Psalms 67:1-7: in context

This short psalm begins with a familiar request, an echo of the ancient priestly blessing: may God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine on us. It is a prayer for God's favor, the kind of thing we all pray. But watch the very next word, because it turns the whole prayer outward and reveals why the blessing is being sought. May God bless us, the psalm continues, that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations. The blessing is not requested as an end in itself. It is requested so that, through the blessed people, God's ways and God's salvation would become known to everyone, until all the peoples praise him and all the nations are glad.

That reorients the whole idea of being blessed. The instinct is to treat God's blessings on me as terminating in me, given for my own comfort, security, and enjoyment, mine to receive and keep. This psalm assumes something different: that God blesses his people so that the blessing will flow through them to the world, so that his goodness, seen in them, would draw the nations to know and praise him. The favor received is meant to become favor passed on. It is the same logic God gave Abraham at the very beginning: I will bless you, so that you will be a blessing. The blessing is a channel, not a reservoir.

That asks a pointed question about the blessings I have received. God's kindness to me, the good things in my life, the ways his face has shone on me, do they stop with me, spent on my own comfort and hoarded as mine, or do they flow through me to others, so that people around me come to know something of God's goodness because of how it reached me? Have I treated God's blessing as a reservoir to keep, or as a channel meant to carry his goodness onward, that his way may be known through me?