Spiritual Remembering

You know, the Bible talks about remembering. [...] A basic biblical concept is the sinful tendency to forget the Lord and the need to remember. This cannot mean, mainly, a matter of intellect and information because when God uses the word 'remember' he's not talking about it this way. When he says, "I remembered my convenant to Abraham" this does not mean, "Oh yeah. Abraham. I forgot." When God uses the term 'remember' what it really means is I'm acting now. My heart is engaged. It's not just intellectual.

And what that then means for us is, the problem is that the information we have we spiritually forget. It doesn't automatically become real to us unless someone is fanning the flame all the time. 2 Peter 1:8&9 says "You've forgotten you were cleansed from your former sins." If you're not growing, he says you've forgotten you were cleansed from your former sins. Now, does he really mean that one day you woke up and said "my gosh, it's been three weeks--I forgot: I'm a Christian. Or I forgot that I was saved?" No! What does he mean? He's talking about spiritual forgetting. It's not vital anymore. You're not engaged. It's not real to your heart.

In Joshua 4:21-24, God tells the children of Israel to take 12 stones from the place where he dried up the Jordan in order to make the pillar of remembrance.  It would seem ridiculous to imagine that people could forget such a remarkable miracle. [...] The main difference between a Christian and a nominal Christian is that the truth has become spiritually real to the heart of the Christian. The main difference between a growing Christian and a stagnant Christian is that the truth has been refreshed regularly in the growing Christian. [...]

What is the Lord's Supper about? Remembering. It's not primarily an intellectual thing. The Lord's Supper and the worship service in general is designed to recreate sensible ideas (that is sense-affecting ideas) of the gospel. Hebrews 3:13 says we need, at the very least, Christian community daily to exhort us lest we be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. All our problems with worry, temptation, guilt, anger, etc. are due to the fact that God and his salvation is unreal to us. We're not remembering Jesus.

From the end of #31 here.