BLESSING,
SOURCE OF

ONE OF the reasons that we don’t recognize the goodness of God is that we confuse the means of delivery with the source. Many times we think that unless a blessing falls miraculously from heaven into our laps that it didn’t come from God. We mix up medium and source.

When we listen to the radio, we can do so only because the radio is a method of delivery. There are no drums in the radio. No horns and no guitars reside inside the equipment. The radio is only a conduit—a point of contact. Even when your radio stops working, there’s music in the air. All the radio does is receive a signal that comes from another source and deliver it to you. If you lose sight of that fact, you’ll give the radio more credit than a radio ought to have. If you place too much weight on the medium, you’ll forget the source.45

James 1:17

NORMALLY, when people eat a balanced evening meal, it includes vegetables. Those vegetables will have been purchased at a grocery store. Of course, a grocery store bought the vegetables from someone who farmed and harvested them. The farmer had those vegetables to sell because he planted seeds in the ground. The land in which the seed was planted was also supported by both rain and sunshine. Rain and sunshine are dependent on heaven.

Rain from heaven must come down upon the land in which the seed has been planted—so the fruit and vegetable can sprout, so the farmer can deliver it to the grocery store, so that we can pick it up when we go shopping, so that we can have a nice evening meal. If a person gets stuck appreciating the grocery store, then they’ve missed the source.

The grocery store is simply the mechanism of delivery. Now, if God stops the sunshine and rain, stops the replication of the seed, or does not allow the land to be fruitful, then there is no trip to the grocery store.46

[Provision, God’s]

Matt. 5:44–45

THE CEREAL that we eat with milk comes from the grain, which came from the mill, which goes back to the provision of God in the wheat fields. The milk came from the cows that ate the grass that came from the ground that God provided. Everything you have is traced back to God.47