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.

• 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.