Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits. Psalm 103:2.
Today your LORD (יהוה) God says:
I want you to know all of the benefits I give you and to enjoy them all. I have richly supplied you with all things to enjoy. 1 Timothy 6:17. I created the heavens and the earth, endowed them with beauty, majesty, and splendor, and filled them with an abundance of all that you need for life and godliness. And when I saw it was very good, I gave it all to you. And there is so much more beyond that! I have prepared a Kingdom for you. The delights at My right hand forever. “Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” Matthew 25:34.
And in Jesus, I have blessed you with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Ephesians 1:3. I chose you in Him before the foundation of the world, that you would be holy and blameless before Me. I have lavished My grace upon you. Ephesians 1:4-6. I prepared a fruitful life of good deeds for you in advance. Ephesians 2:10. And the magnificent and splendid things I have prepared for you yet to experience I reveal to you by My Spirit. And through Jesus, I have given you My Spirit to be with you and in you, so that you may know the things I have freely given to you. 1 Corinthians 2:10-12.
There are things I tell you to remember and do in remembrance of Me. There are things I tell you to forget. But there are six things I tell you NOT to forget. And they are benefits that fill every need in your life. But if you do not know you have these benefits freely given you in Christ, or if you treat them as of no value or doubt they are true, you will never enjoy them and this will grieve Me. For But My righteous one shall live by faith; and if he shrinks back, My soul has no pleasure in him. Hebrews 10:38.
So we begin a new series of life lessons today, “Forget not ALL His Benefits,” with Life Lesson No. 1: “He forgives ALL your sins.” You will find the benefits of which I am speaking all through My Word, but there is a list in Psalm 103, a psalm of David, and he took hold of all these benefits in his life and is still enjoying them today in eternity. He sang to his soul (mind, will and emotions), and when you are in a challenging trial you need to do the same. Remind yourself, encourage yourself, edify yourself, so you take hold by faith and do not neglect to activate a single one of My benefits. “Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name. Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget none of His benefits; He forgives all your iniquities; He heals all your diseases; He redeems your life from the pit; He surrounds and crowns you with lovingkindness and compassion; He fills and satisfies your days with good, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle.” Psalm 103:1-5. Taste and see My goodness.
Let us begin with the benefit that opens all the other benefits, that I forgive ALL YOUR SINS. The word translated as “iniquities” or “sins,” is the Hebrew word “avon,” which means iniquity, guilt, and includes punishment for iniquity. It is the same word I use when I say that Jesus was crushed for your iniquities in My prophecy to Isaiah recorded in Isaiah 53:5.
This benefit is primary for our relationship and for the confidence with which you approach Me. Set free from sin, you know you can come in, right to My Holy of Holies, with confidence to fellowship and receive mercy and find grace just when you need it. My servant Paul tells you that this is of first importance, that Christ died for your sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. 1 Corinthians 15:3-4. This is huge. I have not just forgiven one or two or even fifty of your sins, I have forgiven them ALL. And My Holy Spirit testifies to your spirit that your sins and offenses I remember NO MORE. Hebrews 10:17. They are not just forgiven, they are GONE, like you never did them but lived a sinless life. “I have wiped out your transgressions like a thick cloud and your sins like a heavy mist. Return to Me, for I have redeemed you.” Isaiah 44:22. In Jesus you have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of your trespasses, according to the riches of My grace which I lavished on you. Ephesians 1:7-8. “I, even I, am the one who wipes out your transgressions for My own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” Isaiah 43:25. And then I tell you that you are to put Me in remembrance, let us argue our case together; state your cause, that you may be proved right. Isaiah 44:26. I want you to remember and remind Me that all your sins are gone, that you are offering Me a sinless life of splendor. The life of Jesus as My gift to you. When you are baptized into Him, you are clothed in Him. You have washed your robes and made them white in the Blood of the Lamb. Revelation 7:14.
Too many of you who love Me and are believers in My Son do not understand this benefit, but it is the only way that you can enter My Kingdom and live in unity with Me. Sin creates a division, a barrier between us. I hate sin and My eyes are too pure to gaze upon it. That is why when Jesus became sin for you, I had to look away from Him as My just wrath consumed Him as the sin offering. He called out that I had forsaken Him, and He took that darkness of the condemned so that none of you will ever be forsaken and I can promise you that I will NEVER leave you or forsake you. There is NO condemnation now for those who are in Christ Jesus. Why? He took your sentence of condemnation, “Dust you are and to dust you shall return,” and went down to the dust of death for you. Psalm 22:15. He tasted death, the wages of sin, in all its horror, so that you would never have to taste it. Hebrews 2:9 (“so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone”). Now, for those who are in Him, I call death sleep, from which you awaken in My presence. Absent from the body, present with the Lord. You have nothing to fear about death now that I have made you righteous. “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 6:23. “Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives.” Hebrews 2:14-15.
In Christ, I make you a new creation, no longer tainted and corrupted before Me in sin, but holy, blameless and beyond reproach. 2 Corinthians 5:17; Colossians 1:22. You have become one to be welcomed, beloved, honored, and given the same standing as Jesus before Me. For I made Him, who knew no sin to be sin on your behalf, so that you might become the righteousness of God in Him. 2 Corinthians 5:21.
Now I bring to your attention the Words of wisdom I gave to My prophet Zechariah, “I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn.” Zechariah 12:10. “In that day a fountain will be opened for the house of David and for the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for impurity. Zechariah 13:1. “And one will say to him, ‘What are these wounds in your hands?’ Then He will say, ‘Those with which I was wounded in the house of those who love Me.’ Zechariah 13:6. And do you know what the very next sentence states? “Awake, O sword, against My Shepherd, and against the man, My Associate,” declares the LORD of hosts. “Strike the Shepherd that the sheep may be scattered.” Zechariah 13:7. Jesus quoted the end of that line the night He was betrayed to His disciples foretelling what would take place the next day. Matthew 26:31; Mark 14:27.
My prophet Zechariah revealed the three fountains to you. My beloved John speaks of them to you as the Spirit, the water and the Blood. But of course that is from the perspective where you are seated with Christ in Heaven, the order on earth is the Blood, the Water, and the Spirit. I revealed this in Jesus’ death, resurrection, and glorification at My right hand. From His wounded side came the fountains of Blood and Water, and as soon as He was exalted back at My right hand in Heaven, He poured out the fountain of the anointing oil, which is the Spirit. You see this in the plan I gave to Moses on Mt. Sinai for the tabernacle, My dwelling among them, which they built and ministered therein exactly as I instructed Moses. There you began at the bronze altar with the sin offering—the Blood, went on to the water of the laver, and then the consecration and anointing with oil of the priests for ministry so they could enter the inner court. Jesus told you that Moses wrote about Him, and that is exactly right. I gave Moses the explanation in type and shadow of which Jesus is the fulfillment and substance. Now the shadow is no longer needed.
Let Me show you the three that opened to you in Jesus. First, the fountain of His blood. This is the fountain of redemption. I have redeemed you from the law of sin and death and I did this by the Blood of My Son. “For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” Romans 8:3-4. For it is by My doing you are in Christ Jesus, who I have made wisdom for you and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption. 1 Corinthians 1:30. Return, for I have redeemed you by making My Son to be sin for you so that in Him you might become righteous with My own righteousness. Isaiah 44:22; 2 Corinthians 5:21. I have delivered you from going down into the pit of destruction because I found a ransom. Job 33:24. My Son. And you who are wise have found Him too. I did not send Him to be served, but to serve, to give His life as a ransom for the many. “To Him who loves us and released us from our sins by His blood— and He has made us to be a kingdom, priests to His God and Father—to Him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen.” Revelation 1:5-6. I released you by His blood that He willingly offered to Me, Matthew 26:27-28, but He made you priests and kings when He anointed you with the promised Holy Spirit, pouring Him out from Me when He was glorified. John 7:37-39; Acts 2:33. Anointed with His same anointing, the oil of joy. The first community of the church could not but be filled with joy and the Holy Spirit!
The blood releases you from your sins. It is the fountain for sin that Zechariah speaks of. You see, when Adam rebelled against My Word and took a new sovereign for his master and father, his spirit became dead to Me and alive to sin. Just as I had told him would happen. He destroyed, murdered so to speak, the eternal life that I had given him and did the same for all his seed. He corrupted the seed to sin and death. And “If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him, for the temple of God is holy, and that is what you are.” 1 Corinthians 3:16-17. And the penalty is a life for life, in Adam’s case, an eternal life for an eternal life. And the life is in the blood, that is why I gave it to you for atonement on the altar in the sacrifices I taught to Moses as coverings for sins credited to those who offered them as righteousness but the credit had to be one day paid with eternal blood, and in My Son I did that and nailed the debt you owed to the cross, paid in full by the eternal blood of My Son in an eternal redemption for all who choose to wash in that fountain. You see, no person descended from Adam’s corrupted seed had an eternal life to give as a ransom. So I had to do it Myself. I sent My Son born in the likeness of sinful flesh yet conceived by the imperishable seed of My Word by the generating creative power of the Holy Spirit hovering over Mary as I spoke the Word so that, like the first adam formed from My Word, He had an indestructible life. He had eternal blood to give to take away your punishment, bearing it in His own flesh on the cross. And He gave every drop of that eternal blood for you. Your condemnation is cancelled, born by Him, and your sins are gone, washed away in His blood, and you are redeemed from the curse and made spotless before Me. I gave you Jesus to live your life through Him. He is My gift to you. So you own that sinless life and can offer it to Me as if you had never sinned. You can come before Me and present to Me a beautiful, pure, spotless, blameless life of honor, integrity and perfection. I did all that for you in Christ. He took your faults and failings, they are no longer yours. It is no longer your fault, but His, and I took care of it on Him for you. You are free. Whom the Son sets free is free indeed. Rejoice. In the tabernacle of old this is the blood offerings on the bronze altar when you first enter the gate to the outer court. Redeemed you can proceed further into the mystery of My presence, the spiritual realm, the eternal reality.
Then the next fountain is that of purity. Water. Represented in the shadow of the laver where the priests washed in the tabernacle of Moses before they could proceed further into the inner court. The washing with Water by the Word. “For you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God.” 1 Peter 1:23. “But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” Titus 3:4-7. This is the work of the Holy Spirit. My Word is Spirit breathed and He testifies to Jesus. The Holy Spirit baptizes you into Jesus once your sins have been taken out of the way by the fountain of the Blood. Jesus explained this, for He explains Me (John 1:18), “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” John 3:4-6. This is when you become a new creation in Christ, old things have passed away and all is made new. 2 Corinthians 5:17. I send forth My Spirit and they are created and I renew the face of the earth, that is, the “adamah,” the dust of which you were originally formed in your flesh. And it still has to do with the forgiveness of sins or none of this can take place.
Next, is the fountain of the anointing. The oil. I gave this to Moses in the anointing oil for the priests to consecrate them for service. When first ordained for the tabernacle of old, they sacrificed the sin offering (bull and rams) and were sprinkled in the blood, yes, literally with the blood of the sacrificed bull, and they were washed in the water of the laver, and anointed with the anointing oil for consecration to ministry before Me, to minister to My people and to Me. Exodus 29. I also showed this fountain to Zechariah: “He said to me, “What do you see?” And I said, “I see, and behold, a lampstand all of gold with its bowl on the top of it, and its seven lamps on it with seven spouts belonging to each of the lamps which are on the top of it; also two olive trees by it, one on the right side of the bowl and the other on its left side.” Then I said to the angel who was speaking with me saying, “What are these, my lord?” So the angel who was speaking with me answered and said to me, “Do you not know what these are?” And I said, “No, my lord.” Then he said to me, “This is the word of the LORD to Zerubbabel saying, ‘Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the LORD of hosts.” Zechariah 4:3-4. By My Spirit. The anointing. “The Spirit of the Lord (Adonai) LORD (YHWH) is upon Me for He has anointed Me, to bring good news to the lowly; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to captives and freedom to prisoners; to proclaim the favorable year of the LORD.” Isaiah 61:1. And as I anointed and sent Him, so He anoints and sends you as His witnesses, His body the church, to the world to seek out and save the lost. Jesus, your great High Priest, commissions and baptizes you in the Holy Spirit. “It will come about after this that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind; and your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on the male and female servants I will pour out My Spirit in those days.” Joel 2:28-29. The fountain of the anointing oil.
And all this from the first benefit listed in Psalm 103: “He forgives all your iniquity.” But it does not stop there, like the tabernacle I revealed to Moses it goes from the bronze altar of the burnt offering for sins, to the lavar of renewal, regeneration, and new birth, and to the anointing for ministry and the gifts of the Spirit, into the very Holy of Holies with your great High Priest to fellowship, partner and steward your life with Me.
And read on in that Psalm: “The LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness. He will not always strive with us, nor will He keep His anger forever. He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His lovingkindness toward those who fear Him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. Just as a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear Him. For He Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust. As for man, his days are like grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourishes. When the wind has passed over it, it is no more, and its place acknowledges it no longer. But the lovingkindness of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him, and His righteousness to children’s children, to those who keep His covenant and remember His precepts to do them.” Psalm 103:8-18.
I love you. You cannot even begin to fathom all that I did for you in Christ, not because of any righteous deeds you had done, for you did the opposite, but for My sake. Why? I want you with Me. I love you and honor you and you are precious in My sight. I gave My Son for you. I gave His life for you. I give everything including My Kingdom to have you with Me. You are Mine. But it is up to you whether you will come to Me to have this life. I will not force you. Is it not time you got familiar with all your benefits? Because it is then, in knowing them, you will know Me.
And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. Ephesians 2:1-10.