When you read through Scripture, it is important to notice the number of times a word or an idea appears. 

Throughout the Bible, the word or idea “remember” appears 150-200 times. God consistently tells his people to look back, to remember, not to forget. It is what happened at passover, what takes place in communion. 

Why?

Because we forget. 

This happened in Nehemiah 8. When the people opened the law and read it, they wept and worshiped. And then, they responded by participating in the Feast of Booths (Nehemiah 8:16 – 17).

What is the Feast of Booths? It’s a reminder of God’s faithfulness. For seven days, no one worked. The people lived in makeshift shelters — booths — just as their ancestors had lived in temporary shelters after God delivered them out of 400 years of slavery in Egypt, on their journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land.

Why does God command his people to remember? Why build practices around remembering?

Because we forget, our present drowns out the work of God in our past. We start to believe our best days — maybe even God’s best days — are behind us.

As Eric Mason has said, “God wants us to remember the days of hardship because when he finally makes our lives fruitful, he doesn’t want us thinking we did it on our own. He wants us pointing back to the source.”

The booths reminded Israel that moving forward requires looking back — remembering how God provided in the past.

Here’s our problem: we hate looking back, because the past holds so much pain. We’ve been abandoned. Rejected. Unloved. We’ve walked away believing we’re worthless. So we avoid looking backward — it hurts; it’s not where we want to live. And yet it’s exactly there, in that place, that we find God’s grace.

Brennan Manning wrote that the false self — the imposter — begins the moment we first felt rejected, worthless, or unlovable. Have you ever felt like you were faking it? Like you didn’t belong? We all have, at some point.

Many of us don’t struggle to trust God with eternity or with the future. We struggle to trust him with the present. And the way we learn to trust God today is by looking back and remembering how he answered us yesterday. That’s precisely why God gave Israel a calendar full of festivals, monuments, and altars — so that every time they passed by, they’d ask: Do you remember what God did in this place?

Looking back helps us move forward.

Consider God’s patience in this story. Decades — centuries — had passed since Israel celebrated this feast, and yet God still extended grace. The moment you think grace has run out for you, God has more.

This is why, in John’s Gospel, John writes that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” — literally, tabernacled among us. John is deliberately connecting the coming of Jesus to this very feast.

The booths were a reminder to Israel of God’s grace and power — and a witness, a better story, to the watching world.

A church thrives when it’s built on Jesus — on his life, death, and resurrection. That’s why we take communion every week: we need a weekly reminder of grace. That’s why we baptize people: it’s not just a public announcement of change; it’s a marker — a moment you look back on for the rest of your life and say, ” This happened here.” We do this with anniversaries and birthdays too.

Why? Because we forget. Things grow stale. Grace is hard to remember. The mountain in front of you always feels bigger than the last one you climbed. And it’s not just that we forget — we often feel forgotten. Our prayers feel lifeless. We feel aimless. We wonder if God notices the details: the ache in our body, the weight on our heart, the stress we’re carrying.

It is in the remembering that we find our way forward. 

This week, take a moment to look back and reflect on the faithfulness of God in your life. Where have you seen God move in your life? Answer prayer? Provide for you in big and small ways? Then, take time to thank God for that and share that with someone else as a way to encourage them.