Remember

History has a way of repeating itself and the wise man will benefit from the lessons of the past by remembering what others have already done and how it turned out for them. We will not live long enough to learn everything through experience. We have to remember the lessons from the past.

Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.

Ex 1:8 

Forgetting is a common thing that is almost always seen in a negative nuance. When we forget our lessons in school, we have to work diligently to relearn then. If we don’t remember the steps that got us to where we are, we won’t know how to move forward. Remembering is usually viewed as honorable. When we remember, we are able to build upon what we already know. "The Torah can be summed up in one word - remember. Remember the stories, remember the laws, remember the One God" (Anderson, Keith. A Spirituality of listening. Intervarsity Press. Downers Grove, IL. 2016 p. 95). God’s Word has great power, but it won’t influence our lives if we don’t remember what it says.

Difficulties should make you search for what God is doing rather than questioning why me, God. 

When we remember that God is the reason for life, we can look for His activity even when life’s activities are messy. Our attention has to be directed away from our experience of our circumstances and turned toward God’s involvement in our experience. We won’t see what we’re not looking for, and once we change what we are looking for, we will see the world in a completely different way. 

If you seek God, you will always be able to find Him.

When we decide what we are looking at, we will see it. What we see changes based on what we are looking for. How we experience life is mostly subject to how we are expecting to experience it. If we drive around looking for red cars, we will find them. If we look for problems in life, we will surely find them, but if we look for the good, we will also find that. We have to remember what we are looking for in life.

For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was.

James 1:23-24

The best way to remember something is to do it. We remember 2 X 2 is 4 because we do it over and over again.  We remember how to play a musical instrument by playing it over and over again. We can remember God is good by experiencing Him over and over again. We can remember life is hard by experiencing it over and over again. When we choose what is important to remember, we will remember it differently and experience life differently.