Thanksgiving

One of the greatest assets you have in relation to your future is the memories of past victories. It is very important that you confront today’s challenges with the memories of yesterday’s victories. If you forget the victories of the past, you would only remember the pain and reproduce that. Nothing succeeds as success and nothing fails as failure. God commanded at the beginning “Let every thing bring forth after its kind with the seed in themselves�. Within every successful project lies the seed for the progress of the future. Your past (regardless of how you feel about it) has events which are loaded with seeds for tomorrow’s blessing. There are two mental faculties you must learn to utilise properly your memory and your imagination. Your memory gives the images of the past while you can project and organise your future through your imagination. Often, we relate with the memory in a negative sense. Due to several unpleasant events which have happened in our past, we train ourselves to suppress this faculty. We regard the memory as being ‘bad’ and our imagination as being ‘good’. This attitude causes us to develop an escapist mentality that makes us idle dreamers. We must confront realities. A tree grows outward but its root grows inwards. Your history is prophetic. It might relate to events in the past but it also points to possibilities in your future. Though there are many things in your past that are best forgotten and it gives great emotional liberty to be able to say ‘goodbye’ to dead issues and walk away from them, there are powerful things which God has done in our past. If we neglect to remember and celebrate these events, we will never be able to find the pathway into our future nor have the confidence and the courage to navigate through the waters of today’s challenges. We won’t even have the emotional strength to walk away from things. There is a spiritual law that governs life… ‘If they had cherished the memory of the country (events, circumstances, place) from which they were coming, they would have created opportunities to return.� (Hebrews 11:15) Whatever you continuously harbour in your memory, negative or positive, reproduces itself in your life. Opportunities appear in your environment making it easy for such situations to re-occur. Thanksgiving is a powerful way of expressing appreciation to God for the things He has done for us. By so doing, we make it easier to obtain victory the next time. We need to remind ourselves of all the positive and landmark events in our lives times of favour, when we got through where others failed. Periods of promotion and advancement. Times when God gave us advantage over others where through no fault of theirs they did not have that type of access. It hurts God and our future if we fall short in the area of thanksgiving. We lose out on future blessings and our lives can take a negative turn. We must be careful to set time aside to give thanks to God to count our blessings and name them one by one before Him. God manifested himself to a set of people showing them the invisible things of Him by reason of the things God was doing in their lives, but when they knew Him they did not give glory to Him as God neither were they thankful so He gave them up to themselves and they became vain in their imaginations and their foolish hearts became darkened (Romans 1: 20-21). God constantly told the Jews to always remember the things He had done for them. He instructed at times that stones be piled up in particular places where they obtained a blessing as a memorial for the generations to come. When the Hebrew Christians got into a difficult patch, Paul counselled them not to give up but to call into remembrance the former days when they were first enlightened and how they overcame the challenges. When David encountered Goliath, he recited before the King, before Goliath and to himself his past victories and that brought about God’s presence unto the scene. If God has done it before, He would do it again. Always face today’s challenges with the memories of yesterday’s victories and light will shine on you.

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