Have you ever thought about the reminders God has put all around us to remind us we are His? From the rainbow God put in the sky to remind Noah after the Flood to standing stones and the Cross, God wanted people to have little nudges in view to remind them of Him when they were struggling. These reminders can help us remember God loves us or that we need to obey Him.
Yesterday we were blessed to attend the baptism of a young man. As the youth minister spoke before his baptism, he pointed out that every time in the future the teen encountered water, he should remember his baptism and what it meant. In fact, the youth minister spent some time listing the ways the young man might encounter water and how those things should always remind him of his baptism.
If you had been there, you might have wondered why the youth minister was talking about water so much. After all, water is just water without the spiritual rite of baptism. But I knew exactly what he was doing. Just like God wanted Noah to remember His promise to him every time Noah saw a rainbow, this youth minister wanted to plant a symbol in the young man’s mind that could serve to encourage him or remind him to obey wherever he was in the future.
We were visiting the congregation on our travels, but the young man’s parents had evidently been doing something similar for many years. Each of their children had a special, different chapter from the book of Psalms that the parents had sung to them regularly over the years. They read the one for their son that was being baptized and it had in it a lot of the messages that wanted their son to have so firmly engrained in his mind that those truths would come to him wherever he was in life – even after they were gone.
Take some time and think about some ways you can encourage your children to think of God when they see something. Or find ways to regularly repeat key scriptures you want so firmly embedded in their minds they will immediately come to mind when your kids are struggling. Make sure your kids always remember God is there – whether they need to be encouraged or reminded to obey.