Genesis 1:28-31
28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.
31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
Often in churches we talk about the idea of original sin, that we are born broken and with an innate desire to sin. However, we rarely if ever talk about our original blessing. That when God created humanity, the first thing that he did was to bless us and that every single one of us is born with this blessing.
God said that we are to be fruitful and to multiply. The word ‘fruitful’ means to be mature and producing good fruit. It is all about flourishing. God has blessed you to be fruitful in your work, fruitful in your relationships, fruitful in your finances, fruitful in your character and more. God has also blessed you to multiply. In other words, you are also made to be a catalyst for fruitfulness in others. You are blessed to be a blessing.
The challenge of this passage is that many of us do not feel like we experience this a lot of the time. Work is graft and requires grit. Our character may feel weak and our relationships are draining. We look at what other people are doing, or heaven forbid, we look at what culture says flourishing should look like and we feel like we are inadequate, inefficient and incomplete.
So, we pray that God will make us flourish but God will not bless you with flourishing… because He already has! It is in your dna. Our blessing supersedes our brokenness! This is why multiplication comes so easily to us. We multiply insecurity, fear, anger, pain and all kind of messiness without thinking. Yet if we sow encouragement, generosity, faith and love, that will also multiply. We can choose what we sow into the world and it will grow! This is your blessing! You have been given a mandate to shape the world. We are gardeners carefully and consistently nurturing the world around us - what will you multiply?
What is the world you want to live in? How can you cultivate that?
