Well now that I have shared about what the signs of blessing in your life are, perhaps you may be saying,

"Okay I don’t see these signs of blessing in my life. In fact everything is the complete opposite from what you have shared. What is wrong?"

That is what I want to look at in this chapter. You see I have described what things should look like. But they are often very far from being this way. There can be many different reasons why the blessing is not manifesting in your life, and I want to look at a few of them here.

Hopefully as I go through these things briefly, you will be able to see some of these problems operating in your life. Once you know the problems you can then begin to deal with them – which is what I will share with you in the next chapter.

Your Enemies

To start with I want you to know that you have some enemies operating in your life. And as much as you want to embrace the blessing of the Lord and walk in it, these enemies will try and rise up in your life whenever they can.

What are these enemies? They are:

1. The world
2. The flesh
3. The Devil

The World

Let’s look at them quickly. The world continually puts pressure on you as you go throughout your life. People in the world stand against you. They try and put pressure on you or be unloving. Satan is in control of the World System which is designed to put the pressure on you to walk away from the Lord.

You are influenced by so many things in the world, and one of the biggest ones is all the input that you receive each day. You have the news that fills your mind with all sorts of negative things and mostly bad news.

There is TV that bombards you all the time with adverts and tries to influence your senses in a way that is often far from positive. So many things come against you and they slowly eat away at your spiritual power.

The Flesh

Then you have the good old flesh. It is the part of you that is totally opposite to the Spirit and that wars against it all the time.

Paul describes it so beautifully in Romans 7 when he describes trying to do what he knows is right, but doing the opposite. That is your flesh rising up and trying to rule.

You have the Holy Spirit living inside of you. But you also have the sinful nature that occurred through sin when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. This is what Satan tries to stir up so that you will fail and not walk in the blessing of the Lord.

The Devil

The final thing that stands against you is the Devil. I don’t think I need to tell you that He is bent on trying to bring problems into your life.

I shared how the Spirit is the complete opposite of the flesh and how you see things manifesting in your life. In the same way the Lord’s desire for blessing is the total opposite of what Satan wants for you.

The Lord wants to bless you and cause your bank accounts to increase and overflow. Satan wants to cause you to operate in a curse and for your finances to dwindle down to nothing.

What this really means is that every day you are in a potential conflict situation. And while you should be walking each day in blessing, the reality is that often there are signs of a curse in your life.

Let’s look again very quickly at the four areas that you should see the Lord’s blessing in, in your life.

1. What your hand touches will prosper.
2. You will reap a harvest of what you sow in the Spirit.
3. You will have continual growth.
4. The Lord’s anointing will be on your life.

When something is wrong and there is a possible curse or problem in your life, you will see these signs rather than the blessing:

1. What your hand touches will mess up. You will make mistakes, or you will feel like you are walking uphill with weights on your legs. It will be very hard and unproductive.

2. You will sow much in the Spirit but see no fruit to what you have sowed.

3. You will have little growth, or what you have will be stunted or even reversed.

4. Your life will feel dead and dry and the anointing will be very much lacking.

In my husband’s book The New Way of Blessing, he shows what the signs of a curse are. To summarize them very quickly, they are:

1. Theft
2. Strife
3. Destruction
4. Fear
5. Loss of control

When you see any of these signs in your life it is time to sit up and take note. There is an open door that has given the enemy license. This is in fact the only way that Satan can come in and attack you and stop the blessing from flowing.

Satan will try to get the world to stand against you and put pressure on you. He will try to stir up your flesh so that you sin and put a barrier between you and the Lord. And he will try and stir up people to speak against you, or to open the door to bitterness.

These are all the general ways that Satan will try to stop the blessing from manifesting in your life. Instead of then walking in blessing, you start to walk in the signs of a curse as I have shared here.

In the next chapter I will share some more about how you can personally open the door to Satan and allow him in. But there is good news here! Once you know how Satan has entered in, there are some tools that you can use to get him out quickly. So don’t go away. Let’s move onto the next important chapter.