REMEMBERING THE BLESSINGS
Those of you who know me know that I love fishing. I do not however like hunting. For some reason the thought of shooting an animal is just not appealing to me. That does not mean I do not know how to shoot. When I was a kid I was in a gun club. I competed in target shooting and got my picture in the newspaper because I was a good shot. One day a friend suggested we take our guns and go out hunting. We went out in the woods near the house and it wasn’t long before we saw a rabbit. My friend shot and missed. The rabbit was running away and I took aim and fired – hitting it right in the neck. We ran over to it and saw it was suffering. Something in me just broke when I saw that terribly wounded animal. I was so upset by it that I took my gun and threw it into a pond on the way home. I haven’t picked up one since. I went home and told my brother what I had done, expecting he would understand my guilt. He asked where I had shot it and then went and found the rabbit, cut off it’s feet and hung them from the rear view mirror of his car. Every morning for the next 5 years going to and from school I had to look at those feet and remember what I had done and revisit my guilt.
Anybody here ever felt like that? You made a mistake in the past and to this day you are constantly being reminded of it and feeling guilty? How do you deal with those feelings of shame and guilt? The first step is repentance. The next step is remembering the blessings of God and moving forward.
Psalm 103:1 Praise the LORD, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. 2 Praise the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits-- 3 who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, 4 who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, 5 who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's.
David is speaking here to his own soul. Notice the wording. He is talking to everything that is IN HIM. He is speaking to his inner being in the second person form. David is talking to himself. Today I want to talk about what God wants you to say when you talk to yourself!
There was a time when David had made a mistake. He had led his men into battle, and left the women and children behind defenseless. When they returned, they found that their homes had been destroyed and their families carried away into captivity. They all wept at the tragedy. The men began to blame David and point their fingers at him…
1 Sam 30:6 David was greatly distressed because the men were talking of stoning him; each one was bitter in spirit because of his sons and daughters. But David found strength in the LORD his God.
There is not one of us here this morning that has not made some grave mistakes in our lives. I am sure we all have regrets. Regrets are natural. When you think of it – regret and guilt is a very good thing. What if you did not feel regret? It is sort of like pain. We tend to look at pain as a negative thing, but really it is not. Pain is our friend. Pain tells us that something is wrong. It is pain that gets our attention and drives us to change.
I have one finger that has no real feeling on the end. It was crushed when I was young. Now it is like a poker. I can open a pop can with this thing just by poking it. However, not having pain is a problem.
In 1999 Dr Paul Brand and Philip Yancey co-wrote a book called Pain: the Gift Nobody Wants. Dr Brand was born in India to missionary parents, and has spent most of his life caring for people with leprosy. One of Dr Brand’s greatest discoveries was that people with leprosy do not have "bad flesh" that just rots away. Actually, their flesh is as healthy as yours, or mine.
The problem is that blood flow is restricted to certain parts of their body, and their nerve endings die. With this death of their nerve endings comes the inability to sense danger to their bodies. Lepers live totally pain free.
Don’t you wish you could live pain free? Not when you realize that this absence of pain is the greatest enemy of the leper. Again and again they harm their bodies, without even knowing it. Dr Brand knew that lepers often went blind. Why? Because they didn’t blink. They didn’t blink because they didn’t feel the pain that we feel when our eyes dry out. Dr Brand solved this problem by surgically attaching the chewing muscle to their eyelid – and then teaching them to chew gum.
Dr Brand was puzzled by the fact that lepers often lost fingers and toes overnight. He knew that they weren’t simply disappearing into thin air, so he commissioned workers to observe the lepers sleeping. To their surprise, they found that rats would come in and nibble the exposed fingers and toes. The lepers, who did not feel pain, never awoke to brush them away.
As the title of the book says, pain is the gift that nobody wants. Sometimes, so is regret. You know what we call someone that has no regrets? A psychopath! Without remorse, nothing leads to change.
God gave us the ability to feel pain – but He had no intention of us living in it. God gave us the ability to feel remorse and regret – but He doesn’t want us to constantly live in it! Regret is a gift to our soul, just as pain is a gift to our flesh. It is designed to serve a temporary purpose! God does not intend for us to wallow in it. He does not want us to feel it any longer than necessary to deal with the cause. When we wallow in regret – it becomes shame. This is exactly what the Lord wants to deliver us from.
In 1 Sam 30, David had reason to feel regret. He blamed himself for what had happened. What was worse – everyone else started blaming him for what had happened as well. You know – sometimes friends and family can magnify our shame. Those who are closest to you and know our story. Often family and friends are less forgiving because they feel the pain of the sin in your life. Unfortunately, we tend to speak words of condemnation instead of words of encouragement. Jesus did not come to condemn us but to encourage us and save us.
John 3:17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
I am not encouraging here a blind acceptance of sin. Jesus spoke more harshly against sin than anyone. But He did not condemn. Condemnation focuses on how bad the person is, as opposed to how bad the sin is. Condemnation causes healthy regrets to turn into unhealthy shame.
Rom 10:11 As the Scripture says, "Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame."
Fortunately, David found the solution for his regret. Even when nobody else was encouraging him (as a matter of fact, they were talking about stoning him) he began to encourage himself in the Lord. What do you tell yourself when regret comes knocking? How do you encourage yourself in the Lord? You “forget not all his benefits”. In other words you remember God’s blessings. The Pslamist gives several ways in which God has blessed us:
1. Forgiven and Healed – (vs. 3)
Who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases
God has dealt with the penalty for sin in our lives. He has justified us. We have been forgiven. It is amazing to consider what it is we have been saved from and saved to.
There is an old legend of a man who found the barn where Satan kept his seeds ready to be sown in the human heart. On finding the seeds of discouragement more numerous than others, he learned that those seeds could be made to grow almost anywhere. When questioned, Satan reluctantly admitted that there was one place in which he could never get them to thrive. "And where is that?" asked the man. He replied sadly, "In the heart of a grateful person."
Notice here that forgiveness and healing go together. That is because through our salvation we have been brought into the kingdom of God which is breaking out into the world. Divine healing is happening today as a testimony to the power and grace of God.
Is 53: 4 Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. 6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
The word for infirmities is translated GRIEFS in the KJV. The context of the passage is that Jesus took on our sins when he was on the cross. It talks about our griefs, sorrows, transgressions and iniquities and then says we are healed. The New Testament says:
1 Pet 2:24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.
Healing here is again linked to Jesus dealing with sin on the cross. Ultimately all sickness is a result of sin. Because of original sin we live in a fallen world and our bodies are subject to decay. The moment we are born we begin to die. These bodies were not made to last and there is something self-destructive in all of them. So how are we healed? Healing can happen in one of 3 ways:
a. Healed FROM the sickness – faith is built
b. Healed THROUGH the sickness – faith is refined
c. Healed BY the sickness into His arms – faith is perfected
Ultimately we will only be fully healed when we get our new bodies in heaven. Until then the grace of God is sufficient to help us bear our thorns and at times the mercy of God spills out in miraculous healing. Yes we should pray and expect God to do the miraculous, but trust in God to ultimately do what is best in our lives.
2. Redeemed and Crowned – (vs. 4)
Who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion
Not only has God dealt with our sins by justifying us but He has also dealt with the power of sin in our lives. Redemption is more than just being declared righteous. To be redeemed means to be release from bondage.
Gal 3:1313 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.
The Word redeemed is the Greek word EXAGORAZO which come from the word EK which means FROM and the word AGORAZO which comes from AGORA or MARKET. Together they mean FROM THE MARKET or to BUY BACK.
We see a beautiful picture of redemption in the book of Hosea. Even though Gomer had been unfaithful to her husband and been sold into slavery, Hosea bought her back to be his wife again.
Hosea 3:1 The LORD said to me, "Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress. Love her as the LORD loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes." 2 So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and about a homer and a lethek of barley. 3 Then I told her, "You are to live with me many days; you must not be a prostitute or be intimate with any man, and I will live with you."
Luke 7:41 "Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. 42 Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?" 43 Simon replied, "I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled." "You have judged correctly," Jesus said. 44 Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. 46 You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. 47 Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven--for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little."
Jesus says here that the extent to which we love God is the extent to which we understand how much God has actually saved us from. Those who do not understand the depth of their own sin love little. Those who recognize their great need of salvation, when they receive it, love much.
God did not only declare us righteous but has imputed upon us the righteousness of Christ. The word imputed is a great word! The NIV uses the word CREDITED. God did not only forgive us the great debt that we owe but has credited to our account his righteousness. Not simply taken away the bad things and left us with nothing but credited to us all the good things Jesus did. Credited and crowned with righteousness.
2 Tim 4:7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 8 Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness , which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day--and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.
God has crowned us. My name is Stephen which in Greek means CROWNED ONE but all of us in Christ are crowned ones. Hosea did not simply redeem Gomer to free her from bondage but also so that she could once again be his wife. His motivation was love. God has redeemed us not simply because he took pity on us but because he wants to have a relationship with us.
Harvey Penick's Little Red Book on golf, has sold more than a million copies it is one of the biggest things in the history of sports books. In the 1920s Penick bought a red spiral notebook and began jotting down observations about golf. He never showed the book to anyone except his son until 1991, when he shared it with a local writer and asked if he thought it was worth publishing. The man read it and told him yes. He left word with Penick's wife the next evening that Simon & Schuster had agreed to an advance of $90,000. When the writer saw Penick later, the old man seemed troubled. Finally, Penick came clean. With all his medical bills, he said, there was no way he could advance Simon & Schuster that much money.
The writer had to explain that Penick would be the one to receive the $90,000." People often have Penick's reaction to the fabulous gift of salvation offered in Jesus Christ. We ask, "What must I do?" God answers, "Just receive it."
3. Satisfied and Renewed – (vs. 5)
Who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's
We are forgiven and healed. We are redeemed and crowned. On top of this we do not simply have hope in the next life but the promise that God is working for us in this present life. God is Jehovah Jireh – the one who supplies all our needs.
Phil. 4:19 And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.
We are satisfied because we have everything we need. For me the picture is of a person after a good meal. Before the meal they were in want, looking around the kitchen and sticking their head in the refrigerator hoping to find something to eat. After the meal they are full, content and satisfied.
Notice that God satisfies us with GOOD things. He never promised to supply all you WANT, just what you NEED. I heard the story of a missionary who did not receive her monthly check. She had a serious stomach problem but could not afford food so she had to eat oatmeal for a month. Later she found out her normal diet could have killed her and that an oatmeal diet was the best possible cure.
We know that in this life we will have troubles. The good news is that Christ walks with us through them. When we lose our strength and cannot go on God gives us what we need to continue to move forward.
Is 40:28 Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. 29 He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. 30 Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; 31 but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
Once an eagle reaches maturity, it molts each year. It’s beak keeps growing, so even if damaged soon it is as good as know. I was reading that you cannot tell the age of an eagle once it has reached an adult stage. It seems their strength does not diminish. Their color does not fade. They are one of the longest-living of all birds, with a life expectancy of over 25 years in the wild, and having been known to live 50 years in captivity.
Psal 18:31 For who is God besides the LORD? And who is the Rock except our God? 32 It is God who arms me with strength and makes my way perfect. 33 He makes my feet like the feet of a deer; he enables me to stand on the heights.
A famous surgeon was seldom seen on the streets without a beautiful, fresh rose in his lapel. His friends wondered why these buds stayed fresh for so long a time. When they asked him his secret, he turned back the flap of his coat and revealed a little bottle of water into which the stem of the flower had been inserted. So it is with believers. If our lives draw from the great resources of the Lord Jesus, who is in us the Water of Life, we will grow more fragrant and beautiful as the days and years go by.
