew 5, Jesus tells His followers that the blessed are those who are poor in spirit, mournful, meek, hungering and thirsting after righteousness, merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, persecuted for their righteousness, and reviled by this world for Jesus’ sake. This does not sound like the path to being rich and loved, today’s version of “blessed.” Yet for those who follow Jesus, we can see it.

One weekend while in Gilmer, Texas, I witnessed the first outing of one of my best friends’ little ones into the world of Little League Baseball. As joyful a time as that was, I will remember more what happened later. We had lunch downtown with those same friends and family. That day, they were having a barbecue contest downtown, so the square was full. I decided to wear one of my ICR T-shirts for two reasons. The first reason was the name of the baseball team had dinosaurs in it.

Secondly, I had hoped for a reaction from someone who would read it, and someone did. A gentleman walked up to me and asked what it meant. I was wearing the “Dinosaurs Est. Day 6” shirt, and he was curious. He had never heard of the Institute for Creation Research, so I let him know all about us. I felt so much joy from that. Jesus knew when He was speaking to those people on the mount that most of them were not the rich elite but might have wanted to be. He also knew that if they focused on what He wanted instead, they would get way more joy than what money could bring them.

That day I felt blessed, and that wasn’t the only day. I love my job working in information technology, and it always seems like I’m blessed whenever we need to do an upgrade or fix something that just got old and worn down.

Every time I think about the donors who give money to ICR, I feel blessed. God works through our donors to help us get to where we need to be, to stay at the cutting edge. Those donations have helped us to create things like designs for T-shirts so that introverts like me can have a way to spark up those conversations to help spread Christ’s kingdom. They also helped to get the ICR Discovery Center for Science & Earth History off the ground so that we can equip those brave souls who will use the information they gain from it to go and be blessed with the kind of blessing Jesus was talking about—the favor of God and heavenly riches.

* Mr. West is IT Systems Administrator at the Institute for Creation Research.

Cite this article: Bill West. 2021. Be Blessed. Acts & Facts. 50 (8).

The Latest
CREATION.LIVE PODCAST
Getting the Gospel into People's Hands | Creation.Live Podcast:...
Can God use an atheist airline pilot to reach other nations with the truth of the Gospel? The answer, obviously, is yes.   Host...

NEWS
Chimp Genome Only 75% Similar to Human?
An oft-repeated claim of evolutionary propaganda is that chimpanzee and human DNA are 98.5% identical. This high level of DNA similarity, which has...

NEWS
''73-Million-Year-Old'' Alaskan Salmon
Fish evolution remains an enigma. Evolutionists can only say fish first “appeared” over a half-billion years ago.1 Creationists...

NEWS
God's Memorial Day
“And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of...

NEWS
The Origin of Eukaryotes
Eukaryotes are multicellular organisms that contain diverse differentiated cell types. Within almost every cell there are subcellular compartments called...

CREATION PODCAST
Water vs. Wind: The Controversial Coconino | The Creation Podcast:...
Welcome to the sixth episode in a series called “The Failures of Old Earth Creationism.” Many Christians attempt to fit old...

NEWS
Fossil Fish Finally Filmed
The bizarre lobe-finned coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) “that flourished some 350 million years ago”1 continues to be a thorn...

NEWS
The Mosasaur: A Giant Sea Dragon
Mosasaurs (order Squamata) were massive marine lizards that were common in the pre-Flood oceans. Therefore, it is not surprising that their fossils...

DAYS OF PRAISE DEVOTIONALS
Summer 2025
...

NEWS
Was Life Detected on a Distant Planet?
There was celebration, albeit briefly, for the discovery of potential life on a planet called K2-18b, which is 124 lightyears away from Earth. The...