Sermon Count Your Blessings

Don't Forget What God Has Done

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits.

Psalm 103:1-2, Csb

There is something quietly dangerous about a good memory that goes to work on the wrong things. Most of us can recall with sharp detail the disappointment that stung us, the door that closed in our face, the prayer that seemed to go unanswered for a long time. We rehearse those things almost without trying. But the kindnesses of God, the mercies that have carried us through, the moments when He showed up and we knew it was Him, those things have a way of fading faster than we expect. We don't mean to forget. But we do.

David knew that tendency. He had lived through enough to know that a soul left to itself will drift toward anxiety, complaint, and forgetfulness before it drifts toward praise. So he did not wait for a feeling to arise. He issued a command, and he issued it to himself. Bless the Lord, O my soul. He was not asking. He was not suggesting. He was calling his own inner life to attention and pointing it toward God.

That is where Psalm 103 begins, and it is where this message begins. The central claim is simple and it is worth holding onto all the way through: when you take time to remember what God has actually done, gratitude becomes more than a feeling, it becomes a foundation. Counting your blessings is not a sentimental exercise. In the hands of a praying person, it is an act of faith, a form of worship, and a weapon against despair.

David Talks To Himself, And We Should Too

Look at how the psalm opens. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits. Psalm 103:1-2, CSB.

David is not addressing the congregation. He is not leading a choir. He is talking to himself. He is preaching to his own soul. That is worth pausing on for a moment. David was a man who had known great heights and terrible lows. He had experienced the joy of victory and the weight of his own failure. He had written psalms in the pit and psalms on the mountaintop. And he understood that the soul does not automatically orient itself toward gratitude. It has to be directed there.

When he says do not forget all his benefits, the word forget carries real weight. It does not mean a casual slip of memory. It means to neglect, to let something that matters slip out of your active awareness. David is warning against a kind of spiritual amnesia that creeps in when life gets hard, when seasons stretch long, when the blessings of yesterday feel distant. He is saying, pull those things back to the front. Don't let them fade. Your soul needs to remember.

And so does ours. Before we ever get to application, we need to sit with the posture David is modeling here. He is not performing praise for an audience. He is commanding his own heart to do what it was made to do, which is to bless the name of the Lord. That is the starting point for everything else in this psalm.

Five Benefits That Deserve To Be Named

Starting in verse 3, David does something remarkable. He does not stay in the abstract. He does not simply say God is good and move on. He names specific benefits, one by one, like a man counting on his fingers what God has done. And each one is worth looking at closely.

Who forgives all your iniquity. That is the first benefit, and David puts it first for a reason. Before healing, before provision, before any earthly blessing, there is forgiveness. The word iniquity here is not a small word. It refers to the deep, twisted, willful wrongdoing that separates a person from God. And David says God forgives all of it. Not most of it. Not the manageable parts. All of it. For a man who had known the crushing weight of his own sin and the mercy that met him in it, this was not a theological abstraction. It was a personal reality.

For us, this benefit points directly to the cross. The forgiveness David celebrated in shadow, we celebrate in full light. Jesus Christ bore our iniquity. He took the weight of it on himself so that it would not crush us. The forgiveness of sins is the first and greatest benefit we have received from God, and if we counted no other blessing for the rest of our lives, this one alone would be enough to fill eternity with praise.

Who heals all your diseases. David is not making a blanket promise that every illness will be cured in this life. The psalms are honest about suffering, and so must we be. But David is pointing to a God who is fundamentally a healer, whose nature is restoration, whose ultimate intention for his people is wholeness. We live in a world that is broken, and our bodies carry that brokenness. But we serve a God who has not abandoned us to it. And there is coming a day when every disease, every weakness, every tear will be answered by the God who heals. That hope is not wishful thinking. It is grounded in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the firstfruits of the new creation.

Who redeems your life from the Pit. The Pit in Hebrew poetry is the place of death, the grave, destruction. David is saying God reaches down into the lowest place a person can go and pulls them out. He redeems. He buys back. He rescues. This is the language of someone who has been in a desperate place and found that God was there. And again, for the believer in Christ, this is not metaphor. Jesus descended into death and rose again. He has redeemed our lives from the pit in the most literal and ultimate sense possible. We were headed for destruction and he turned us around.

Who crowns you with faithful love and compassion. The word for faithful love here is hesed in Hebrew, the covenant love of God that is steadfast, loyal, and unbreakable. David says God does not merely offer this love from a distance. He crowns you with it. He places it on your head like a crown. He dignifies you with it. You are not just a recipient of God's mercy. You are clothed in it, marked by it, identified with it. That is a staggering thought. The same God who rules the universe has chosen to crown his people with compassion.

Who satisfies you with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle. David closes this list with the image of renewal, of strength restored, of a life that does not simply endure but is refreshed. God is not a God who gives barely enough. He satisfies. He fills. And the result is not just survival but vitality, the kind of renewed energy that comes when a soul has been genuinely nourished by the goodness of God.

What Forgetting Costs Us

Now here is the practical reality. When we forget these benefits, something happens to us on the inside. We begin to live as if we are on our own. We begin to treat the troubles of today as though they are the whole story. We start measuring God's faithfulness by the most recent difficulty rather than by the full record of what He has done. And when that happens, worry takes the place of worship, and complaint takes the place of gratitude.

David understood this. That is why he did not just write this psalm and let it sit. He commanded his soul to bless the Lord. He was essentially saying, soul, I know you want to rehearse the problems. I know you want to dwell on what has not happened yet. But I am telling you to stop and remember. Remember the forgiveness. Remember the redemption. Remember the healing, the love, the renewal. Count those things. Name them out loud. Let them be real to you again.

This is what it means to count your blessings in the biblical sense. It is not a cheerful exercise designed to make you feel better by ignoring hard things. It is a deliberate, faith-filled act of remembering what is true about God so that your soul is anchored in reality rather than drifting on anxiety. Gratitude is not denial. It is discernment. It is choosing to see the whole picture, including the mercies that are easy to overlook.

The Invitation This Psalm Extends

If you are a believer this morning, Psalm 103 is an invitation to stop and take stock. Not of your problems, but of your benefits. Not of what has gone wrong, but of what God has done right, and done faithfully, and done at great cost to himself through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

You have been forgiven. That is not a small thing. The sin that should have separated you from God forever has been dealt with at the cross. You have been redeemed from the pit. You have been crowned with a love that does not change based on your performance. You have been satisfied with good things in ways you may have stopped noticing. These are not promises for a future that has not arrived. These are benefits you already possess in Christ.

And if you are here today and you have not yet received that forgiveness, the door is open. The same God who forgives all iniquity is not keeping a record against you to condemn you. He is holding out the gift of mercy through Jesus Christ, and it is free, and it is full, and it is available right now.

For all of us, the call is the same. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Do not forget. Take time this week, maybe today before you leave this place, to name what God has done for you. Write it down if you need to. Say it out loud. Let your soul hear it again. Because when you remember what God has done, you will find that the weight of today becomes more manageable, not because the circumstances have changed, but because your soul has been reminded of who is carrying you through them.

God has been faithful. He is faithful now. And He will be faithful to the end.

Bless the Lord, O my soul. And do not forget.

Sources Consulted

Allen, Leslie C. Psalms 101-150. Word Biblical Commentary. Word Books, 1983.

Goldingay, John. Psalms, Volume 3: Psalms 90-150. Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms. Baker Academic, 2008.

Kidner, Derek. Psalms 73-150. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries. InterVarsity Press, 1975.

Ross, Allen P. A Commentary on the Psalms, Volume 3 (90-150). Kregel Academic, 2016.

Spurgeon, Charles H. The Treasury of David. Volumes covering Psalm 103. Various publishers, originally 1869-1885.