Count Your Blessings (Job 1:21; Ephesians 1:3)

In the book of Job chapter 1 we see Job’s wife pointed out only the bad things as the reasons to curse God but Job pointed out the Good things “The LORD gave” unto him and unto his family to praise God. Job’s words were not only the words of faith but also the words of faithful. It is one of Satan’s tactics to show you God as cruel by magnifying the calamities you are going through. But we as children of God should thank Him and count the good “The LORD gave” us. The incomparable good “The LORD gave” us is Christ who laid down His life for us. Apostle Paul in Ephesians 1:3 says that “We are blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ.”

The hymn “Count your Blessings” was written by Johnson Oatman, Jr., a famous and one of the important and prolific gospel song writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though he wrote over 5,000 hymn texts, the hymn “Count your Blessings” is considered his finest hymn. “Count your Blessings” is a song of thankfulness to God for all the blessings that He bestowed upon us. One writer said about Count Your Blessings, “It is like a beam of sunlight that has brightened up the dark places of the earth.” During the revival in Wales it was one of the hymns sung at every service.

Jeremy Taylor was a 17th-century English cleric who was severely persecuted for his faith. But though his house was plundered, his family left destitute, and his property confiscated, he continued to count the blessings he could not lose. He wrote: "They have not taken away my merry countenance, my cheerful spirit, and a good conscience; they have still left me with the providence of God, and all His promises … my hopes of Heaven, and my charity to them, too, and still I sleep and digest, I eat and drink, I read and meditate. God the ultimate source of my joy and salvation has chosen me to sit upon this little handful of thorns to count all the blessings that “He gave”.

Dear friends, let’s learn to count our blessings when life is clouded with troubles and loaded with burdens because “God is over all” and everything is under His control. When we see others with their land and gold let’s still “count our blessings and trust in the promise that Christ has promised us with His wealth untold. We have God’s promise to meet all our needs “According to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19).