Counting Blessings

I recently heard a pastor say that we ought not just to think about the bad times but also praise God for the good times. Of course I would agree with him. All throughout the Old Testament, God's people set up altars to commemorate how good God is. They counted their blessings.

Often as Christians we don't count our blessings. We think about the bad times and the times in our lives where God either said "no" or we had to go through some kind of trial. Don't get me wrong, we ought to remember those times and thank the Lord for those times of growth. But we ought to also thank God for the many blessings he has given us.

Recently, my wife and I were struggling a bit with faithfulness. For some weird reason, we decided to put our house up for sale in this last spring. News reports began to spread that the housing market was crashing. Well, we would have taken our home off the market if we could have, but we were already legally committed to a new home closer to our church. Things were rough. We had a new baby to tend to (our third) open houses that seemed to be worthless, many on-call walk throughs--the stress level was high.

On one particular night we were both feeling down. I walked into the room and my wife was watching a woman sing her heart out on the TV. She was incredible. She was singing about praising God for all of his blessings. Then she sang something along these lines, "Sometimes I don't think I have anything to praise the Lord about, but last time I checked I woke up this morning!"

Isn't that the truth? God has given me another day of life to enjoy Him and His creation and all of the many blessings and hardships that he has given me. What more could we desire or want? I echo the words of Paul, "For me to live is to Christ and to die is gain."

We ought to count our hardships and consider them pure joy. But we ought to count our blessings and consider them pure joy as well. God is the giver of all good things. Have we thanked him lately?