Count Your Blessings, Not Your Problems

Psalm 103 carries the old superscription “A Psalm of David”, so by long tradition we are listening to a king who had known both rescue and trouble. I cannot tell you the day he wrote it, and I would distrust anyone who claimed to, but I can tell you the posture of the man in it. He is not leading a congregation in worship here. He is alone with his own heart, giving it a plain instruction.

That matters more than it first appears. So much of Israel’s praise happened together, with other voices around you. Here the audience is a single person, and that person is the writer. He has turned inward and found a heart that needs prodding. I find that oddly steadying. David, remembered as a man after God’s own heart, still had to talk himself round to gratitude. If he did, my own sluggish mornings are in decent company. This is not the voice of someone who finds thankfulness easy. It is the voice of someone who has learned he has to summon it, deliberately, before the day gets going.

Read the verse slowly and notice where the weight falls: “Praise the LORD, my soul, and don’t forget all his benefits,”. The first half is the bright command. The second half is the honest one. He does not warn his soul against open rebellion or contempt. He warns it against forgetting, which is a far quieter failing, and the one I am actually guilty of.

Forgetting is rarely a decision. It is a drift. Israel was warned about this danger more than once, especially in Deuteronomy, where a people about to come into plenty are told, in effect, not to let comfort erase memory. David is doing the same work on a smaller scale, inside one chest. The word rendered “benefits” reaches back over everything God has given, and the next verses spell out what he means: forgiveness, healing, redemption, steadfast love. So the line is not vague positivity. It is a man refusing to let particular mercies slide off the back of his mind the moment the next worry arrives.

Israel’s whole life with God was built on remembering. The Passover, the stones lifted out of the Jordan, the feasts, the Sabbath itself: these were memory made physical, because God knew how fast a rescued people forget their rescue. David’s small command to his own soul stands in that long line. He is keeping a kind of private Passover of the heart, naming the kindness so it does not fade.

This is also where I see the verse reach forward to Christ. On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread and told his friends to keep doing it in remembrance of him (Luke 22:19). The same instinct runs straight through: God’s people are forgetful, so God gives us means to remember. Where David counted benefits, we now have a benefit with a name and a face, the forgiveness and healing of Psalm 103 made flesh and finished at the cross. Lamentations 3:22-23 holds the wider truth underneath it, that the Lord’s mercies are new every morning, and James 1:17 reminds me every good gift traces back to one unchanging Giver. David is teaching his soul to follow the gifts back to him.

I will be honest about how this works in real life, because polished encouragement helps no one. My mind keeps a meticulous ledger of what has gone wrong and a leaky bucket for what has gone right. By the middle of the week I can recite every irritation and not one of the kindnesses. That is the exact gap David is addressing.

What helps me is taking him at his word and actually speaking to myself, out loud if no one is about. Name three real things and refuse to move on until I have. The colleague who covered for me. The scan that came back clear. The plain fact that I woke up at all. It feels stilted for the first half a minute and then it stops feeling that way. This is not pretending the hard things away. Paul tells us, in 1 Thessalonians 5:18, to give thanks in all our circumstances, which is a very different thing from giving thanks for all of them. The mercies and the burdens travel together. David is not asking his soul to lie. He is asking it to stop forgetting the true things it already knows, and to count them on purpose before the day buries them again.

We assume we forget God most when life is hard, but scripture keeps locating the danger somewhere else. In Deuteronomy 8:11-14 Moses warns a people on the edge of plenty: once they have eaten their fill, built good houses and settled in, their hearts may swell and quietly let go of the One who brought them out of slavery. Trouble drives us to our knees. Comfort is what lulls us to sleep.

I know the pattern in myself. When a week falls apart I pray hard. When everything runs smoothly I can go days without a grateful thought, coasting on mercies I have stopped seeing, now the furniture of an ordinary life. So David’s command is not only for the low seasons. It may matter most when nothing is wrong, which is exactly the moment a soul forgets it is being held.

Notice what David does next, because it rescues the line from sentimentality. He could have stopped at “all his benefits” and left it pleasantly vague. Instead the verses that follow itemise them one at a time: the God who forgives every wrong, heals the diseases, redeems a life from the pit, and crowns the days with steadfast love and tender mercy (Psalm 103:3-5). That is not a mood. It is an inventory.

This is the part I most often skip. Vague gratitude has evaporated by lunchtime, while a named mercy stays put. “Thank you for everything” asks nothing of me and leaves no mark. “Thank you that the results came back clear, that the rent is covered, that I was forgiven again for the same old failing” pins me to something solid. Generalities are easy to forget because they were never specific enough to hold.

For a while I have kept a plain notebook for this, just a cheap pad by the kettle, and most days I add a line or two. It is dull to describe and quietly steadying to do. The point is not the writing itself but what it guards against: the soul’s habit of letting yesterday’s kindness dissolve the moment today’s worry walks in.

What still catches me out is going back over the old pages. Mercies I could have sworn I imagined are there in my own hand, dated and undeniable. A fear that swallowed a whole fortnight last spring turns out to have been answered, and I had quietly forgotten both the dread and the answer. The list remembers what my memory will not. David told his soul not to forget, and keeping a written record is simply taking him at his word.

I have heard “count your blessings” used to close a conversation somebody did not want to keep having. A friend loses a job, or a marriage goes, or the letter from the hospital says the wrong thing, and this verse arrives like a lid for the pot. Said gently it still does the same work. It tells the person their grief is a failure of arithmetic, and that if they only totted the good column up properly the bad column would stop shouting.

David is doing something else entirely. Every word of verse 2 is aimed at his own soul, on his own authority over his own heart. He does widen out later, but even then he is calling angels and all creation up into praise, never leaning over one hurting person and telling them to cheer up. Borrow his line, point it at someone else’s pain, and a command a man gave himself becomes a rebuke we hand out. Worship turns into crowd control wearing worship’s clothes. I have done it. I watched a face go careful and polite the second the words left me, and understood far too late that I had just told a friend, in scripture’s own words, to stop mentioning her pain in front of me.

If I were teaching this, I would not stop at verse 2, because David does not. He begins with the smallest congregation there is, one soul being talked round by its owner, somewhere I picture as a kitchen table at six in the morning. By the end the doors are off their hinges: angels, the heavenly armies, everything God has made in every place of his dominion, all of it summoned into the same praise (Psalm 103:20-22). Then the very last line of the psalm drops back down to the one soul he started with.

That shape is the sermon. Do not open at full volume, because you will have nowhere left to go and the ending will land like a greetings card. Start where he starts, with a man losing an argument with his own forgetfulness, and be honest about how badly that argument goes on a bad Monday. Only then let the psalm widen. The angels at the close are not decoration. They are the far edge of a fight that began in the dark with one stubborn heart, and a room will feel the difference.

A New Year service, a harvest thanksgiving, a testimony evening where people stand and speak in their own voice: those are its natural home, because in each one somebody does what David did and addresses their own soul, by their own choice. If you are leading one, resist reading verse 2 out and then asking the room to feel grateful. Read it and then get out of the way. A minute of quiet, a pencil, one named mercy from the past year written down, and whoever wants to can say theirs aloud. Nobody is called on. The whole point of this verse is that the voice has to be your own.

The one place I would keep it out of is the order of service for a funeral while the grief is still standing up in the room. Not because thanksgiving has no business in hard ground (some of the bravest I have heard came from exactly there), but because it has to come up out of the person carrying the weight. If a grieving friend ever decides to count her blessings aloud in front of me, my job is to be quiet and let her.

Open your Bible one page back and the temperature drops. Psalm 102 comes with its own heading, a prayer of the afflicted who is overwhelmed and pouring out his complaint before the Lord, and it earns every word of that title. Days going up like smoke. Bones that burn. Bread forgotten. A man awake at three in the morning like a sparrow alone on a housetop (Psalm 102:3 to 7). For years I filed these two psalms as opposites, the sad one and the glad one, shelved side by side by accident.

That reading is lazy, and the psalm will not let it stand. Psalm 102 does turn. Halfway through, the man stops cataloguing his own ruin and starts talking about the Lord who remains for ever and will have mercy on Zion (Psalm 102:12 to 13). What it never does is stop hurting. The praise arrives and the affliction stays, and the psalm closes still leaning forward, still on the far side of the mercy it has become sure of (Psalm 102:28).

Then the page turns and a man tells his own soul to praise. I do not know who set these two next to each other, and I would not trust anyone who claimed they did. But it means the Psalter refuses to keep despair and praise in separate rooms. Psalm 103 is not the prize you collect once Psalm 102 has finally been sorted out. It sits right next door, unresolved and singing anyway. Most of my own Tuesdays are both at once: the thing that has not lifted, and the coffee, and the plain fact that I am still here to drink it.

I have to say the hard thing, because the line straight after ours says it: God heals all your diseases (Psalm 103:3). One verse. That is the whole distance between telling your soul not to forget the benefits and a claim that has broken on people I have sat beside. A mother’s cancer prayed over and the scan comes back unchanged. A child prayed for and buried anyway. Read this psalm at that funeral, meaning every word of comfort in it, and the word all sits in the room like an accusation aimed at the God it was meant to praise. I have watched a good man stop asking for healing altogether, not because he had stopped believing but because the asking had begun to hurt worse than the illness.

I have no tidy way to close that gap and I distrust anyone who says they have. Some hear all as the full-throated way psalms talk everywhere, a man straining after the character of God rather than auditing the case files. Others hear a promise begun and not finished, healing certain but not arrived yet for every body, the way nothing in Revelation’s promise of all things new has landed yet either (Revelation 21:5). I find something true in both, and I have never once found either enough to hand to a woman still waiting on a scan. What I can say is that whoever sang this first sang it out of a body that would fail him in the end, as every voice that has sung it since has. He was not exempt from the very list he was praising God for handling. That solves nothing. It only means the man singing was never standing safely outside the problem, looking in at the rest of us.

Set this beside Habakkuk 3:17 to 19 and something moves. Habakkuk had asked God about injustice and got back an answer worse than the silence: an invading army, already on its way (Habakkuk 1:5 to 6). By the end of his book he is picturing the aftermath in a farmer’s plainest terms, the fig tree, the vines, the olive crop, the fields, the pen, the stall, every one of them empty. That is not poetry doing a flourish. That is a household with nothing in the larder and winter coming on. And with absolutely nothing left to count, he says he will rejoice in the Lord anyway.

The two prayers look alike and are not the same thing at all, and the difference took me years to see. David has material to work with. His soul is being told to remember mercies that genuinely happened: the forgiveness, the healing, the mornings that kept arriving. Habakkuk has none. The barns are bare and getting barer, and his joy has nothing underneath it except God himself, not one supplied good thing holding it up. Between them they cover a life. Most of mine is Psalm 103 gratitude, mercies I can point at and name. But I have had the odd Habakkuk fortnight where the list is honestly empty, and I badly needed to have known in advance that this harder joy was permitted, because David’s psalm on its own would never have taught me it existed. That is an argument for reading the whole book rather than the verse on the fridge magnet.

Look at what he actually tells himself. Not remember a decent number of his benefits. All of them. That is a strange thing to ask of a mind, because nobody can recall every kindness they have ever been handed. I cannot name every meal I was fed as a child. I certainly cannot name the times somebody quietly let one of my small cruelties go by without answering it, because by definition I never noticed. Every ordinary morning I woke up in a body that still worked. The full ledger would run to more pages than the life it belonged to.

So all was never a request for a complete audit, and I suspect the man writing it knew that better than I do. For years I heard it as homework I was failing, which is its own particular misery: gratitude turned into an exam with a pass mark. What he is after is a bearing rather than a total. A soul facing the mercy instead of the complaint, and staying turned that way once the complaint gets louder, which it will by Thursday. And the test cuts both ways, which is the part that unsettles me. I have known people who could produce the notebook and the dated entries and were still, underneath it, quietly furious with God and unable to say so out loud. The counting was real. The turning had never happened. A soul that has genuinely turned round has counted rightly whether or not it counted everything, and a soul that has logged every item while still facing the other way has counted nothing at all.

The thing that finally made this verse land for me is on the next page rather than this one, and I went past it for years without seeing it. Psalm 103 opens with a man ordering his own soul to praise and closes on the very same line, the whole song bookended by one voice talking to itself (Psalm 103:1 and 103:22). Then Psalm 104 starts, and the first thing out of its mouth is that identical instruction, and it signs off with it too (Psalm 104:1 and 104:35).

Two psalms. The same self-address at all four corners. What changes is where the soul is made to look. Psalm 103 turns it inward and downward: sins forgiven, the body healed, a life hauled up out of the pit, a father’s pity for his children, dust that God has not forgotten we are made of. Psalm 104 swings that same soul outward, to springs in the valleys, wild donkeys, cedars, the sea, the whole enormous ordinary machinery of a world getting fed.

I take that pairing as a rebuke of my instincts, and a kind one. Left alone I count only what happened to me, and my gratitude quietly shrinks to the size of my own week and my own body. The Psalter will not allow it. The same soul, given the same order twice, is made to look first at its own forgiveness and then at the rain falling on hills it will never walk. Both are called benefits. Neither is to be forgotten. My list is always too small, and the trouble is not that I feel too little. It is that I never look far enough past myself.

• What good thing from this past week have I already let slip out of view, and could I name it now, before the next worry crowds in?
• Where do I keep a careful record of my troubles but a leaky memory for God’s kindness, and why might that be?
• If I spoke to my own soul the way David spoke to his, what would I tell it today?
• Which particular mercy am I quietly tempted to treat as owed to me rather than given?

If you would like to carry this further, you could spend a few minutes with the verse of the day or read on through more of the book of Psalms.