Declare the Commanded Blessing Despite the Economy

BLESSED shall be thy basket and thy store. BLESSED shalt thou be when thou comest in, and BLESSED shalt thou be when thou goest out (Deuteronomy 28:5-6).

One of the members of our church used to be the manager of a local Walmart store.

After the store was freshly renovated a few years back, he asked if before the grand re-opening I would come and do a dedication service. I gladly agreed, assuming it would be a small event with just a few people.

When I arrived to do the dedication, however, I found quite a crowd. Not only was a large group of employees there, along with several managers from other stores, the mayor and sheriff had showed up. I don’t know what most of them were expecting, but when it was my turn to speak what they got was a 21st century application of Deuteronomy 28.

Grabbing one of the store’s baskets, I put my Bible in it. Then I pushed it around declaring, “BLESSED shall be your basket, and BLESSED shall be your store!”

I told Gloria about it later, during one of our teaching sessions on prosperity.

“I believe that store will break sales records,” she said. And you know what? It did. It flourished so much under THE BLESSING of God and under the BLESSED manager overseeing it that the company moved him to another city to run a bigger store.

“Pastor George,” you might say, “do you really believe God BLESSES Walmart?”

He does if His people are involved and using their faith. We have His WORD on it. He said in Deuteronomy 28 that if we’ll walk with Him, THE BLESSING will work for us in everything.

• We’ll be BLESSED coming and going. As Adam Clarke’s commentary says, “When you comest in from your employment, you shall find that no evil has happened to the family or dwelling in your absence. When you goest out, your way shall be made prosperous before, and you shall have the divine blessing in all your labors.”

• We’ll be BLESSED wherever we are. As John Gill’s Exposition of the Bible says, whether you’re in the city or the country, all will “prosper and succeed, and bring forth fruit abundantly.”

• We’ll be BLESSED in what we do. You’ll be extremely productive, succeeding to a high and extraordinary degree so that it can be said about you what the Bible says about Joseph, “The LORD made all that he did to prosper in his hand” (Genesis 39:3).

• We’ll be BLESSED in what we have. Your baskets (or whatever containers you use to store your goods) will increase and overflow until you have a great surplus and become like the young boy in John 6 who gave his lunch to Jesus. He didn’t go home with an empty lunchbox. Jesus didn’t even just replace his little lunch. He BLESSED it, fed the multitude with it, and sent the boy home with twelve baskets full of food (verse 13).

You want to have an anointed shopping trip? Think about that next time you go to the store. As you push your basket up and down the aisles, release your faith in THE BLESSING of Abraham that’s yours in Christ Jesus and declare, “I am BLESSED!”

The Commanded Blessing

The LORD shall command THE BLESSING upon thee in thy storehouses, and in all that thou settest thine hand unto; and he shall BLESS thee in the land which The LORD thy God giveth thee (Deuteronomy 28:8).

Do you know what happens when God speaks to the material elements and operations of this universe? They obey Him! In Genesis 1, when He said to the darkness, “Let there be light,” light came into being. When He said to the earth, “Bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree” (verse 11), there was no argument about it. The earth obeyed His command.

A command is an order, charge, or decree. And when God gives an order to His creation it is carried out. What He says is how it’s going to be.

This is the reason you as a believer can prosper anywhere anytime. As you walk with Him by faith and obey His voice, God commands THE BLESSING on everything that has to do with your finances. He issues a decree of empowerment over your storehouses.

What are storehouses? They’re multiple places where goods and wealth are stored. In our culture they might be bank accounts, investment accounts, safety deposit boxes, closets or garages. In the Israelites’ culture, they tended to be barns, granaries, cellars and other places where agricultural crops were stored.

Adam Clarke’s Commentary on the Bible says that having God’s BLESSING on your storehouses means “everything that you have shall come by divine appointment; you shall have nothing casually, but everything, both spiritual and temporal, shall come by the immediate command of God.”

According to Deuteronomy 28:8, God also commands THE BLESSING on all you set your hand to. He commands THE BLESSING on you “in all thy business,” as one Bible scholar puts it. He declares success over your efforts in your occupations and any trades in which you are employed and decrees that, as Psalm 128 says, “You will eat the fruit of your labor; BLESSINGS and prosperity will be yours” (verse 2, NIV).

A third thing God’s command of BLESSING comes upon is the land He gives you. The term land speaks not only of the physical property you own and inhabit. It includes the places in which God positions you. Wherever He sends you and whatever the natural conditions might be there, God’s BLESSING causes it to be “a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing” (Deuteronomy 8:9, NKJV). In other words, wherever you go, God does for you what He did for Isaac in the land of Gerar.

That land was a veritable dustbowl in Isaac’s day! It was so stricken by drought and famine that Isaac thought he’d have to move out of it just to survive. But as he was preparing to leave, God stopped him. “Dwell in this land, and I will be with you and BLESS you,” He said. “I will perform the oath which I swore to Abraham your father” (Genesis 26:3, NKJV).

Isaac believed God and stayed put. He “sowed in that land,” and the seemingly impossible happened. He “reaped in the same year a hundredfold” (verse 12).

A hundredfold return was an unusual harvest for Gerar under any conditions! Even in the fertile regions, when there was plenty of rain, the land rarely yielded as much as a fiftyfold harvest. But for Isaac, the soil of Gerar produced so supernaturally that “the man began to prosper, and continued prospering until he became very prosperous” (verse 13).

Jeremiah 17:7-8 further explains why this happened. It says: “BLESSED is the man who trusts in The LORD, and whose hope is The LORD. For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river, and will not fear when heat comes; but its leaf will be green, and will not be anxious in the year of drought, nor will cease from yielding fruit.”

Those verses describe Isaac quite well, don’t they? As the BLESSED of God, they also describe you.