God Remembers

The book of Nehemiah ends with a simple prayer - O God - my God - remember me with favor.

This comes after Nehemiah has recounted and retold all of the things that he did not just to physically restore the Temple and the wall and the city of Jerusalem, but all of the things that he did to spiritually restore Jerusalem and her people - reading the book of Moses, reinstituting the Temple worship, ensuring the purity of what was going on in this rebuilt place. 

His prayer is not really remember me, but remember all of the things I've done with a pure heart for You, Lord, and for Your holy place. 

As if the Lord could forget. 

As if the God who knows every hair on your head, the God who knit you together in your mother's womb, the God who numbered your days, numbered your breaths before there was even one of them could forget anything that you do, especially the things that you do out of pureness of heart and love for His holy ways. 

We live in a world, and we talked about this yesterday, where you have to keep doing something new all the time if you want to be remembered. We live in a world that can only recall your last fifteen minutes of fame, and if that was more than fifteen minutes ago, this world might not recall you at all. (I recently asked some younger coworkers if they even knew who Pauley Shore is, and they just stared at me like I completely made up a name. But when I was younger, Pauley Shore was in everything. He was the guy. But I digress.) 

The world that we live in makes us assume that God must be the same way, only remembering the latest thing we've done. Many of us live our lives of faith trying to constantly be doing a new thing, a better thing, a bigger thing for God. 

Let me ask you - what would have been a better thing than what Nehemiah had already done? The only thing left would have been for him to go to the Cross himself and die for the people, but that wasn't what God had asked him to do. 

It's not what God asks us to do, either. 

Yet, it's where we lead ourselves when we think that God might be prone to forget what we've done if we don't keep outdoing ourselves. If we don't keep doing more. So we do more and more and more until we're pretty sure we are supposed to be the savior of the world and then, we realize we can't. And we worry all the more that since we couldn't do this bigger thing, God - like the world - will simply forget us. 

As if the Lord could forget. 

Friend, you need not worry about God forgetting you. Nehemiah knew this even before He said this prayer. He prayed this prayer in the knowledge of the goodness of God, what he already knew about the Lord - 

That He really couldn't forget. How could He forget? 

The Lord always remembers you. 

Always.