Bless The Lord, O My Soul

Bless the Lord, o my soul, and forget not all His benefits!

I had one of those "ah, HA!" moments this morning. I was thinking about some email and blog posts I've read lately and realized something that I think is most interesting. When Christians pray, they mostly pray, "God, bless me." When the Jews and those who practice the Hebraic roots of our faith pray, they mostly pray, "Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, Who has...(you fill in the blank)." Where's the focus? In the first instance, the focus is all on self--bless me: bless me with food, bless me with health, bless me with wealth, etc. In the second instance, the focus is on the LORD: Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, Who has filled our lives with all good things, Who renews our lives like the eagles, Who healeth all our diseases, Who redeems our lives from the pit, etc.

It's as if in the first instance, we really don't trust the LORD to provide our needs or even trust Him to know what our needs are, so we have to remind Him. In the second instance, it seems that the trust is implicit, we know that He knows what we need and we trust that He is providing, so we bless Him for the provision that we may or may not see already.

If you'd like to learn more about blessing God, you can find many of these kinds of blessings at Hebrew4Christians. This is a great site. I also want to state up front that the man who runs that site does not believe that Christians need to keep the Torah. That should be reassuring if you are a Christian who doesn't understand what value keeping Torah has for you and are not interested in becoming Torah observant. For those believers who do want to keep Torah, don't let this put you off from utilizing the wonderful resources available at this website.