This past Monday we celebrated Memorial Day. Even though we live close to Appomattox, I didn’t know that Memorial Day began in the years immediately following the Civil War. But until World War II most people knew it as “Decoration Day.” It was a day to decorate with flowers and flags the graves of fallen soldiers and remember those who had given, as Abraham Lincoln beautifully said, “the last full measure of devotion” to defend their nation. It was a day to remember what the honored dead had died to defend.

Memorial Day is an important national moment. It is a day to do more than barbecue. It is right to remember the great price some have paid to preserve the historically unprecedented civil and religious freedoms we Americans have the luxury to take largely for granted. But the importance of Memorial Day is more for our future than it is for our past. It is crucial that we remember the horrors of war and why they happened. The future of the United States depends in large amount on how well we collectively remember and cherish what liberty really is and the terror of tyranny. There is a high cost to forgetting. In the words of George Santayana’s famous aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I believe that’s why God has surrounded us with memorials. The entire Bible itself is a memorial. We read and meditate on it to remember. The Sabbath was a memorial to Israel’s freedom from Egyptian slavery (Deuteronomy 5:15), and the church observed it on Sundays as a memorial to Christ’s resurrection. Israel’s great gathering feast days were memorials (Exodus 13:3). And now each time a local church gathers, each Lord’s Supper, each baptism, each Christmas celebration, and each Easter celebration is a memorial. Remembering God’s past grace is necessary to fuel our faith in God’s future grace for us. This makes the memory one of God’s most profound, mysterious, and merciful gifts granted to us. God designed it to be a means of preserving (persevering) grace for his people. We neglect it at our own jeopardy. The future of the church, globally and locally, and of each Christian depends largely on how well we remember the gospel of Jesus and all his precious and very great promises, the successes and struggles of church history. So as we commemorate Memorial Day as Americans, let us do it with profound gratitude for the extraordinary common grace given to us when men and women laid their lives down for the sake of America’s survival. And let us remember the past evils that we may not repeat them in the future.

As believers, let us make every day a Memorial Day (Hebrews 3:13). Let us “take care lest [we] forget the Lord” (Deuteronomy 6:12). Let us “remember Jesus Christ” (2 Timothy 2:8).

THE REV. JOHN MOXLEY can be reached at Jmoxley1@juno.com.