REMEMBER

“Rabbi, look, the fig tree which You cursed has withered.” And Jesus answered saying to them, “Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted him.”

Mark 11:21-23

Effectual prayer, the kind that God hears and answers, requires unwavering confidence in God’s power. And central to this kind of faith is learning to remember God’s miraculous works of deliverance and judgment in the past. This is what Jesus wanted His disciples to learn. He had been teaching, providing, protecting, and strengthening them, but in a few days, He would be gone, and they would be utterly dependent upon the power of prayer to access God. Therefore, they must be confident that they had access to the same power that miraculously withered the fig tree—a living illustration of His omnipotence, one they would never forget, because what happened symbolically with fig tree would soon happen with the destruction of the Temple.

This is a lesson we would all do well to learn. Remembering God’s supernatural works in the past bolsters our confidence in His power for the present. He instructed Moses to tell His covenant people to remember His powerful acts in the past in preparation for what they would encounter in the future as they entered the land of Canaan. For example, Moses said to the people, “Remember this day in which you went out from Egypt, from the house of slavery; for by a powerful hand the Lord brought you out from this place” (Exodus 13:3).

When David was in the depths of despair, when his enemies were about to destroy him and he was in desperate need of deliverance, he remembered! In Psalm 143:5-6 we read, “I remember the days of old; I meditate on all your doings; I muse on the work of your hands. I stretch out my hands to you; my soul longs for you, as a parched land.”

Likewise, Psalm 77 records a communal lament where Asaph expresses his past and present fears and even wonders if God was willing and able to deal with his concerns. As one of God’s chosen servants to lead the people of Israel spiritually, Asaph would have been accustomed to traversing vast oceans of sorrow. I’m sure he had weathered many a gale in his own life and ministry. Often the hidden reefs of unseen adversity can tempt even a choice servant of God to give up and drown in his or her own tears.

But rather than allowing his depression to cause him to sink into his own self-centered morass, after verbalizing his problems before the throne of grace, Asaph remembered, saying, “I shall remember the deeds of the Lord; surely I will remember Your wonders of old. I will meditate on all Your work and muse on Your deeds” (Psalm 77:11-12, cf. vv. 13-20).

Knowing that God’s redemptive power and grace can only be fully understood in the context of history, we must make it a practice to remember—even rehearse—the marvelous works of God as He faithfully exercises His sovereignty in the affairs of history to accomplish His covenantal purposes, including those in our own life. May we, like the godly psalmist, “Remember His wonders which He has done, His marvels and the judgments uttered by His mouth, O seed of Abraham, His servant, O sons of Jacob, His chosen ones! He is the Lord our God; His judgments are in all the earth” (Psalm 105:5-7).

© COPYRIGHT NOTICE 2023 BY DAVID HARRELL AND SHEPHERD’S FIRE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.