“Our best remembering is remembering what God forgets.”
August 16, 2026 • Aaron Gosser, Teaching Elder • Kingdom Church Troy
This devotional was drafted with AI assistance
from the week’s sermon and reviewed before publishing.
We Are Forgetful People
Scripture is honest about how quickly we forget. God delivers Israel from Egypt with wonder after wonder — plagues, a parted sea, an enemy swallowed by the waves — and within days the same people who watched it happen are asking why they were brought into the wilderness to die (Exodus 15–16). It isn’t a flaw unique to them. We watch God move, and almost immediately our attention slides back to whatever threat is nearest. Forgetting is our default setting.
Even outside Scripture, this pattern holds. Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl observed that the people who endured the camps were often the ones who remembered something beyond the walls around them — who held on to a story that pointed forward. Take that away, and the spark inside a person doesn’t just dim; it goes out. What we remember, and what we let ourselves forget, shapes how we live today, this hour, this moment.
To Remember Is to Act
In Hebrew, the word for remember is zakar, and throughout Scripture it never means simple mental recall. When God remembers Noah, the flood recedes (Genesis 8:1). When God remembers his people enslaved in Egypt, he acts to save them (Exodus 2:24). Zakar is not a thought sitting quietly in the mind — it is a verb with consequences. Remembering, biblically, is inseparable from response.
That’s what makes “remember the Sabbath and keep it holy” a command and not a passing sentiment (Exodus 20:8). And it’s why our own remembering — of who God is, of what he has done — can’t stay locked in our heads either. To remember rightly is to be moved: to worship, to trust, to act differently because of it.
A Song Built Around Remembering
Psalm 103 is written to teach us how. It opens and closes with the same call: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits” (v. 2). The whole psalm is shaped like a mirror — scholars call it a chiasmus — where the outer sections match each other and everything folds inward toward a center. On the outside, David praises God personally, then cosmically, calling even the angels to bless the Lord. In between, he tells two truths at once: the truth about us, fragile as grass, our days like a flower the wind passes over and is gone (Psalm 103:15–16); and the truth about God — merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love (v. 8), a description repeated so often across Scripture, from Sinai to Nehemiah to Jonah to Joel, that it functions like underlining. When God wants us to know something about himself above everything else, he repeats it.
Imagine a day that started that way — praise as the first word out of your mouth instead of a scramble for the phone. Not “Lord, bless me,” but “Bless the Lord.” It doesn’t erase the struggle. It puts the struggle inside a much larger story, one where, as Paul writes, “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed” (Romans 8:18).
The Center of the Psalm
Every mirror has a hinge, and this psalm’s hinge — verse 12, sitting exactly at its middle — is its whole point.
PSALM 103:12
“As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”
Head east from anywhere and you never arrive at west. There’s no line where one becomes the other. That’s the distance David reaches for to describe what God does with our sin — not filed away, not merely excused, but removed to a distance that doesn’t exist. Our best remembering, in the end, may be remembering what God forgets.
David wrote those words without yet knowing how far God would go to make them true. He didn’t know Christ. We do.
Remember, at This Table
On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and said, “This is my body, given for you. Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:24). He took the cup the same way: “Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me” (v. 25). This is zakar made visible — not a memory exercise but an action, bread and cup in hand, the distance between us and our transgressions made as real as what we taste. We remember a God who acts: who parts seas and empties tombs, who takes our failures and carries them where east never meets west.
Bless the Lord, O my soul — and remember.