Never Forget What God Remembers — David Legge

The Benefits and Mercy of Psalm 103

I want you to turn with me this morning to Psalm 103, Psalm 103, and I want to bring to you a word from the Lord, just from one verse of this psalm, but I think we would need to read it all, and the title of my message is, Never Forget What God Remembers.

So, beginning to read Psalm 103, verse 1, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy diseases, who redeemeth thy life from destruction, who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies, who satisfyeth thy mouth with good things, so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle's.

The Lord executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed. He made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of Israel. The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy.

He will not always chide, neither will he keep his anger forever. He hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust.

As for man, his days are as grass, as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more. But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children's children, to such as keep his covenant, and to those that remember his commandments to do them.

The Lord hath prepared his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom ruleth over all. Bless the Lord, ye his angels, that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word.

Bless ye the Lord, all ye his hosts, ye ministers of his, that do his pleasure. Bless the Lord, all his works, in all places of his dominion. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Let's come before the Lord in a word of prayer, just before we meditate upon his word, and I would ask you please to pray.

Pray for me, that I'll be able to deliver what the Lord has put into my heart, but pray for yourself, and pray for those around you, that the Lord might speak very definitely. I hope that you've come to be with God's people, to hear from heaven.

And so often we go through the motions of Sunday morning Christianity, and I hope that you've come to hear from God. Are you expecting to have a message from the Almighty? Well, if you haven't done already, well, why not come before the Lord and say, Lord, I'm opening my heart now, and I want to hear your voice.

I want to receive a message from you. And maybe you're here with a very pertinent need. Maybe you're here with a burden, or a heartache, or some other challenge or trial that you're facing. Well, why not just invite the Lord now, and tune your ear to him, and your heart to hear what he has to say to you from his holy word.

Father, we thank you for these wonderful words. We thank you, Lord, for the sentiments that they express as they reveal to us your great character in being the loving, long-suffering, compassionate, almighty God of heaven.

And Lord, we see in this psalm, the psalmist drawn out in worship and praise to bless your holy name, because he really got a true glimpse, and he touched and connected with what it was to know this God in all of his greatness.

And Lord, we pray this morning that each of us, as we come to this psalm, may hear. Lord, we may hear your voice. We may hear you speaking to us. Lord, I pray for each head bowed, and I ask now that you might minister to those gathered in this place today, whatever their needs might be.

We pray in Jesus' name, the Lord Jesus Christ, and you have promised to provide all our needs according to your riches in glory, in Christ Jesus. And so in his name we pray now, that by the Holy Spirit that you will minister to us.

In Jesus' name and for his glory alone we pray. Amen. They say that confession is good for the soul, and many preachers have been told not to confess too much. But I have to confess to you that I had quite a busy weekend of ministry last weekend, after which I was tired, and preachers do get tired, a little bit dejected.

And of course, mixed with that was the busyness of family life and some of the strains and stresses of things that were going on in the home and the wider family circle. And I have to be honest with you, on Tuesday and Wednesday I didn't feel that I had much energy to do anything, let alone to pray and to read or study the Word of God.

Do you ever feel like that? No, you never feel like that. Well, I felt like that, and when you feel like that, here's a bit of advice, you just have to force yourself to pray and to read the Word of God.

But you often find that when you do force yourself, the Lord quickly rewards you. And that happened to me just on Wednesday of this week, from verse 14 of Psalm 103. I lay up as comfortable as I could get and looked at my daily readings to see what it was for the day.

And I often choose the Psalm first because they're the most palpable and encouraging to our hearts. And this was the verse that just leapt out to me, verse 14 of Psalm 103, For he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust.

And boy, did that encourage me. When I felt tired, when I felt dejected, not much energy, to know that the Lord knows. He knows my frame. He remembers that I am dust. And I just want to share with you the meditation that I had on this verse on Wednesday past.

And basically, the summary of what I'm going to say here this morning is this, our God remembers what we so often forget. He knows our frame, and He remembers that we are dust. And sometimes we forget the things that God wants us to remember, and because we forget these important truths, we often get ourselves into all sorts of trouble.

Now, you've heard the expression—it can be heard in different contexts—maybe a young fella going on to the football pitch, and his coach shouts, Show them what you're made of! Or maybe a child is going into an exam, and an encouraging father or mother pats him on the back and says, Now you go and show them what you're made of.

Humanity Made from Dust and Bearing God's Image

What verse 14 is talking to us about is we would do well to remember what we are made of. The Lord knows our frame, and He remembers that we are dust. If you go right back to the beginning, the book of beginnings, Genesis chapter 2 and verse 7, you read there that the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul, a living being.

We need to remember that we are dust, and we were dust originally. God made us, if you like, from the dirt of the ground. Now, of course, having breathed his ruach, his Spirit, into that clay, he made us in his image.

And so, though we're made of the dust, we still have the divine mark, the image of God upon us. And yet, our substance, essentially, at least in our flesh, is dust. You may not know that science has recently discovered that there are the same essential elements found in the human body and indeed the flesh of animals as there is in soil—nitrogen, oxygen, calcium, etc.

We're basically made up of earth. And of course, that reflects the revelation of Scripture and the truth of it, that originally we were dust. Will you remember that? And remember something else. Remember, ultimately, from dust we came, and to dust we shall go again.

Genesis 3 and verse 19, still at the beginning, God said, after the fall and the sin, in the sweat of your face, your brow, you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.

Ecclesiastes 12, verse 7, we read that monumental verse, then dust will return to the earth as it was, and the Spirit will return to God who gave it. We are originally dust, and ultimately we will return to dust.

Whenever we think of dust, what do we think of? We think of something that's common, something that's ordinary. It's something that we find lying on the ground. I imagine if I went home to a few of your houses just now, I would find it as well on the mantelpiece, on the dining room table, in all sorts of places.

It speaks of something common, something ordinary. But what God is communicating to us, I believe, through his Word is dust speaks of our weakness and our frailty. When God says he knows our frame, he remembers we're dust, he knows what we're really made of.

But dust also, I believe, speaks of the tremendous potential that we have, even as humans, in our weakness. Because when God in the beginning made us from the dust, he wants us to know that we're weak in and of ourselves, but we're strong in him.

He wants us to remember that he took the common, ordinary dust of the ground and made it into clay, and he took that clay and he breathed into it, and he made man in his image. And so, from something common, something ordinary, with his breath in it, he can do great things.

There's great potential in dust and clay. For you see, when you're in God's hands, who is the potter, he can mold you and make you after his will. So, God remembers we're dust originally. He remembers that we are dust and will become dust ultimately.

God's Personal Knowledge of the Human Frame

But it also says in verse 14, he knows our frame. And I want to apply that personally to all of us here today. Do you know that God knows your frame? Let me remind you of Psalm 139, if you care to turn to it with me, just a few pages over.

Psalm 139, verse 13, expresses how God knows us personally. Verse 13 of 139,. For thou hast possessed my reins, thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Marvelous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect.

And in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them. Some translations translate this as, You knew my frame in my mother's womb. At conception, God knew your frame, and He has known it and remembered it every day since.

Isn't that remarkable? In fact, the Lord Jesus Himself gives us a glimpse into the true extent of this knowledge of us in Matthew 10 and verse 30 when He said, The very hairs of your head are all numbered.

Now, I want to stress the statistics I'm about to share with you are average statistics, and they couldn't be applied to some here in the meeting this morning, but apparently upwards of 100 ,000 hairs on the average head.

Between 100 ,000 to 200 ,000, and I'm told that we can lose between 50 to 100 hairs daily. Yet Jesus wants us to know that He knows, and God our Father knows our frame. The very hairs of our head are numbered.

And from our mother's womb at the point of conception, He understood everything in our constitution, our frame. Now, can I just pause here for a moment? Because many people in our world, and it has to be said this applies to Christians as well, have a problem accepting who they are.

You're either too short or you're too tall, you're too fat, you're too thin, you're not fair enough, or you're not dark, tall, and handsome, or whatever. Maybe it's the problem with the old hairs that have been going out at some rate over 50 to under today, and you're left almost with nothing.

I don't know what it is. Maybe it's a personality thing or an achievement thing that you're not educated or intellectual enough, that you're not successful enough in your career. If ever there was a reason why we should accept ourselves the way God has made us, it is this, that He knows our frame, and He's known everything about us from our conception.

Now, I'm not saying that we ought not to grow as human beings and as believers in Christ, or we should never change. But what I am saying is this, some of us should stop trying to be someone or something that we're not.

Is that a message from God for some soul here this morning? Do you need to hear that God made you, you? He made you the way you are. And it is the wonder of God's spectrum of creation that there is such a myriad of variety.

You don't get two snowflakes the same. Equally, you'll never get two human souls, two human beings the same. You are unique. Think about that for a moment. And the wonder of the New Testament gospel and all the truth of the Spirit-filled life is that if you really surrender yourself, your personality and your body, and give it all over as a living sacrifice, holy to God, and He fills and possesses you, He will make a mark with your life that He cannot nor will not ever do with anyone else.

There'll never be another C .H. Spurgeon, so there's no sense you trying to be him, or John Wesley or whoever else you might worship the ground that they walk on. God made you, you, for a purpose, for a reason, and He knows you, and He understands you.

The New King James Version in the margin of verse 14 reads like this, renders, knows our freedom like this, He understands our constitution. I like that. What is the human constitution? Well, we'll not go into all the details this morning, but basically, we're material and immaterial.

We are physical and we are spiritual. And what the Word of God is saying here is God understands our complete human constitution. He knows your body. He knows everything about it. Maybe you're going through tests at the moment, and they're poking and prodding you and x-raying you, and there's parts of you you never knew existed, you've seen.

God knows everything about your body. He knows the secrets that physicians don't know. Isn't that marvelous? He knows your weaknesses. He knows your tiredness. He knows your fatigue. He knows the things that wear you down.

He knows it all. And then when we go to the immaterial part of us, the soul, which of course we could categorize as being made up of the mind, the intellect, He knows your mind. He knows how your mind ticks.

So many people have mental problems in their thought processes, morally and with anxiety and all sorts of phobias and fears. God knows. Now, I don't think I'm saying God condones everything that's going on in your mind, but I want you to understand God knows the struggles that you have.

There's the mind, and then there's the emotion. Some of us are wrecked emotionally and nervously. God knows. God knows what's going on in your heart. And you're all dickied up this morning, and you look wonderful, and you look well, and some of you look happy.

But God knows what's going on deep down in your heart. And not only is there the mind and there's the emotion, there's the will that makes us up, our volition, the choice that we make. And God knows how strong willed or how weak willed we might be.

Human Limitations and Contentment in Christ

I love that verse, 1 Corinthians chapter 10, verse 13,. No temptation has taken you, no test or trial has taken you, but such is common to man. And God is faithful, who will not allow you, will not suffer you to be tempted above what you're able, but will also with the temptation make a way of escape that you might be able to bear it.

In other words, God knows what your will is like, so that he's not going to allow anything to come across your pathway that you can't handle. And I know the devil whispers in your ear and says, you're not going to be able to handle this.

God's word says he won't allow you to be tested above what you're able because he knows your will. He understands our constitution. And here's the whole point of this verse 14, which is just my message to you today.

He knows what we can take because he remembers that we are dust. He knows that we're fragile. Look at verse 15 and 16 as he illustrates this again. As for man, his days are as grass, as a flower of the field, so he flourishes.

For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more. Or you could translate that, the place thereof shall remember it no more. Like grass that is blown away and remembered no more by its environment.

We can be like that because we are dust and you know what wind does to dust. But you see, God remembers. So often we're blown about like dust in the wind of turmoil and trial and tribulation. But God is not fragile the way we are.

This is the point of this psalm, verse 17. But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him and his righteousness unto children's children, to such as keep his covenant unto those that remember his commandments to do them.

God who remembers we are dust and fragile, he is not fragile. He is from everlasting to everlasting. The irony is he remembers, yet we forget. What do we forget? What do we forget that he remembers? Let me share three short things with you this morning that we forget yet he remembers.

One, we forget our limitations. Does that apply to anyone here in the gathering? Do you need to have a revelation from God today that you're not superhuman? Did you really believe you were? Did you believe that you can achieve perfection in your education, in your career, in your family life, in your ministry?

Are you a health freak and you think that you have discovered the lecture of eternal youth? You're not going to live healthy forever. You're not going to have success all the time. You're not going to pass every exam, achieve every promotion.

You're not going to always live in victory. You're not going to see every prayer answered. Are there folk in the gathering here today, and I think this is quite common, who are focusing on themselves too much?

I mean by that, you're focusing on your failures. You wish you could be more spiritual, but you're always falling short of the mark. Or perhaps you're the other end of the extreme. You're focusing on your successes, your perceived successes, and how well you're doing in spiritual things or secular things.

Well, can I tell you, there's something in common with both of those people. The failures and the successes, and it's this, they're both miserable. Did you know that? Because eventually, the successes will let themselves down or be let down with a big bump from a high height.

The failures never get high enough to have the great fall. But both of them are miserable simply because they are looking to themselves, and when you look to yourself, you know what happens? You despair.

Or they are looking to the circumstances, how they waft them on the crest of the wind, just like dust, but it's only for a moment. And when their circumstances turn or the wind changes, they become disappointed.

You look to yourself, you will despair. You look to your circumstances, you will be disappointed. And what the psalmist wants us to do is get our eyes on God and understand, like Henry Francis Light, that change and decay in all around I see, O thou that changest not, abide with me.

You see, Paul the apostle had this capacity. Listen to what he says in Philippians 4 and verse 11 to 13. Not that I speak in regard to need, for I have learned in whatever state I am therewith to be content.

It's not amazing. This is the man that was behind prison bars. This is the man who was flogged and beaten. This is the man who was in shipwreck. He said, I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound.

Everywhere in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need, and I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Do you understand where his focus was?

His focus wasn't on himself because he would despair. His focus wasn't on his circumstances because they would disappoint him. But his focus was on the unchanging God who is not fragile. Are you with me?

And often we forget our limitations. Is that what you're doing? And you have to realize today you're not superhuman, and you ain't super spiritual either, and you're not able to achieve perfection, and you're not able to live healthily and have success in business or academia or career the rest of your days.

Remembering Weakness and Receiving Grace

God remembers, yet we forget our limitations too. Another thing. He remembers, but we forget our weaknesses. Now, when I speak of weaknesses, there can be two types of weaknesses. We forget often our besetting sin, the moral weaknesses in our lives, or that could also apply to what the Bible calls infirmities, actual weaknesses whether in our body or our mind or our heart, things that trip us up from time to time that are not necessarily our own fault, but we have inherited them, the lot, the hand that we've been dealt.

Now, listen carefully to what I'm going to say. We often get into trouble as dust because we forget our weaknesses. But the truly strong Christian is the Christian who knows his or her weaknesses, but admits them and deals with them by the grace of God.

Do you understand what I'm saying? Our Achilles' heel is often our perceived strength, the things that we think we're strong in or the sins that we feel that we have conquered and overcome. And these perceived strengths can often become our weaknesses, our Achilles' heel.

Do you know where that phrase comes from, Achilles' heel? Well, in Greek mythology, Achilles was a baby, and it was foretold that he would die in battle from an arrow in his foot. And in order to prevent his death, his mother Thetis took Achilles to the River Styx, which was supposed to offer powers of invincibility, and she dipped his body into the water.

But Thetis failed to notice that she was holding him by the heel, and she dipped every part of him in the water, that magical river, except his heel. Achilles grew up to be a man of war who survived many great battles, but one day a poisonous arrow shot at him and was lodged in his heel, killing him shortly after.

He was strong, but his weakness was ignored. Now, listen carefully. God knows your frame. God knows your frame. He knows what your weakness is. He knows what your physical, your mental, your emotional, and your spiritual weakness is, and it's about time you knew and wakened up to it.

Beware of your Achilles' heel. Beware of pride. C .S. Lewis said, pride is the sin that made the devil the devil. It's often our pride that causes us to fall, is it not? And God's order is to acknowledge our weaknesses, whatever they may be.

You see, this is God's economy, that it's actually, and ironically, through remembering our dust, constitution, originality, our ultimate dustiness, that God's eternal strength, everlasting, almighty, omnipotent power will be revealed.

And again, the apostle Paul discovered that. If you turn with me to 2 Corinthians chapter 12, you can read it for yourself. Verse 5, he's speaking about a revelatory experience he had, been caught up to the third heaven, and then he explains verse 5, of such a one will I glory, yet of myself I will not glory, but in my infirmities, weaknesses.

For though I would desire the glory, I shall not be a fool. For I will say the truth, but now I forbear, lest any man should think of me above that which he seeth me to be, or that he heareth of me. And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure.

For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, my grace is sufficient for thee, for my strength is made perfect in weakness. God gave Paul this revelation, that God's strength is made perfect not in human strength, or perceived strength, or ability, but in us not forgetting, remembering that we're thus, and God knows our frame.

He knows our limitations. He knows our weaknesses. And this is his conclusion in verse 9 at the end. Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

Let me ask you, what are you glorying? What are you delighting? Is it not your strength? Paul gloried in his weaknesses. Not in his failures, but in the knowledge of his weakness so that he could admit and confess his weakness to God and receive the strength.

Human Depravity and the Danger of Spiritual Pride

And this really leads on to a moral scale, because the irony is that God remembers what we forget in our limitations, in our weaknesses, and also, thirdly, in our depravity, our wickedness. Now, I'm going to make a statement here that may well be disputed by some who've got a problem with spiritual pride, and I've witnessed it.

Here's the statement. We as fallen human beings are capable of any sin in the book. Every single one of us here is capable of any sin in our depravity. I used to hear men in prayer meetings praying, oh God, we watched the news, and we saw that awful thing reported, and oh, we wonder how men could do such things.

And I'm sitting there thinking, well, if it wasn't for the grace of God in my life, if it wasn't for the restraining power of the Holy Spirit in my walk with God, I don't know that I wouldn't be capable of such a thing.

If you don't think like that, you don't really know your heart. You've never seen it the way God knows it. Out of the heart proceed all these things, as Jesus said. And here's a warning from the apostle Paul again, in the same chapter that we read earlier, 1 Corinthians 10, 12, therefore let him who thinks he stand take heed lest he fall.

Now, let me come to the nub of the problem. Often people who have this twofold predicament, what I mean by that is, one, they're constantly living in failure and miserable, or two, they're puffed up with pride because of their achievement, but they're still miserable because they're not perfect.

The common denominator between those two people is not just the fact that they're miserable, but this, the fact that they're living before God according to law. They're living before God according to a set of rules.

Might be the Ten Commandments, it might be their own set that they've added to the Ten Commandments, like the Pharisees in Jesus' day. But the problem that they have is, if they're the constant failure, they're not achieving the benchmark of their law.

Or if they're the more successful scholar, like the lawyers in Jesus' time, like the rich young ruler, you're living blameless 99 .9 of the time, but there's always that little problem that you have, his was covetousness and greed.

And so both are miserable, because when you live by law, you've only got the option to strive for perfection, and none of us can have perfection. And anyone who thinks that they can, does not know their frame and forgets that they are dust.

You see, we are compromised. We're like those, what was it, the Toyotas that all went out and had to be recalled. We've got a problem. We're compromised, and Romans puts it like this, what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh.

That's what our problem is, why we can't keep the law. Not that there's anything wrong with God's law. God's law is perfect and reflects his heart. The problem is we are predisposed to break it. You see, the law demands perfection, and perfectionism is the fruit of legalism.

So, if you're living to some kind of list of rules and regulations, whether they're biblical ones, or whether they're your own man-made ones, or that of someone else, you've got to waken up to the fact that you're always going to be miserable.

You're always going to be a failure. And no matter how good you are, you're never going to achieve the standard. Now, someone has said, and I believe this is true, Jesus was perfect, but he was not a perfectionist.

Oh, you say, ah, but hold on a minute, didn't the Lord Jesus not say in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5, therefore you shall be perfect just as your Father in heaven is perfect? Yes, he did say that.

But if you think for one moment that Jesus was inviting wicked sinners to pull their socks up and to step up to the mark, you're very wrong. What the Lord Jesus, all through his life ministry, and indeed, what the law of Moses was purposed to do was to show us that we cannot attain perfection.

It is unattainable without the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and indeed, without us following him to Calvary and taking up the cross and dying to ourselves and living in the Spirit, the life of Christ, which is the only perfect life.

Grace Rather Than Legalism

Have you ever made that discovery? And maybe this Christian life for you has been one of peaks and troughs. It's like a roller coaster experience, like the grand old Duke of York. When you're up, you're up, and when you're down, you're down, and half the time you're neither halfway up nor down.

And you wonder what's wrong, and perhaps what is wrong is you've forgotten you're dust. You don't know your frame. You don't understand that you cannot live the Christian life. Do you know that the Christian life is impossible to live?

It can only be lived by the power of God living in and through you. And so, you've got to die, and Christ has got to live in you. So, it seems to me that we can either think too much of ourselves in our successes, or we can think too little of ourselves in our failure, and that's actually inverted pride.

Oh, I'm not good enough. I should be better. And you know the problem with both of those. Both of those see ourselves as having to achieve to be acceptable with God and ourselves, and we don't understand grace, for grace is that we are acceptable, and all we must do is die and abide in Christ.

The problem is we forget what God remembers. We forget our limitations. We forget our weaknesses. We forget our depravity, and the answer to that problem is found in Psalm 103. Strike the balance here.

Here it is. Listen carefully. Start forgetting what you always remember. What's that? Your perceived strengths. Forget them, or perhaps your besetting sins or your failures. Forget how you feel God up to now, and start remembering what God doesn't forget.

What does God not forget? That you're not all that, that you aren't perfect, that your frame is weak, and start remembering what God remembers, and that is this. Because you are dust, you need the everlasting power and strength of God.

Do I need to explain this more? Well, let me ask you, do you derive strength from any perceived strength of your own, or are you discouraged because of a weakness in your life? Well, I want you to come to God with the knowledge now that He knows your frame, He knows your weaknesses, and come and admit them.

Christian, come and admit your weaknesses to God. Admit your limitations to God. Admit your depravity and your struggle with temptation to God, and come to Him and trust Him for His inexhaustible strength.

What did we say that dust meant at the very beginning? It's something common, something ordinary. But the wonderful thing about dust is the potential that it has in the potter's hand to be made clay and to be breathed into.

And if you can come to the place of acknowledging like God your frame and your weakness, God will do a wonderful thing with you. He'll take you and mold you and breathe into you, and as Paul says, you will have the treasure of the very life of God in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us, so that we cannot walk around being spiritual peacocks because we know ourselves as God knows us, but because we know ourselves, God flows through.

Remembering God's Benefits Through Praise

Now, in the moments that remain, practically, how can we go about this? How can we go about this? I always like to give people something to do, tell me what to do to achieve this more in my life. Well, here's the thing, verse 1 and 2, bless the Lord.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits. You see, blessing Him for His mercy does something very wonderful.

When you start to praise God, praise is a great way of remembering, because in order to praise, you must appraise. In order to praise, you must appraise. In other words, you engage in a mental activity of thinking about the goodness of God, and when you think about the goodness of God, you start to praise God, and when you praise God, you're remembering that without Him, you'd be lost, and you'd be hopeless.

It's interesting, there's no petition in this Psalm at all. It's all praise, and it's reminding us of our ultimate dependence on the Almighty. Look at the verse, forget not all His benefits. Do you want to know your frame?

Do you want to remember that you're dust in order to be clay in His hands, to be breathed into, and to be used of God? Well, then, don't forget His benefits, and praise Him for it, and remember how dependent you are upon Him.