Remembering to Forget
So friends, I hope you’ve enjoyed this sermon from Sangster about remembering to forget. Forgetting the pain of past events.
Forgetting the things that embarrassed you.
Forgetting the sins that made you feel guilty.
Forgetting the pain that others have caused you, and forgetting your resentment towards them.
Put it Out of Your Mind
Sangster closes the sermon by saying, How can we do this? How can we forget? It’s unreasonable to just say ‘forget.’ You can’t do it at will, he says.
And so let me read from the sermon one more time. Sangster says “This is what I advise: Remember to forget. Does that sound mad? If you think I’m all upside down here, let me remind you that Immanuel Kant, the foremost philosopher, uses that very phrase in his journal.”
It turns out that Kant had lived for years with a trusted servant named Lampe, and then one day he discovered that this man had systematically robbed him. So he fired him, and this really affected him. And in his journal Kant wrote, “Remember to forget Lampe.”
And so Sangster says, “you can remember to forget. You do it by reversing the process of remembering to remember. To remember one must revive the image, hold it in the mind, and revive it regularly.
Reverse that process. Don’t revive the image. When it rises into your mind for whatever reason, remember to forget it. Turn it from the mind immediately.”
Replace the Thought With Other Thoughts
Then he says, “Have in your mind a few other things to always replace it with. Substitute those things into your mind to thrust the bad thing from your attention.
“Prayer will not do it if prayer is about the thing itself. We can use prayer as a way to keep our resentment up and to keep things in our memory. Prayer is best of all when it opens you to love, forgive, and find peace and poise.
And so when the memory comes into your mind, don’t dwell on it, but remember to forget and dwell on something else.”
A Personal Illustration
Then he closes the sermon with a little illustration: “It was Christmas time in my home. One of my guests had come a couple of days early and saw me sending off the last Christmas card. He was startled to see a certain name and address. “Surely you’re not sending a greeting to him,” he said. “Why not?” I asked. “Don’t you remember?” he began, “18 months ago…”
And then Sangster says, “I remembered then the thing that the man had publicly said about me. But I also remembered resolving at the time, with God’s help, that I would remember to forget. And God had made me forget. And so I posted the card.
Great sermon! And I hope that it’s helped you. Remember to forget, and find the peace that God offers you when you live facing the future, not dwelling in the past.
Biddy Chambers’ great faith enables her to never question of get upset at what God was doing. What an example for us.