Jesus tells us, “With God all things are possible.” Scriptures confirm that our God created all things, is all-powerful and “is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.” Yet there is something that our all-powerful God cannot do, for Paul tells Titus that God cannot lie. This limitation is a great comfort to us, for the verse that tells us that God that cannot lie contains the promise of eternal life for us.
The wonderful hope of living forever is what God wants to give to us, as Peter assures us: “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some men count slackness, but is long suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.” How thankful we are that our Heavenly Father is willing to cast all our sins behind His back and remember them no more if only we confess them to Him and ask Him to forgive us.
Thinking about what God cannot do, have we ever considered what else He cannot do? He is not able to remember the good things that we have not done. For example, God cannot remember our baptism if we are not yet baptized.
God remembers those who are faithful to him. Nehemiah worked diligently in the Lord’s service, rebuilding the wall around God’s holy city, Jerusalem, and looking out for the welfare of God’s people. Nehemiah asked God over and over again to remember him for good, and certainly God will remember him for all the good that he did. God remembered Noah while he was in the ark floating on the waters that had destroyed everything on the earth. Noah had built the ark while witnessing to a world that would perish because they did not want to listen to the word of God. God remembered Noah and saved his life and that of his family.
The good that we hope God remembers about us need not be great heroic deeds. Jesus tells us simple loving acts are important to him: “whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.”
Jesus describes the kind of things he will remember about us at his judgment seat. “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” When those hearing these words do not remember having done these things for Jesus, he explains, “The King will reply, I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”
The lesson to learn from this example is to fill each day with activities the Lord will remember about us at his judgment seat, such as being kind to some of God’s other children. When we wake up in the morning we should start planning what we can do to help others today. Before we climb into bed at night we hope that we can remember having done something for others to make their life easier. If we have not done anything good, it is a sobering thought to realize also that the Lord will not be able to remember that we did something good this day.
Is a wasted day, any day that we do not do good things for the Lord to remember about us? Dare we go through our life wasting days? These are critical questions that each of us should be asking ourselves every day.
“Truly this is the day which the Lord has made,” so let us dedicate each day to doing kind and thoughtful things for others. If we are faithfully serving our Lord, then we are told that the Lord will remember us and will say to us at his judgment seat. “Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:”
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One