Memory can be a powerful tool. But right in the middle of the trials and dealings of life, it can be easy to lose focus on where God is in the middle of it.
And when you lose focus on that, pretty soon you can look back on your experiences and all you remember is the bad things!
God says: “Put Me in remembrance” (Isaiah 43:26). That’s important!
I’ve been touched by powerful testimonies of friends.
These spiritual giants I have known have gone through miraculous, deep things where God was transforming their hearts and using them to transform everyone around them.
However, years later, it broke my heart to see how these friends forgot what God was doing.
Pretty soon all that got prioritized in their memory are the hard things, all the afflictions they were going through at the time.
It’s appalling, and incredibly sad.
In the Old Testament, whenever God would move spectacularly in the Israelites’ lives, God would ask them to create a monument to memorialize the event.
You might think this is pretty stupid.
Who would ever forget how God parted the Jordan River miraculously? How the priests took the Ark of the Covenant and took it to the middle of the raging Jordan River, only to find their feet were on dry land?
How, as long as those priests held the Ark of the Covenant as instructed by the Lord, the entire congregation of Israelites passed over to the other side? Who would forget that?
It’s way easier to forget than you’d imagine.
Last year, I saw a friend at Thanksgiving. I told him: “man, it’s been a month since I’ve seen you last.”
“By now, I figured you’d be a completely different person.”
“Why is that?” my friend asked me.
“The last time I saw you, you told me about how Jesus walked into your room a few days before that.”
“I did?”
I stared at him. “Yes–” Had he seriously forgotten?!
“I think I vaguely remember that,” my friend said slowly. “What else happened?”
“Just before I saw you last, you told me Jesus had walked into your bedroom one night, and sat down on your bed.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Yes. He asked you why you didn’t believe you were anointed. Then you told me you responded: ‘why me? What makes me so special?’
“Then Jesus said: ‘why not you? I’ve called everyone. You responded.’ “
“It’s starting to come back to me,” my friend said.
Revelation says: “they overcame him(the accuser of the brethren, or satan) by the blood of the lamb and the word of their testimony”.
Our memories make up the building blocks of our lives.
I was going through some trials recently. A freak wind damaged a key piece of equipment I was using. Shortly afterwards, I got into a miscommunication that ended unpleasantly.
In the middle of it, God kept speaking: “Keep Me in remembrance”.
It’s easy for to fixate on the trials of it. But if I do that, those awful things become my memory of it–which again, is one of the building blocks of my life.
God was in the middle of it, but I had to testify of what He was doing.
That’s because God told me to, and obedience to God commands a blessing.
But it’s also because I don’t want to clutter up my heart with bad memories.
What was God doing?
Teaching me to respond correctly, whether I was needing to move quicker than the freak wind or respond differently to my friend to prevent the miscommunication.
The devil wants to rob you of how God is moving in your life.
As God moves, memorialize the event and tell everyone of how big your God is!
God will be honored, you’ll be blessed, and you’ll be shocked by how much more you’ll notice God in your life as you testify of Him!
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