Why do we need warnings with God’s blessings?

Why does God have to attach warnings when He blesses His people?

With His blessings, God says,

• “Watch yourself!”
• “Be careful!”
• “Don’t forget!”
• “Be sure to remember!”

Questions for conversation

• What does it tell us about ourselves that we need warnings with our blessings?
• Do spiritual dangers come with material and physical prosperity?

Seven stages that often follow God’s blessings

1. Prosperity increases
2. Time passes
3. Memory of hardship fades
4. A change of heart slowly emerges
5. We forget the God who blessed us
6. We subtlety credit ourselves for the blessings
7. We need hardships to shake our complacency and bring us back to God

Os Guinness wisely noted that, “…rebellion against God does not begin with the clenched fist of atheism but with the self-satisfied heart of the one for whom ‘thank you’ is redundant.”

We should live by the saying, ‘Nothing taken for granted. Everything received with gratitude. Everything passed on with grace.’ (G. K. Chesterton).

Let’s build times of remembering into the normal pattern of our lives. This will help us avoid the path away from the God who blesses.

Questions for deeper reflection

• Do you allow time for reflection at the end of a day, a week, or a year?
• Do you keep a record of God’s goodness to help you remember and give thanks?
• Do you participate in any public gatherings for remembering? Do you pause from time to time simply to thank God for the many small joys that come with each day?

We all need to take gratitude more seriously than we do.

Thought

“Cultivating a grateful heart is not just an add-on nicety, a civil tip of the hat to God as we steamroll through our day. A posture of purposeful, perpetual thanks to God is absolutely central to Christian character … the rhythm of divine renewal beats in the pulse of a purposefully grateful heart” (Ellen Vaughn, Radical Gratitude).

Steve Cornell