God’s benefits are too great to forget. Recalling them and trusting them is how you encourage yourself in the Lord and strengthen your soul. It sounds simple to merely remember God’s goodness, but you will discover that there’s a battle going on over us that can cause spiritual amnesia.
The enemy wants us to forget all of these benefits. In fact, he wants you to base your trust in God on your feelings or your circumstances; he wants you to remember every time you’ve been disappointed. He celebrates when you hold on to a hurt, sorrow, or prayer that wasn’t answered in the way you thought it should be.
When your trust level starts to drop and you sense that your innermost being is starting to doubt if God is really there or that He truly cares, you are forgetting His benefits. That is when you will be inclined to revisit every mistake you ever made, every foolish thing you were ever involved in, every moment of failure. This mental spiral can hold you in a destructive pattern. I’m not just talking about people who don’t know the Lord. I’m talking about Christians who forget to rehearse those benefits because the enemy is waging a war for their mind.
You’ll never be able to accept the crown of lovingkindness or receive the tender mercies as God’s benefits for you because you’ll say, “I’m not worthy. That’s not for me. God wouldn’t do that in my life.” You’ll fail to recognize the hand of God at work in your life. Another symptom of forgetting is that your mouth will constantly speak of the defeat and the disappointment. Those praises and testimonies God wants to place in your mouth will be crowded out by expressed uncertainty about God and unworthiness of self. You’ll always be suspicious of what God is up to, and your words will rehearse doubts to yourself and others.
How many times have you heard people say something along the lines of, “We just don’t know what’s going to happen next; we just don’t know what God is going to do next. This is a bad world we live in, so who can trust what will come?” If we personally get like this, we not only wear ourselves out but we wear out everybody else around us. People will wonder, Where is the evidence of benefits to being a believer in Jesus Christ?
His benefits should be evident in your life. The enemy of your soul wants you to live drained, depleted, and defeated, because his ultimate goal is to destroy you. And if he can’t take you out completely, he’ll destroy your testimony and your witness. He will fill your mind and your mouth with grumbling, complaining, and negative comments that will cause people to go in the opposite direction.
Remember. Remember. Remember. When you turn daily to God in prayer and seek Him, you will not forget His benefits.
From Becoming a Woman Who Knows God by Name by Jan Harrison
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