Let us not forget His mercies!

Our aptness to forget God’s mercies, is, alas! too conspicuous. It has been said that the annals of a prosperous and peaceful country are singularly uninteresting; does this arise from the fact that we do not make memoranda of our mercies, or at least if we do they are far more readily blotted out than the record of our sorrows? We trace our joys in the sand, but we write our afflictions on marble. We forget the streams of mercy, never ceasing, which flow so continually parallel with our pathway. If we thus ungratefully forget, it should cause us serious reflections, when we see that God does not forget.

Here in this Book he brings to his people’s memories all the mercies they have received, because they were always present before his own mind. The child may forget the kindness of its mother, but the mother doth not forget what she bore, and what she has sacrificed for her child. The friend may forget what he has received, but it is not likely that the benefactor will forget what he has bestowed. If God’s memory therefore records all that he has given me, let me be ashamed to let my memory suffer these things to slip. What God counts worthy of his divine recollection let me record on the pages of my memory, and often let me peruse the record.

From a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled "The Pilgrim's Grateful Recollections," delivered July 3, 1870. Image by Dino Quinzani under Creative Commons License.