God's Book of Remembrance

 Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another: and the Lord hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name.  And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.

Malachi 3:16,17

In the constitution of being, the brain and the mind record the events of life. Science tells us that memory never loses a thing. Everything is retained and may be recalled when the right trigger is touched. Life’s events reappear, good or bad.

The pride, profits and pleasures of life may veneer its events to the point that a person actually may think that memory loses a portion of life’s events. One might consider, for example a person who in delirium forsakes her family. How else to account for such an unlikely event but that a part of her life was lost to memory. Yet. Yet it is all there; the right conditions will evoke the missing memory.

Did you ever revisit some scene of early life?  That is to say after many intervening years have you returned to the site of some place where your experiences there come flooding back as you visually peruse the scene about you?

As the poet said,
“The things that were as dead things came floating before my sight
They are now alive, alive with a terrible might.”

The past spontaneously rushes back upon the hinges of memory. Vivid recollection.

In seasons of sorrow the past utters its voice. No handwriting is needed. We review the choices we have made.

The thing that interests us most of all is that moment when death shall pass the book of memory over into the hand of the Registrar of Eternity.

Memory is the Prime Minister of God’s retributive justice.

The prospects of the book of memory being brought to light should create vigilance in the choices we make and in the way we live.  The life we live will meet us as a resurrection of forgotten acts.

It is within our power to see to it that our forgotten acts are complementary to our future well being through the exercise of right choices made within the context of our free moral agency.

The Revelator said, “I saw the dead small and great stand before God, and the books were opened--and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.” --Revelation 20:12

The book of memory is written by us, but preserved of God.

Imagine the abandoned sinner in the presence of God with the amassed, concentrated wicked deeds of his life between him and God’s Holiness.

When I think of memory with its vast power, it seems no wonder that men are either afraid or ashamed to meet God.
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If one lives a misspent life and rejects the Savior, memory will tell that individual that he chose to be a wild vine.

If we choose to carry about a double heart, suffering from divided affection by attempting to serve both God and mammon, we shall be a well without water, clouds carried by a tempest. (2 Peter 2:17)

Should we choose to worship the creature above the Creator, our memory of the rejection of salvation will be vivid in our minds. (Romans 1:25)

In Luke, chapter sixteen, we read of the rich man in hell who lifted his eyes in torment. He was alive, conscious, in full exercise of his faculties, his memory functioning.

© 2005 David W. Lacy
This work is a reconstruction of a sermon by D. W. Lacy working from his outline.  The delivery cannot be reconstructed.; but these words are faithful to the intent of the message.