Count Your Blessings

Introduction

Turn in your Bibles, if you will, to Psalm 40, the 40th Psalm. We certainly welcome all who are here. We’re glad to have those who are visiting, as always, and we always have a lot of visitors here at South Bumby. And thankful for those who are not visiting and who are here normally as well. Last week, Mr. Harkrider and myself preached on giving thanks. And I just felt that we needed one more lesson on that same basic theme. And so the title for this morning’s lesson is Count Your Blessings. Just like the song that we just sang. Count your many blessings. Name them one by one. Count your many blessings, see what God has done. And so that’s what we’re going to try to do in this morning’s lesson.

By the way, we have had a lot of uplifting lessons lately. But as a preacher, I am always aware of the need of balance. And so I will make sure that all of our lessons are not encouraging, okay? I’ll make sure that we have some hard-hitting ones. Some that will uh step on our toes. But we need uplifting lessons. They call these feel-good lessons. But you know what? Sometimes we need to feel good about our God and what he has done for us. And so that’s what I intend to do in today’s lesson. Name them one by one. In Psalm 40 and in verse 5, many, O Lord my God, are the wonders which you have done and your thoughts toward us. There is none to compare with you.

If I would declare and speak of them, they would be too numerous to count. What an encouraging verse. That is the theme verse for the Psalm. Count your blessings. In Psalm 139, we have a similar set of verses in verses 17 and 18, which say, How precious also are your thoughts to me, O God. How vast is the sum of them. If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand. When I awake, I am still with you. I don’t know how many grains of sand there are on planet Earth. But I think that I could say there are a lot.

And verse 15.

1. Name God’s Blessings to Him

There are so many of God’s blessings, we could talk about them all day. In fact, we should be excited to talk about them. And we would never run out of things to say in talking about the works of God. Because we don’t even know the sum of them. By the way, is God’s praise always on your lips? Even in simple answers such as, how are you doing? I’m blessed. God is good. How are you? I’m better than I deserve. How are you? Those are statements of grace and statements of praise to our most holy God. That should always be on our tongue. And third of all, name God’s blessings to Him. In everything, give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

1 Thessalonians 5 and verse 18. In everything. And I think that it’s helpful. Just like we see the Apostle Paul doing. List the blessings out when you are praising God. List the individuals out that you are giving thanks for. The physical blessings. The spiritual blessings. What we’re going to do, really, for most of the rest of the lesson, almost all, is we’re going to count some blessings. And I didn’t actually count them. You might have some fun. Some of you kids might try to count them. I’d like to challenge you to see if you can just count what I put up on the screen because I didn’t actually count them. But we’re going to name some. And I’m going to get into some nitty gritty of blessings that God has bestowed upon us physically and spiritually.

2. Physical Blessings

We’ll start with physical blessings. First of all, how about life? I mean, the very fact that your heart is pumping blood, that your lungs are pumping air, that you have oxygen to breathe, that you are standing on solid ground, and that you live on a planet where it is perfectly arranged and tweaked so that life can exist here on earth. Well, I don’t like my life. Well, at least you have life. I mean, that’s a huge blessing, the very fact that you are alive. Secondly, do you have two arms and two legs? Do you have ten fingers and ten toes? Probably most, if not all of us do. That’s a blessing. When’s the last time you thanked God for ten fingers and ten toes? I imagine if you were missing one of those, you would notice.

I heard that if you missed your big toe, your balance would really be thrown off. When’s the last time you said, God, thank you for my big toe? Now that sounds trivial, but the point that I’m making is we want to name our blessings one by one. Slow down when you’re praying. Unpack these different uh categories, if you will, or thoughts and really think like kids do of every last tiny detail. How about the ability to walk? Some people can’t do that. Or even the ability to run. You’d really miss that one if you didn’t have the ability to walk or run. The ability to talk and communicate. All five senses. You can see, you can hear, you can smell, you can taste, you can touch.

If any one of those were taken away from us, our lives would be drastically changed. How about the fact that you can think and reason and you have an intellect and the ability to obtain education and to learn? That’s a real blessing. How about physical strength to do things, to move, to just do basic chores and tasks? But some of us have strength to run and jump and climb and pick up heavy objects and do wonderful feats of athleticism. When’s the last time we thanked God for that? I’m talking to myself too. When’s the last time I thanked God for these things? How about talent? I’ve been amazed at learning the talent of various brethren. Things you would never imagine that people can do. And so maybe you have a talent for music.

Maybe you have a talent for sports, whatever it might be, a craft that you can do. That is something the Lord has given you. That’s something to be thankful for. How about being thankful for your youth? You say, well, I don’t feel very young. Well, you’re younger than you will be tomorrow. How about being thankful for your health? Well, I’m not very healthy. You’re healthy enough to be alive. How about being thankful for your spouse? Being thankful for your children. Being thankful for your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, your brothers, your sisters. I could add stepbrothers, stepsisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles. Some of you say aunties. It’s okay. You can say it wrong. I’ll say it the right way. Parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. Now notice I didn’t just say family.

What we just did is we unpacked the blessings of family, and we’re mindful of that right now. It’s a time we’ve just celebrated Thanksgiving this last week as a secular holiday. And so family’s on our mind. But even unpack that further. Name them one by one. Name the individuals you’re thankful for that are in your family. The clothes that are on your back. And you know, we don’t just have clothes to cover our skin or to keep us from being cold. We have clothes that are stylish. And we all know you can’t wear the same outfit to services two times in a row, right? You see, we have to be careful that we distinguish between our wants and our needs. We have far more clothing than we need.

We have a lot of clothes we want. So don’t say, I need more clothes. No, you don’t. You want more clothes. But be thankful for even those clothes that you get that are wants. How about shoes? You know, there are places in the world, like Ghana, where shoes are not as common as they are here. In fact, they buy shoes that stretch so that they will grow with the person so they can have them for as long as they possibly can use them. And collections were being made by Sarah Rosotto, who was overseas to bring and buy people’s shoes. Do you ever stop and say, God, thank you for shoes on my feet? Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Nothing’s too trivial to be thankful for. How about soap and shampoo?

Where would we be without soap and shampoo? You could add to that? Deodorant, razors, on and on, all the things for our hygiene? Medicine. Or medical treatments. Many of you have had operations in the last year or within the last few years. Where would you have been without modern medical advancements? You might not even be alive. Freedom. That’s a thing to be thankful for. Even religious freedom, especially. How about rain? Oh, it rains too much, you might think at certain times. Well, we need to be thankful for the rain. God sends the rain on the just and the unjust. How about transportation? Now let’s unpack transportation. This is going to be fun. How about not only do you have a way to get from point A to point B, but you have a way to get there with air conditioning.

Some of you may not have that in your car. But maybe you do. That’s a real blessing. Or heat if it ever gets cold here in Orlando. How about power steering? Have you ever driven a car that didn’t have power steering? I have 67 Mustang. It was hard to turn. I’m thankful for power steering for headlights, for wipers, for a radio, for a working engine. These are, you know, these are things you can break down in prayer to God. How could we ever run out of things to say? Housing. Now let’s unpack this one a lot. First of all, not only do you have a roof over your head, but they have walls that are closed so you can keep your house cold when it’s hot or warm when it’s cold outside.

So you have air conditioning. You have heat. You have electricity. Hey, we can turn on a light in any room of the house. See, we don’t even think about that. We take it for granted. We do. Running water. You know, in many places of the world, people have to go and they have to tote water in buckets on their head for miles. And then if they drop it, sometimes suicides happen because of the shame that will be seen if they go back to their village without the water. And so we have running water. Not only is it running, but it can be warm and hot. We have a water heater. I thank God often for hot showers. And really, let me throw this in there. I really believe that the best way to just be thankful and think and thank God for these blessings is not to just sit down at once and think of how many you can.

But the best way to do it is just think of them throughout the day as you experience them. Every tiny thing that you normally won’t think of, just think in your mind, thank you for that, God. That’s a blessing. Thank you for the shower. Thank you for the bath. Where would we be without showers and baths? We’d be bathing in sinks. What if we didn’t have sinks? Thank God for sinks. Thank God for commodes. Yes. Where would we be without that? How about a washer and a dryer? Dishwasher. Maybe you have trash pickup at your house. I’ve lived in places that didn’t. Or a place that didn’t. Multiple rooms. My house is not big. It’s bigger than 500 square feet, and you don’t have 17 people living in it.

That can happen in certain places of the world, even within America. Beds to sleep on. You don’t sleep on the dirt floor. You have a comfortable bed. Flooring. You don’t look down in your house and see just the solid ground, just dirt. You have tile, you have carpet, you have wooded floors. What a blessing. Now let’s change categories to food. Food is available 24-7 in total abundance in this nation. It’s affordable, not all of it, but affordable enough that all of us can eat. There are healthy options. And there are tasty options. Usually those two don’t go hand in hand. There’s every variety so that we don’t have to eat plain rice three times a day, seven days a week, or maybe two times a day or once a day if you’re lucky.

But there’s every variety. And there’s water. I heard recently that about 50% of all health problems related to disease and so forth are from unsafe, unclean water. We don’t realize what a blessing it is. That all of us have safe, clean water to drink. And other liquids, juices and milk and so forth. Now, what about financial support? Let’s talk about that job. Well, I don’t like my job. Well, do they pay you? Yeah. Well, that’s one blessing of your job. At least you get paid. Right? Maybe you have benefits. I mean, there are tremendous blessings. You could just name them one by one, even with your job. Each one of these subcategories could be broken down into more subcategories. If you don’t have a job, maybe your spouse does, or maybe you both do.

Or maybe you receive income from other family. If you’re a child, you know your parents support you, give you a place to sleep. Children be thankful for that. Maybe you receive some financial support from brethren from time to time, or from the church treasury, which is ultimately from brethren from time to time. Be thankful for that. Now, how about some, you might say, more superficial physical blessings? These extras that really are wants. Computers, tablets, cell phones, televisions, toys, boats, motorcycles, ATVs, jewelry, land, books, decorations, furniture, collectibles. I’m not trying to say all this to make you feel guilty. These things can become curses instead of blessings. But what we need to be sure is to thank God for all of these wants that we have in this abundantly rich culture that we live in instead of feeling sorry for ourselves.

God promises to meet our basic needs. You know the passage in Matthew 6. Where Jesus says not to worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or your body, what you will wear. God takes care of the birds. He clothes even the lilies of the field. Will he not also clothe you? Don’t worry about the things that the heathen worry about. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. God promises to meet our basic needs. But we have far more than that in this country. Far more than our basic needs. If you have a toilet in your house, you are more blessed than 38% of humanity. Almost 40% of people on planet Earth do not have a toilet in their house.

How about that? If you have a vehicle, a car, a truck, a van, an SUV, even if it’s a jalopy, even if it’s a lemon, you are more blessed than 80% of people in this world that are of driving age. Well, I don’t like the car my mom and dad gave me. You are more blessed to have that car than 80% of people in this world. If you have electricity in your house, you are more blessed than 25% of humanity. If you have enough food to eat today, you are more blessed than 13% of humanity. About 925 million people go hungry every day in the world. If you have the ability to read, you are more blessed than 12% of humanity. If you live on more than $2.50 a day, which comes out to about $55 a month, you are more blessed than 50% of humanity.

3. Our Spiritual Blessings

Let that sink in. If you live on more than $10 a day, which is about $300 a month, you are more blessed than 80% of humanity. We’ve got to stop complaining, don’t we? We’ve got to learn to be thankful, don’t we, brethren? So, we’ve talked about and named some physical blessings. And we’ve just touched the veritable hem of the garment. I mean, we could go on and on. But I have a time limit. So let’s turn our attention to our spiritual blessings. First of all, God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world that we would be holy and blameless before him in love. What that means is that before the world began, God made a plan that we could be saved. He thought of us before we ever came into existence.

His son was effectively slain before the foundation of the world in the plan and in the mind of God, so that we might be able to have salvation if we choose God. What a blessing. When Christ came into the world, he was crucified on the cross as our substitute, so that we don’t have to die because the price of sin is death. And Christ was buried. What a blessing his burial is, because by the fact that he was buried in a tomb, it could also be proven that the tomb was found empty and shown to the whole world. That our Lord is a resurrected Lord. And since he has resurrected, which is another blessing, we have evidence and proof for ourselves that we also one day will be risen from the dead.

We have access to God’s grace. It’s not far across the sea. It’s not high up on a mountain that you have to go across the sea or climb upon a mountain to obtain it. It is with you, it is near you, it is in your grasp if you are willing to take it and serve God and obey him. We have adoption as sons. Some of you might be adopted. And you know what it’s like to not be a blood relative to your family, but to be just as much family as a blood relative would be. We are adopted by God into his spiritual family, and therefore we have become children of God. Thank you, God, that I can be your child, and you can be my loving father.

We have obtained an inheritance that is incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you. We have obtained salvation. We have been saved from hell and from the condition we were in because of our sin. We have heavenly citizenship, so that our citizenship is not here on earth. But our citizenship is in a better, a heavenly country. We have freedom from sin. People talk about freedom, meaning you can do anything you want. Well, when you are enslaved to sin, you do everything that sin wants you to do. You do everything that Satan wants you to do, and that’s not freedom. That’s slavery. When you become free of that, brethren, that’s freedom. And we became we become slaves or servants of God.

Thank you, God, for making me your slave. What a blessing. We become heirs of God. We become joint heirs together with Christ. You know, it’s pretty amazing to me that you have religious leaders who want people to call them father. Yet even Jesus Christ is not our father, he’s our brother. He’s not ashamed to call us brethren. The book of Hebrews tells us. We are new creatures and new creations. We have been born again. We have newness of life. We’ve been reconciled to God from whom we were separated from. We have been sanctified, made holy, set apart. We are accepted in the beloved. No longer are we rejected. We have obtained eternal life. There’s just no way to fathom that blessing. We have now peace with God so that we aren’t his enemies.

We are friends. And we have an intimate relationship with God and we can obtain oneness with him and with his son. We have our names written in the Lamb’s book of life. We have blessed hope. We are seated in the heavenly places together with Christ. We have fellowship with the Father, with the Son, and with the Holy Spirit. We have a place prepared for us by none other than the Son of God Himself. We are anointed. We are sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise. We have the Spirit of God that was promised to us. Now I’m not in this lesson going to explain how we have the Spirit of God and what manner that I believe works itself out. But this is biblical language, I’m telling you.

These are blessings. When’s the last time you said, God, thank you for the Spirit of God? Thank you for having Jesus in me. Thank you for your influence within me. Thank you for forgiveness of sins, so that our sins are not merely ignored by God. They are cast into the depths of the sea, as Micah says. We are justified in God’s sight. You know, when you’re typing a document and you want to left justify or right justify what you’re typing, that means to make it straight over here or straight over here. So the fact that we are justified in God’s sight means we are made straight. We are redeemed. Christ is our advocate, our friend, our mediator. Sin no longer has dominion over us. We are Christ’s ambassadors.

We are his hands and his feet and his vessels. We are blessed, Ephesians 1 and verse 3 tells us, with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. Not some of them, not most of them, not a few of them, but every one of them are at our disposal. Christ strengthens us so that we can say, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. What a blessing. God is our helper. He is our comforter. We receive God’s mercy so that we don’t get what we deserve, which is death, separation from God eternally, but we also receive God’s grace, which means we do get what we could never earn, which is life, salvation. We receive God’s love. We receive God’s faithfulness. He tells us, I will never leave you nor forsake you.

As long as we are faithful to him, he will always be by our side. We have a way of escape in time of temptation that God has provided. We are made kings. We are made saints. We are made holy and blameless so that we can be presented to God without any spot or wrinkle or any such thing through Jesus Christ. What a blessing. All things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose. That’s another blessing. We have been delivered from the power of darkness. We are not given a spirit of fear, but we are given the power of a sound mind. We are joined unto the Lord. We are bought with a prize. We are members of the body of Christ.

We are made complete in Christ. We are the temple of God, a dwelling of God in the Spirit. We are laborers together with God, working on the same goals with Him. We are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people. We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. As Mr. Rufus read earlier. We have been called out of darkness into his marvelous light. Our old man is dead. We put him to death in the waters of baptism when we were buried. And we rose to walk in that newness of life, and our life is now hidden with Christ in God. We are branches of the vine that is Christ.

Through him we receive comfort, peace, and joy. In him, we have the right to pray to God. For him to hear our cares and our wants and our needs and our cries. We have God’s word revealed. In fact, not only was it revealed, but it was written down. And through much effort and trouble, God’s word was collated. The 66 books were put together and protected from those who wanted to harm and destroy it. And this whole process took a period of 1600 years. We have the mystery of Christ revealed to us, which is effectively the gospel. We have the confidence of heaven. So that we don’t have to live with the doubt. I don’t know if I’m going to heaven or not. Shame on you. For not trusting in the love and the grace of Christ more than that and for thinking too much of your own works.

I’m not saying, folks, that we don’t have to obey. We have to obey. We have to meet the conditions for salvation. But we can never obey so much to save ourselves. And so in Christ Jesus, we can have joy and rejoice exceedingly in hope of our eternal salvation. We have Christ in us, the hope of glory. We have hope. We have faith. We have love. And we have a brethren. Have you ever just looked through the church directory and just said, thank you for this one. Thank you for that one. Thank you for this one. Thank you for that one. Thank you for this. You know, sometimes we cheat. Thank you for my brethren. We pray for all the sick ones. That was easy. Get specific.

We need to recognize the tremendous blessings that God has given us. Over in Ephesians, the first chapter. In Ephesians chapter 1. In verses 18 and 19, Paul prays here, I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened. So that you will know what is the hope of his calling. What are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints? And what is the surpassing greatness of his power toward us who believe. He says, I want you to open your eyes. The eyes of your heart. I want them to be enlightened. I want you to see and recognize these spiritual blessings so that you can take advantage of them as they lay before you. In chapter 3 at the end, he also prays a similar prayer, beginning in verse 14.

For this reason, he says, I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that he would grant you according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power through his spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your heart through faith, and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. It’s an irony that he says, I want you to know the love of Christ that’s unknowable. That’s what we are to do, though.

4. Three Benefits of Counting Our Blessings

We are to understand it as much as we possibly can through meditating on it, through thinking about it, through being mindful of it, through reading and studying the Holy Word of God. Open your eyes, brethren. There are blessings that cannot be numbered. Name them one by one. If you get so busy with that, you won’t have any time to think about the negatives. You’ll be too busy naming all the positives. So, in closing here, let me just briefly give you three benefits of counting our blessings. And I take these three directly from the Psalm. Count your blessings. First of all, it will surprise you what the Lord has done. I changed half to has. I hope that’s okay with you. It will surprise you. It may surprise you right now to think of some of the blessings that I’ve laid out just in this short lesson.

You may think, you know what? I’ve never thanked God for my big toe before. I’ve never thanks God for these little things that you’ve been talking about. And so what I’m saying is, just start unpacking them, and it might just blow you away by realizing, man, I’m a lot more blessed than I thought I was. Secondly, you will be singing as the days go by. In other words, you will have cause to rejoice. As Paul says in Ephesians the fifth chapter, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart of the Lord. What does he say in the next verse? He says, always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to God even the Father.

There is a connection and a relationship between singing and giving and thanks. You see the same thing at the end of Colossians 3 and verse 16 singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. You give me a singing person, and I’ll give you someone who’s thankful. And we sing because we’re thankful. I mean, you know, think about it, it works both ways, too. When we’re thankful, it also makes you want to sing. And not just singing, but the idea and the key concept here is rejoicing. Do you know a recent study was done, I heard, on children who were by nature pessimistic. If you take a pessimistic child, and for a few weeks, once a day, for a few minutes every day, you just have that child name three new blessings of that day.

It has the potential to transform that child’s thinking to turn him into a natural optimist from that point forward in the matter of about a month. Three blessings a day. Imagine the force of that very concept if we are thinking about our blessings all day and counting our many blessings. I mean, I’m preaching to myself, as I said last week. This is one area I really need to hear. And I really need to work on and get better on. But I’ll tell you, I’ve worked on it, and I’ve gotten better. And it’s made a difference. It’s made a difference in my family. It’s made a difference in my marriage. It’s made a difference in my spiritual life. This simple act of naming and counting my blessings.

Thirdly, as the Psalm says, help and comfort give you to your journey’s end. I love the verse in Lamentation, chapter 3, and verses 22 and 23. Which says, the Lord’s loving kindnesses indeed never cease. For his compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. That’s a beautiful passage. What makes that passage all the more beautiful is that it was written in the book of Lamentations, which is the saddest book in the Bible. Jeremiah is so depressed, lamenting over the destruction of Jerusalem. And if you just back up to verse 19, I want to read from verse 19 all the way down through verse 23. Remember my affliction and my wondering, the wormwood and bitterness. Surely my soul remembers and is bowed down within me.

This I recall to my mind. Therefore I have hope.

Conclusion

They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. I mean, that adds to that passage so much when you realize that what Jeremiah was trying to do was find hope in this time of despair by focusing on the fact that God’s blessings are new every morning. Every day the sun comes up, and as new and as fresh as the day is, and as new and as fresh as the dawn as the dew that is on the ground is. That is how new and fresh God’s blessings are every single day, even in time of great distress, as Greg preached about earlier. And so even if you can’t seem to find joy, you can always find comfort by naming your blessings one by one. Brethren, not only should we name our blessings, we should be a blessing to others.

We are blessed to bless. Don’t be selfish. We are to be conduits of the grace of God and to imitate his love towards us by extending the same blessings we’ve received physically, and as well as we can also, in a way, extend spiritual blessings to others and be ambassadors for Christ. And let us also remember that ultimately our blessings are not here and now. Though we do have innumerable blessings, more than the sand that is on the earth. Ultimately, our blessings are going to be in heaven. Where there’s no death, where there’s no pain, there’s no sickness, there’s no sorrow, there’s no mourning, there’s no tears. One of the best things about heaven is there’ll be nothing bad there. We could list out the numbers of blessings in heaven, and that would be beyond numbering as well.

And ultimately, that’s the only way that you’re going to have blessings. God sends his reign on the just and the unjust. You will experience God’s blessings now, to some degree, whether you’re a Christian or not, his physical blessings anyway. But if you die separated from God, you will not have any blessings. You will have only damnation. You will have only hell for all eternity. So submit to God. Submit to Jesus Christ. Become his servant by believing in him, by repenting of your sins, by confessing his name, by being baptized, and then continuing to walk in that new life by obeying the gospel until the day that you die. You will be saved by the grace of God, by his mercy, through the washing and regeneration of the Holy Spirit.

And you will be saved. And you can hear on that day, well done, thy good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of the Lord. If you’re not a Christian, I invite you to become one today. If you are a Christian and you would like our prayers or our encouragement, we would invite you to come forward now as we stand and sing the Song of Imitation.