Written by Pastor Jack Wellman– Woodrow Kroll
How concentrating on counting your blessings can shrink your problems.
Compare and Contrast
If you simply make out a list and write out your blessings on the left side of a column, it should fill an entire sheet of paper, at least. Make sure to include your salvation, your family, your job, your home, your heat/air conditioning, your (likely) nearly full refrigerator, your freedom to worship, your Bible and so on. Now, write out your problems on the right hand side. Your list should look lopsided. Even the problems listed on the right side like heath, relational problems, or financial problems are only temporary problems that will disappear at the return of Jesus Christ (Rev 21:4).
What is Temporary and What is Permanent?
Look at the list of blessings and see how many of them are permanent? Now look at the list of problems you are experiencing right now and see how many of these are permanent. What you should notice is that most of the greatest blessings cannot be lost but all of the problems will be gone someday. What remains after Christ returns will be forever but what is problematic right now will be a distant memory and something that will never again have to be dealt with. Your salvation, your relationship with Christ, you relations with your saved family members, your rewards for what you’ve done in this life…all will remain. Everything else that has plagued you during this life will no longer be an issue in the life to come.
The Vast Majority
As Woodrow Kroll said, if you have so many more blessings than problems, you will tend to concentrate on all of your blessings and will have less time to deal with the worries of this world. Jesus said that “life is more than food, and the body more than clothing” (Luke 12:23) so “do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear” (Luke 12:22). You never see a raven sow or reap, yet not one of them goes hungry and aren’t you much more valuable than they” (Luke 12:24)? If we seek the kingdom and more specifically, the King of the kingdom first, God will take care of everything else that we might ever need (Matt 6:33).
Conclusion
If you are honest with yourself, you have much more to be thankful for and the blessings far outweigh the problems in this life because these are temporary but the greatest blessings of all will never go away. Count your blessings and you might not even have the time to count anything else.
