It Starts Small

God’s Word contains many reproaches to remember including what God has taught us and done for us. Through remembrance, we hold on to what we have learned in the past and we live in the light of that lesson in the present. Our forgetfulness casts aside everything we have learned, seen, and experienced about God.

Forgetting is not a small matter. God’s Word links our forgetfulness with ingratitude as a root problem in idolatry. Throughout God’s Word, our gratefulness and remembering is to worship what ungrateful and forgetting is to idolatry.

When we neglect God’s role in our lives, we fill it with someone or something else. The throne of power and worship never stays empty for long in our hearts. Something or someone is going to take up residence in that seat of our heart. We begin to wander toward the traps we vowed to to avoid through forgetting God’s goodness and letting sins bitter bite snare us.

Scripture also draws on the theme of remembering and forgetting to surface an important lesson we must not ignore. Go to the book of Deuteronomy to see this emphasis. At the end of Moses’ ministry, Israel was eagerly awaiting to enter the promise land. Deuteronomy offers a crash course in their history and God’s commands. It reviews what Israel should have learned and seen.

Read: Deuteronomy 8

God knows how quickly they and us forget. He tells them and us in advance what we need to remember. It was God alone that led them and provided for them. They are forewarned not to forget this! Just like us, when they got what they wanted, they put God on the shelf and moved on to expressing their ingratitude.

When we read about Israel and the disciples, it is easy for us to shake our heads in “disbelief” of how off course they get. One minute God rescues Israel from slavery and the next they go back. In one conversation, Jesus tells the disciples he has come to lay His life down and in the next the disciples are arguing who will be the greatest. Can we be real and honest with each other and ourselves: we are no different.

God will teach us something in the morning and by noon we have dismissed it. God answers a direct prayer that boosts our faith and in a week we are back to doubting. What we are thankful for one month, we are complaining about the next month. It does not matter if it is ignorance or willfully done, forgetting is setting aside what God has done for us. The result is we have to learn it again. Often times it takes a more difficult painful way to relearn it. DO not loose heart, remembrance is a friend that saves us from unnecessary trouble!

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