Remember His deeds

My Bible Reading Plan has me reading Psalm 105 today. Though each psalm is inspired and incredibly rich, they can sometimes go by like telephone poles on the road: though you appreciate them, their individual placement and message are lost on you. I was struck a bit by this psalms message, so I decided to write something short about it.

This is a praise psalm. More specifically, a historical praise psalm. The psalm itself recalls God's covenant faithfulness to Abraham, to make him a great nation and to give him the land. What struck me on this reading was the psalm's intro. It is an overflowing call to worship that is rooted in a desire to know God's works:
"make known His deeds..."
"tell of all His wondrous works!"
"Remember the wondrous works that He has done, His miracles, and the judgments He uttered"

1. This fact tells me that there is really one chief labor in the believer's life: to constantly call our hearts back to the truth of who God is and what He's done. The rest is all the outflow of that work.
Now, that may seem like such a theoretical and abstract goal, but it's really a very strenuous and practical exercise. Every time God's people stray, it starts in the realm of believing something wrong about Him. They start believing in a false picture of Him...essentially an idol. That leads to every other kind of problem. When we forget what God has done, we start ignoring and abusing the poor, we start isolating ourselves, we start relegating God to the realm of ideas or we over-realize our eschatology and forget God's transcendence. God is God alone and God has acted!

2. This psalm seems to show that we can know that God has acted and that He desires us to know the reality and the significance of His actions. His actions show something definite about His character and person. He wants us to know it and not forget it. We should be encouraging each other to know these things and we should be retelling them often to our stubborn hearts. Some would question our ability to know anything certain about God and would esteem doubt as a virtue. Now, it's not good to lie about your doubts, pretending that they don't exist; but doubting God is the root of all evil.

3. This psalm teaches us that remembering has to do with more than our cognitive abilities. We're told to, "Glory in His holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice..." (v.3). It is obvious that we must be working this true and knowable knowledge into our hearts in such a way that we are moved by it. It must hit us at an affectional level in order to be properly honoring to God. The purpose of knowledge about God is to move us to the praise of God. In fact, this is what Jonathan Edwards meant when he wrote about music in The Religious Affections:

"And the duty of singing praises to God seems to be appointed wholly to excite and express religious affections. No other reason can be assigned why we should express ourselves to God in verse, rather than in prose, and do it with music but only, that such is our nature and frame, that these things have a tendency to move our affections."

It is our duty as believers to remember God's deeds, to believe them, to talk about them and to love God for them.