Remember

Nehemiah 9:5-6, "Stand up and praise the LORD your God, who is from everlasting to everlasting. Blessed be Your glorious name, and may it be exalted above all blessing and praise. You alone are the LORD. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship You."

Stand up and praise the Lord. Stand up and remember where you have come from. Many times you hear people say that you need to forget your past and live for Christ and the life and future that He has placed in you and before you. While I agree with this; I disagree with this. I love reading the Old Testament. I like to see the remembrance that brought about true worship. For it is in remembering that we can find life. It is in remembering that we can see how He raised us from the dead.

(9:16-20),"But they, our forefathers, became arrogant and stiff-necked, and did not obey Your commands. They refused to listen and failed to remember the miracles You performed among them. They became stiff-necked and in their rebellion appointed a leader in order to return to their slavery. But You are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. Therefore You did not desert them, even when they cast for themselves an image of a calf and said, 'This is your god, who brought you up out of Egypt,' or when they committed awful blasphemies. Because of Your great compassion You did not abandon them in the desert... You gave your good Spirit to instruct them."

In the Old Testament we are always being called to remember. We are being called to remember the sins that have brought others pain, and our own personal sins, so that we can do better today and in the future. We must remember our time of slavery. For if we forget this time, we will not be able to truly praise our God and worship Him for what He does for us now.

Oswald Chambers, "Envy, jealousy, and strife don’t necessarily arise from your old nature of sin, but from the flesh which was used for these kinds of things in the past (see Romans 6:19 and 1 Peter 4:1-3). You must maintain continual watchfulness so that nothing arises in your life that would cause you shame... Many people have turned back because they are afraid to look at things from God’s perspective. The greatest spiritual crisis comes when a person has to move a little farther on in his faith than the beliefs he has already accepted."

We do not need to live in guilt of our sin, but we do need to look continually at the truth of who we are without Christ. If we do not remember who we were, then we run the risk of thinking we saved ourselves from death. If we forget who we were, then we run the risk of becoming that person again. Remember where you came from, so that you can focus on Him today. Do not live in the past, but do not try to forget the lessons from your past either.