Psalm 67:1-2: Blessed for God's Glory

Psalm 67:1-2 "May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations."

How many times in the past week have you asked the Lord to bless you? That is, how many times in the past week have you requested that God be gracious and merciful towards you, give you something you needed, or be your peace in times of trouble? Perhaps it has been many times, perhaps it has been few. But the point I would like to speak on this morning is this: why have you asked for the Lord to bless you? In the first two verses of Psalm 67, we see the psalmist asking the Lord to bless him for the sake of God's own glory. The question before us this morning is this: do we ask God to bless us for his glory, or for our own?

Psalm 67 starts out with a basic peitition to God: "May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us." This is a classic petition that ties all the way back to the Aaronic blessing in Numbers 6:24-26.* The psalmist is asking that the Lord be kind to his people by showing them grace and blessing, that is, that all may go right with them and that the Lord would be with them. The psalmist even asks the Lord to "make his face shine upon us," which is ancient language for having a king look upon one's request with gladness (as in, having his face shine upon the one making the request) and therefore grant his request. The psalmist here is petitioning to the Lord a simple request: bless us, O Lord.

But the point I want to get across to y'all today has to do with why the psalmist is making his request, which we see in verse two: "that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations." This is the reasoning behind why the psalmist is asking these things, the basis upon which he states his request. Notice here that the psalmist is not asking for his own renown. He does not ask "bless me, O Lord, that I might be great among the peoples of the earth," but rather "bless me, O Lord, that your name might be great among the peoples of the earth" (Matthew's Paraphrase Version). The desire behind the psalmist's request for blessing was God's glory and God's glory alone. The psalmist did not want himself to be exalted, but for the Lord to be exalted, and likewise, we ought to have the same mindset when petitioning our requests to God.

So, when's the last time you made a request to God for the sake of your own glory? When's the last time you asked the Lord to bless you for the sake of your name instead of his? I encourage you to not be so selfish, and to remember that the Gospel is not all about you, but all about about God. Amen.

*This is merely a fun fact that I wanted to state in the devotional. If you desire to look into it more, I encourage you to! But for the sake of a short devotional, we won't dive into it further.