Rhythms of Remembering

We do this to remember–
to remember who God is, who we are, and why we need Christ every waking moment.

All day long, we work, parent, read, observe, take in information, react, hurt, give. It’s easy to let the details of life distract us from our purpose in knowing God and making Him known. We bump into a tense situation at work and wonder if God will be faithful. We see the dismal number in the bank account and fear the Lord has forgotten us. We lose someone we love and struggle to believe that God is being good to us. We fight with bodies that ache and hearts that break, and we question what we know to be true about the Lord. I quote the poet often to my husband, “the world is too much with us. ¹ Our vision gets cloudy in eyes that already see too dimly.

So, we build rhythms into our days to help burn off the fog. We rise early or we stay up late or give up our lunch hour or the baby’s nap time—we give some piece of our day to remembering what’s true.

As believers in Jesus, we fashion our schedules around the bedrock of our faith: Scripture. We can’t follow a Lord we don’t recognize, can’t love a God we don’t know². So we press into the pages of our Bibles to know Him—for this is how He’s revealed Himself to us: in a book. Therefore, we must be readers of the book. And not so we can accumulate lots of knowledge or check a box, but rather for much richer, deeper, sustaining reasons. We read our Bibles to know the God who made us, to understand the One who saved us, to speak about the Lord who keeps us.

Day in, day out—we go to the words of the Lord to remember that He has always been faithful and He always will be. We read the stories of old, we meditate on God’s character, we nourish our souls with the good doctrine we’ve been taught, we hold fast to the confession of our hope³. Where else can we go? Jesus has the words of life, and because He is God and because He was with God in the beginning, every word of Scripture is His ⁴.

Where else is there to go? Jesus has the words of life, and because He is God and because He was with God in the beginning, every word of Scripture is His. Share on X

This morning, the tally of fellow early risers encouraged me. And that’s one of the residual gifts of remembering in community. Opening my Bible to remember God’s faithfulness isn’t merely for my benefit. It’s for Barry’s, Tyrone’s, Christie’s, Dora’s, and all the others in my life who need sharpening like I need it. If they know I’m burying myself in the Word and prayer each day, they’re more likely to continue the habit, and vice versa. While personal spiritual growth is individualized, it isn’t done in a vacuum. We spur one another to love and good deeds when we hold one another accountable, when we speak of what the Lord is teaching us in our study and in prayer, when we ask one another what we’re learning. Your growth encourages mine. So when those church members I’ve mentioned are faithfully feeding their souls with the Word and prayer, I’m less likely to ignore my alarm and more likely to open my Bible.

We’re hardly the first ones to order our lives around Scripture. We stand in a long line of saints who have built their lives around remembering what the Lord has done. Remembering goes all the way back to the Old Testament. All the way back to the Law when God commanded the people to celebrate what He had done in delivering them from slavery in Egypt. The Israelites were to tell the next generation what God had done for them. And the next generation after that. Things went wrong when the people forgot who God was and what He’d done for them. And things go wrong in my life when I forget what God did in sending Jesus to pay for my sins. When I am not ordering my days around remembering, I chase my sin too much and love Jesus too little. When I give up the practice of remembering God in His Word, I forget about His faithfulness. I forget about His goodness. I forget about His nearness.

Remembering is the way we fight that dangerous forgetfulness. And remembering is done by reading and meditating on God’s good, inerrant Word. If Christ is your life, then do what you must to remember what’s true. Heed the alarm and rise early or spend your lunch break feasting on the Word. Pull out your Bible when the baby is napping or turn off the TV a half hour before bed to read and pray. Order your days with rhythms to help you remember what God has done for you in Christ so that you are rooted in confidence that the He is near and enough and always, always faithful.

 

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For more on rhythms of remembering, check out my book, The Promise is His Presence: Why God is Always Enough
Photo/Graphic credit: Deon VanNostrand