A Command to Remember I: Intentionality Required

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Well, welcome to the WHOLE Council podcast. I'm Jon Snyder. And for us, it's day three of the new year.

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Day two. Day two. Day two. Okay, I'm already ahead. It's going to take me until July before I get used to writing 2025.

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Always. It takes me till about November and then it's about time to start writing 26. So we're glad you can join us again.

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Teddy and I are going to be looking at the beginning of this year at two really sweet, but significant commands.

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And it's always a temptation to think that the commands in scripture, which are so obviously beneficial to us, we tend to think of them as optional things, you know, so don't kill, you know, don't commit adultery, don't worship false idols, you know, the 10 commandments.

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Well, we say, well, those are clearly not optional. But then, you know, look unto me, all you ends of the earth and be saved, you know,

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Isaiah 45. Or Paul, you know, looking unto Jesus, we're transformed to his image.

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Or, you know, remember my kindnesses. Those kind of commands, particularly those two things, that's what we want to talk about today.

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The command to remember and the command to look. And those are so fundamental to running the race well and pressing forward.

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And that's why we want to talk about this at the beginning of the new year. Yeah, absolutely. And also, when it comes to these really sweet commands, like you said, we do have the temptation of thinking that they're optional.

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But I think there's another temptation, at least for me, in that, that these sweet commands are easy, or that they're just going to naturally happen because I'm a

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Christian. So, of course, I would remember the kindness of the Lord. Of course, I would remember our

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God's loving kindness indoors forever, because I know God because I'm a believer.

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But the reality is, we have to be commanded of these things, and we have to approach them with a certain level of intentionality.

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It's kind of in the same way. I remember when I was looking at getting married,

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I was about to be married to Allison, who you're already engaged. And I went to several men that I knew and trusted who were godly men,

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I worked with them. And I said, you know, how do I be a good husband? What advice do you have?

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And one of the guys told me, if you want to show really good, consistent love to your wife, remind yourself to love her.

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And I thought, what a weird thing to say, of course, I'm going to love her, I'm marrying her.

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But having been married now 15 years, I understand what he meant. We in the

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Christian life have to be intentional with that, looking at the love of Christ, looking at the work of Christ and the love of the

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Father. So, John, what I think another way of looking at this, though, is to consider what is it that the

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Christian loses if we don't heed this command? I think one thing to remember is that because it is a command throughout the scriptures, and we're not going to focus on any single passage, that puts it in the category of sin or righteousness, depending on how you respond to the command.

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And so, if we are careless with the command, like you mentioned, feeling that it would probably automatically occur in our lives, but it doesn't.

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And it's this moral choice, this intentionality, this spiritual exercise of stopping and reminding yourself of the truth about God and God's, His character and His ways and His dealings, not just throughout the scripture and history, but in your life.

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If you don't do that, then there is sin, and there is the loss of that sweet sense at times of the nearness of the

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Lord. But I think that more than that, what I've noticed in my own experience is that we begin to be subject to the lies of the enemy, where there's accusations made against God, and there's a very twisted, you know, warped lens that's put in front of our eyes when we remember the past season, let's say the past year.

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And we can think of a lot of the sorrowful things. It's easy to remember sad things. That's human nature, you know.

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We expect and feel perhaps entitled to, you know, a carefree, happy year.

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And then when sorrows kind of crash in, then if we're not thinking correctly, we feel like, well,

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God failed to give me what He's entitled to give me. And the enemy, you know, comes along and says, well, what kind of a

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God do you serve? And you begin to wonder, is that true?

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Is God really as trustworthy as I have said He is? So, if we don't intentionally remember the acts of God, then we become forgetful of them, and we fall,

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I find, prey to doubt, which if not dealt with, leads to a despondency.

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And, you know, Spurgeon dealt with despondency more what we would consider from kind of, you know, a pretty severe, depressive personality.

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And Spurgeon said he felt it was one of the worst temptations, because when it came, it would steal from a man the tools that he would normally reach out and grab hold of to deal with sin.

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So, Scripture and prayer. So, you think of it, when there is a real paralyzing doubt of the goodness of God, it's not the

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Scripture that we generally gravitate toward or to prayer. And so, we struggle to make use of those means that God has given us.

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I think of an Old Testament example, you know, the book of Malachi. Right off in the first chapter, the root of their problem is pretty clear.

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They say, how has God loved us? You know, it doesn't seem like he's really loved us.

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And then what follows is not just a further list of things, but I think things that flow out of that kind of willful doubt.

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And that is, you know, we give God second best in worship. Anything we do in religion, we feel that, oh, it's so costly.

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And then you look at the world and you think, look, is it even worth it? Is it worth it to serve the

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Lord at all? And those are things that are intricately interwoven with doubt.

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And that is a door we leave open when we won't remember the command.

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Remember, call to mind the goodness of the Lord. And I think too, the things like this, messages like this, podcasts like this, or even particularly sweet passages of scripture tend to hit us in those really good times when we read them or we hear them and we think, of course, that's true.

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And the next time that I feel that despondency or I feel the temptation to despair and doubt,

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I'll remember these things. But it's almost like, it's almost like a warrior who has his armor in a closet and says, yeah, if a battle breaks out, if somebody comes into my house,

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I'll always make sure to go to that closet and get my armor out. And you just tuck it away.

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But when the moment comes, it's not there. It's not in reach. And part of that is because we don't have that habit of constantly going to the armor, constantly remembering these things, because we don't do it in the times that are good, in the times that are sweet.

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Yeah, I think that's a really helpful point. With most of the helpful patterns in the

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Christian life, cultivating those in a daily or in an intentional manner is such a significant help, because like you said, when the crisis comes, it's usually too late.

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So, I want us to get a little help from a friend, John Newton. Most of our listeners will be aware of Mr.

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Newton. He wrote Amazing Grace, and I want to mention that, but I also want to mention some other things that he did to remind himself.

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Newton was quite a scoundrel when he was a young man, and when the Lord finally saved him after a lot of wasted time, he said,

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Newton never let himself forget the kindnesses of the Lord. He just never got over them.

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You know, the ethos of the hymn Amazing Grace, it's like Newton never recovered from that.

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He never got, how would we say, he never took it lightly that Mary, his wife, loved him, even before he was a

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Christian, and continued to love him and didn't turn her back on him when he gave her plenty of opportunities.

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He always felt like her love to him was an expression of God's love to him, when John Newton wouldn't even admit that there was a

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God. So, he never, if you read his journals or his letters, when he talks about his wife all the way to her death and after, he just can't get over the fact that she loves him.

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He's just always amazed, and he's amazed, of course, of the greater love of God.

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And so, let's talk about how Newton remembered things, because he was very intentional.

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He used his birthday. If you read his journals, you'll see that when his birthday comes along, he'll stop and say, you know, set aside today to remember the kindnesses of the

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Lord. So, I mean, that sounds so spiritual, but for us, what would it look like?

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Well, for me, maybe it would look like on my birthday, I would, you know, set aside a chunk of time that day where I turn off my phone and, you know, and shut my computer and don't turn a

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TV on or don't read a book that maybe I want to read, don't hang out with friends or family, just time alone with the

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Lord and with your spiritual journals, if you keep a journal. And I was going to say, that's the foundation. The first thing we have to get into is he kept a regular journal.

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Yeah, and if you go to... There's a great little ministry called the John Newton Project. It's online, and we'll put a link to it in the show notes.

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Now, I looked it up again this morning, and I just typed in Newton Project, and there's a Newton Project, but it's Isaac Newton, right?

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The great... Definitely different Newton. Yeah, different Newton. So, John Newton Project, not

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Newton Project. And it's a group of believers that have been in Britain, that had been taking his unpublished journals, transcribing them and making them available.

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And I skimmed through a number of them, and most of the days, it's just, you know, three or four typed lines.

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It's not something that you have to write a full page at the end of the day. That can be daunting.

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You know, you might start off January 1st, but by January 5th, you think, I don't know, you know,

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I don't have a... I don't know what I would write. You don't have two hours to write. Yeah, and, you know, am I supposed to have this, you know, gigantic, great spiritual report at the end of the day?

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Well, no, you can just note things that you feel would be good in years to come to look back on.

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And Newton did that, very short entries. Some were more significant. Now Newton's pattern was, as I mentioned, on his birthday.

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He also, on the anniversary of the great storm, and if you've read his biography, Newton was, as a young man, before he was a captain of his own ship, which he was before he was a

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Christian, and after he was a Christian. And then the Lord began to, you know, mature his understanding because he was the captain of a slave ship.

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And so, as a young Christian, he accepted that as a valid trade at first, and then...

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Culturally. Yeah, culturally. It seemed like everybody else was okay with it. And then, you know, going to the scripture, he saw that that was something that he couldn't be a part of.

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And so, of course, he became instrumental. And then his young friend, William Webber Force in getting slavery removed from England.

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But when Newton was not a Christian, he was press ganged into the

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Navy. He was forced into His Majesty's Navy or Her Majesty's Navy, whoever it was at the time.

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And then he was also a merchant, and he was very godless.

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He said that he was not just the kind of sinner that wanted to sin himself. He wasn't satisfied if he didn't get everyone else to join in with him.

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One time, the captain of a ship, you know, kind of reprimanded him, embarrassed him because of his bad behavior.

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And Newton wrote, because he was a poetic guy and he was capable, he writes this little song about the captain and puts it to music and teaches the crew to sing this crude, you know, lewd song about the captain.

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So you can imagine being the captain with Newton on the ship, you'd probably just be easier just to throw him off the side. But in the middle of that really godless life, where he was getting other people to join him, getting other people to deny, you know,

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God, and all of that's just Sunday school kind of talk, there was a great storm.

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And it's the first time Newton remembered as an adult crying out to God. Before that, he said he had not prayed.

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Well, and it shocked him that he found himself praying. Yeah, it shocked him. Yeah, in the midst of the prayer, why am

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I talking to God? You know, I've mocked the existence of this being. So he used that as a time, the anniversary of that.

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But what I want to mention in particular today is the end of the year. At the end of every year, he would stop and review his journals for the year.

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And at the end of a decade, he would stop and review the journals, the high points from the past 10 years.

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So I want to mention one of the journal entries, and we'll read it in a second. It comes at the first day of 1773.

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So at the end of 1772, beginning of 1773, Newton sets aside some time to review the kindnesses of the

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Lord. He reads over his last year's journal. And it had been a difficult year, he'd been helping

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Cooper a lot, and really just pouring himself into Cooper and crying out to the

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Lord that God would help William Cooper with his extraordinary, really a mental disease, severe depression.

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As he reviews the year, he's also preparing a sermon, which happens to fall on the first day.

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So January 1st is a Sunday in 1773. And Newton writes a hymn because he is a talented guy.

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I can't imagine doing this. But Newton sits down and writes a new song for the church to be able to sing.

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They didn't sing all of his hymns immediately, but he writes these hymns. And so he writes a hymn and it's called

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Faith's Review and Expectation. So look back over last year, faith sees the faithfulness of God, and then expectation that God will be a faithful in the coming year.

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Now, we have sung this many times. Elvis recorded this, but we probably don't know it by that name, because we have long ago, it was renamed or became popularly known as Amazing Grace, instead of Newton's title,

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Faith's Review and Expectation. Because those words are not in the song. That's right. So we just took the first two words,

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Amazing Grace. So Newton writes this, and the church, he introduces it to the church.

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And it's because he's reviewed the previous year, and he's reminded himself of the goodness of God.

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Now, on that day, he writes in his journal, and it's a pretty full entry for Newton.

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It's about a page long. Let me read it. He says this, this is the ninth

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New Year's Day that I have seen in this place. Now that's Olney, England.

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It's a small town. It's where he's been pastoring. So nine years he's been a pastor in this small town church.

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I have reason to say the Lord crowns every year with his goodness. The entrance of this finds me and my dear

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Mary, his wife, in health and peace. I am still favored with strength and with some liberty for my public work and hope the

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Lord is still pleased to work by me for the edification of his people already called and the awakening of sinners.

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As to myself, it is given me to trust in the

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Lord Jesus for life and salvation. I know he is both willing and able to save upon him as an all sufficient savior.

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And upon his word of promise, I build my hope, believing that he will not suffer me to be put to shame.

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My exercise of grace. Now here he begins to talk about himself. My exercise of grace, how

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I've been doing spiritually is faint. My consolations small.

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My heart is full of evil. My chief sensible burdens are a wild, ungoverned imagination and a strange sinful backwardness to reading the scriptures and to secret prayer.

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So I, he found in himself this inexplicable backwardness, this unwillingness at times to read his

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Bible and pray. He goes on to say, these have been my complaints for many years, and I have no less calls of complaint than formerly.

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But now he turns away from looking at himself. But my eye and my heart is to Jesus his.

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I am him. I desire to serve to him. I this day would devote and surrender myself anew.

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Oh, Lord, accept, support, protect, teach, comfort and bless me.

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Be thou my arm, my eye, my joy and my salvation. Mortify the power of sin and increase the image of your holiness in my heart.

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Anoint me with fresh oil. Make me humble, faithful, diligent and obedient. Let me in all things attend to your word as my rule, to your glory as my end or my goal and depend upon your power and promise for safety and success.

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I am now in the forty ninth year of my age and may expect in the course of a few years at most to go whence

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I shall no more return to die. Nor have I a certainty of continuing here a single year or even a month or a day.

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May thy grace keep me always waiting till my appointed change shall come.

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And when the summons shall come, may I enable, may I be enabled to rejoice in thee as the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

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We'll stop there. So really quite an extraordinary entry, because when we think of Newton and as the writer of the great hymn and as a pastor, significant leader of the second generation of the great awakening and kind of consolidating the gains that were made under Whitefield and Wesley, we don't expect for him to say,

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I have these complaints, which I have every year, this wild imagination, this weak faith, this stubborn heart.

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And it's very encouraging to read it and to see that he's not willing to stay there, but he turns his eye to Christ.

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So one thing is, it's not just this one day that Newton knows that he needs to be reminded of these things.

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He actually did a lot of things in addition to writing in his journal, in his manse, so in his parsonage.

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He had, what was it, written up there? Yeah, that's quite an interesting story.

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Newton, above the mantle at his house, which was owned by the church, so they call it a manse.

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Yeah. We would call it a parsonage. Right, right. So the preacher's home. He had an artist come and paint two verses, which would constantly remind him, because the fireplace was in his study, which would constantly remind him of God's kindness.

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And these are the two verses. And we have here today a big plaque that my daughter

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Sarah made me one year, a couple years ago, and she put together some old boards, and she did a really nice job of writing out this, and I hang it in my study.

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And this is what it said. And by the way, when Newton hired the artist to do this, he didn't get permission from the deacons.

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He didn't tell the church that this committee on it. And so even Newton got in trouble because they said, well, what's this?

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And well, I hired an artist to paint this and like, well, you didn't get okay from us.

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And so it caused some strife. This is what he had printed or painted. Isaiah says, since you were precious in my sight, you have been honored, and I have loved you.

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So God's statement, since you were precious in my sight, you have been honored, and I have loved you.

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But the second verse, you shall remember, Deuteronomy, that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the

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Lord, your God redeemed you. You are precious in God's sight, but never forget, you were a slave and I rescued you.

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Newton realized that it wasn't just, it could not be in the moments of crisis when he would remember these things.

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He had to have the things in front of him every day that would help him remember, not just where he had been, who he had been, what he had been, but also who he was, where he was going, as he talked about in the journal.

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And those really encouraging verses, you know, as he was applying them. Paul's echoing this in the same thing in Philippians 3 in verse 13.

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He says this, brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.

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And it begs the question, John, with Newton, with Paul, with us, and with what we're talking about now, we're talking about intentionally remembering things.

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And Paul here is saying, well, we need to remember things, but there's also things we need to forget, and we need to kind of push to the side.

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What's going on there? How do we know what to remember and what to kind of let go? Yeah, I mean, if you just read

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Paul in a surface manner, you would think remembering spiritual benefits you've been given is a bad thing.

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You're supposed to forget that and just press on. Because you don't want, and to spiritualize that, you don't want to rely on yesterday's graces.

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Yeah, and I think that that's at the heart of it. What is right to remember? What's the right way to remember?

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What's the wrong way to remember? So, if you look back on anything, even the gifts of God, the graces that God has given you, the experiences you've had with God, the things

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God has used you to do that might help other believers. Paul in Philippians 3 is looking back on all the benefits he had as being born a

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Jew and brought up in a careful Jewish home. All of that, he says, is worthless in comparison with knowing

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Christ and peace with God through a righteousness which Christ would provide through faith.

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So, we could say it this way. Anytime we look back and it becomes a pillow for us to kind of stop running the race and take a nap, that's an abuse.

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And if that, if you look back on what God has done with you in the past, what God has taught you in the past, and the experiences you've had, genuine

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Christian experiences that were from the Lord in the past, and they become a substitute for walking with God, obeying

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God, and getting to know God better today, then you should forget them. But if you can look back and you can remember the faithfulness of God and it spurs you like a pair of running shoes, you put that on and it keeps you and motivates you running, then that's the right way to remember

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God's past kindnesses. So, not as a substitute for today's obedience or today's studying of the

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Bible, but as a reason to hope, to have an expectation

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He will continue to be the God that He has always been. So, my efforts today have purpose.

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Yeah. And it makes me think, there was a season in my life, it's been a while, where I was really into exercise and lifting weights and things like that.

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And it was, there were workouts that I would come to that I would look at the exercise or I would look at the lifting scheme and think, there's absolutely no way that I could do this.

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But the guys that I was lifting with would say, you don't remember three months ago, you did more than this.

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You've all, you know, reminding yourself of where you've come. Now, if you were to just rest on, yeah, I did that three months ago,

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I don't have to do that today. Then, you know, you're abusing that, but it should be fuel and encouragement to push you on.

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So, what we've talked about... We're not just on radio. So, I don't know if that illustration is gonna fly, because they're looking at us...

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I said a long time ago. They're saying, no, no, I don't think so. I said a long time ago, see, but then

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I had kids, and so it's a different thing. Oh, you've had, yeah, you've had a lot of kids. I have, yeah.

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Yeah, I mean, and you've recovered. Well, I appreciate it. Okay. So, remembering, yeah, remembering, and we wanna be really practical.

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Again, put it on your phone, put it on your calendar, digitally or whatever. Externalize the reminder.

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Yeah. Set reminders, and it doesn't have to be a day of fasting and prayer.

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If you can set that aside and do that, that would be really extraordinarily good.

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But it could just be, I will give one hour to sitting down and reviewing the kindnesses of the

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Lord to me over the past month, and I'll do that one day a month, or one day, one hour, a quarter.

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So if we just begin... One thing that is particularly helpful for me in these things is to treat it like a birthday or an anniversary.

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Remind yourself, set a reminder on your calendar, whatever the case may be, but remind yourself that this is coming a day or two ahead.

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If you'll do that, then you're much more likely, if you just remember the day of, then your day's pretty much already full, right?

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But if you remind yourself, set on your calendar, you can say, remind me a day before, remind me a week before, then you're gonna be much more likely to build that into your time.

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The second command, and we're just gonna mention it today because we're gonna pick this up next week and then the following week.

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So there's the command to remember, but then there's another command that shows up in Scripture, and that is the command to look.

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And whether it's in Isaiah 40 with that famous passage, behold your God, the word behold there is a command, look, look, there's your

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God. I think of Isaiah 45, 22, which led Charles Spurgeon to conversion, where God speaks to the prophet and says, turn to me, or the

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King James Version, look unto me, turn and look, look unto me, all you ends of the earth and be saved.

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You can think of the illustration that Jesus gives in John chapter three, where merely looking at the bronze serpent with trust in God would be enough to heal the body of the people that had been bitten.

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Or John chapter six, where Jesus says, this is the will of my Father that everyone who beholds the

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Son and believes in him. So we look away from all other options, all other false hopes, and all of our hope is sent to one object,

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Christ. Or even Paul in second Corinthians three, where he says the Christian life doesn't just begin by looking to Christ with faith, but it is continued.

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We gaze upon Christ and gazing at Christ, we are transformed from glory to glory.

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Hebrews 12, one and two, why don't you read that? Another well -known passage that combines looking with running the race.

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Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

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So run, lay aside every encumbrance, run the race of daily obedience, but do it watching someone, fixing your gaze on a person, on Christ.

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And we're gonna talk about that next week, and we'll get help from a book. You've got it right there? I've got the book here.

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So this is Looking Unto Jesus by Isaac Ambrose. So we've mentioned this on the podcast before when you and Jordan did a series of episodes.

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Jordan mentioned this book, and so we've kind of been talking about doing a series on it ever since then, and I'll link to that episode in the show notes and put a card in the video if you're watching this on YouTube.

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But you can see this is a fat book, but don't worry, because we're not gonna talk through each chapter on the podcast, because we'd be here for 10 years.

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We're just gonna hit the introductory chapter. That's it. So the goal is about three episodes on this.

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So if you don't have a copy of Looking Unto Jesus, we actually found, I thought it was out of print, but it's not.

31:57

Pillar and Ground has republished it, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Yeah. And we hope to have a couple of copies to give away.

32:04

Yeah, to do a giveaway. So we'll do that at the end, and there will be... One for you, one for me. Exactly, or our wives.

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And so I'll put some descriptions on how you can enter into that giveaway in the show notes, because we'll work with Sarah to kind of work those details out.

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Yeah. So next week, the first of our podcasts on Looking Unto Jesus.

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What does that word, aphorantes in the Greek, it's quite a unique word.

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It's three, has three things, three elements, components to it, which our English doesn't bring out that are very helpful.