[Wednesday's Devotional] - A Grateful Eben-Ezer

In doing my best to practice gratitude, I have not found that the interruptions, disappointments and hurts have ceased—if anything, I am even more aware of them.

In my last set of devotionals I shared about spiritual markers and how important I feel they are in our lives to express gratitude. We discovered the Israelites crossing the river Jordan and saw how Joshua set twelve stones at Gilgal as a marker of remembrance of what the Lord had done. (Joshua 4)

Recently I came across another story that affirmed the importance of spiritual markers:

 ^“While Samuel was offering the sacrifice, the Philistines came within range to fight Israel. Just then God thundered, a huge thunderclap exploding among the Philistines. They panicked—mass confusion!—and ran helter-skelter from Israel. Israel poured out of Mizpah and gave chase, killing Philistines right and left, to a point just beyond Beth Car. Samuel took a single stone and set it upright between Mizpah and Shen. He named it “Ebenezer” (Stone of Help), saying, “This marks the place where God helped us.”   1Samuel 7:10-12 [The Message]

How quickly we can forget the feelings of gratitude that most of us experience when God answers our prayers. Samuel, by example, urges us to pause and carefully consider thanking God for all he has done. We should count our blessings and use our memories of what God has done in the past to inspire us in our faith.

There is something quite pitiful about us when we take God for granted. I know I can often be guilty of this and my failure to sometimes appreciate God’s blessings reminds me of the old Monty Python sketch “what did the Romans ever do for us?”

Let us, like Samuel, be grateful for Jehovah Ezer – The Lord our Helper.

Dawn Milward