In thinking about my blog assignment for this week, I remembered that we are coming up on the one-year anniversary of daily pastor blogging at AGC! Last March, within the unexpected shutting down of normal life amid the Covid-19 pandemic threat, I had the privilege of writing the very first daily Pastor’s Blog that went out on Quick Connect and was posted to our website. At the onset of the crisis, our goals for blogging were part of an urgent effort to seek and implement every possible way to stay connected with all of you—our church family—as we were told to “hunker down.”  We did many other things as well, but the blogging idea was intended to connect with the Lord’s flock through the regular expression of pastoral hearts as the uncertainties of 2020 unfolded day-by-day and week-by-week. As the year wore on, we found no challenges in finding topics to write about. We all hungered for wisdom as we watched America descend into racially inflamed rioting and an unprecedented presidential election, all with the Covid-19 Pandemic as backdrop.

My prayer is that we accomplished the goal of expressing our hearts on the things important to you and that we brought insight and comfort through the unique perspective, training, background, and personality that God has gifted to each of us for His service. As I reflect personally on the many blogs I produced in meeting an every-Monday deadline, I see two consistent realities that I want to share with you today.

The first reality is that God’s Word—Holy Scripture—truly, truly, truly applies to every possible temporal situation imaginable in our human existence. In our AGC Constitution, Statement of Faith, and Philosophy of Ministry documents we affirm the inspiration, inerrancy, and sufficiency of Scripture. And while I have always believed this doctrine to be true, the challenges of the past year have demonstrated to me in incredibly powerful ways that our Bibles do indeed have all the answers we seek in discerning life and doctrine. I trust you have noticed that every single daily blog has been rich in Biblical wisdom and truth applied to the myriad topics addressed in a most unusual year. We must praise our loving and gracious God for revealing himself through His Word! A gift handed down to us through the supernatural means of inspiring different and distinct men, over thousands of years, to write His precious words, resulting in our beautiful Canon of Scripture. We have a Holy Communication that coherently explains, comforts, guides, admonishes, and encourages!

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. 2 Timothy 3:16–17.

The second reality is that God is sovereign and working providentially in every corporate and individual detail of human existence. My awareness of His incommunicable attributes—those He has not shared with us as ones created in His image—has grown and matured. We serve a very big God, and our view of Him should be exceedingly high, even as our view of ourselves must in correlation, be low. In His omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence, God has protected and blessed AGC and its largest ministry, Grace Christian School, in incalculable ways. He is near and He has watched over us with care and concern, even as we have been stretched to grow in our trust and dependence on Him. We should stop and “remember to remember” where we were a year ago, and where He has us now in March 2021. We serve a faithful God!

Unfortunately, we tend to be a forgetting people. We want to ask our heavenly Father, “what have you done for me lately?” instead of falling to our knees in all-consuming gratitude! Forgetting God’s great acts and blessings is such a common and grievous sin that God calls His people repeatedly not to overlook their past but to remember what He has done and how they have responded to Him.

Deuteronomy 9, for example, exhorts the ancient Israelites not to forget their sin in the wilderness lest they fall into transgression again and experience the same wrath the Lord showed earlier generations. Paul calls Timothy to “remember Jesus Christ” so that he will persevere in all circumstances (2 Tim 2:8–13).

The psalmist who wrote Psalm 106 also encourages the people of God to remember the past. He realizes that he cannot rightly ask the Lord to remember His covenant promise to bless His children (Psalm 106:4–5) if he does not recall how these same children have failed to uphold God’s law. After all, it is only in remembering our failures to keep His statutes that we can repent and enjoy all the benefits of His covenant faithfulness. For “if a man does not repent, God will whet his sword” and execute His judgment (Psalm 7:12).

Psalm 106:6–43 rehearses the history of Israel as a means of recalling the past and implicitly calling those who pray the psalm not to repeat the nation’s history of wickedness. The “low points” that the psalmist recounts include the worship of the golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. That episode of idolatry was especially heinous because it occurred so close to where the Lord was revealing His covenant stipulations that established Israel as His holy nation! About three thousand people died as a result of God’s judgment on that sin, and many more suffered from a plague sent by the Lord (Exodus 32:25–29, 35).

The psalmist recounts many other sins of ancient Israel, including their failure to drive out the Canaanites, the sacrifice of their children to pagan gods, and more (Psalm 106:24–43). Yet the psalm does not end on a note of doom but on a note of hope. The Lord remembered His promise to bless His covenant people when they cried out to Him for salvation (vv. 44–48). He will likewise remember this promise when we turn to Him in faith and repentance.

Let us learn from the ancients, as well as from our most recent past, and not be found a forgetting people. Today, think about some of your recent sins, repent if you have not yet done so, and thank the Lord for His mercy! And always, remember to remember!