This is regarding God as if he were a man, and acted as men act. Men find the memory of kindnesses they have done become a plea for showing further kindness. To have ever helped any one gives them a sort of natural claim on us to help them again. So the psalmist, full of joy in the blessings God was giving his people in his day, felt quite sure that God must have been recalling, remembering, what great things he had done, in olden days, for his people. We think our great pleas to urge before God are our needs and our deserts. But these are altogether surpassed by the pleas we may use. God's honour, God's promise, and what God has already done for us. But herein lies an important distinction between God's feelings and man's. Only the very noblest among men fail to be annoyed when past favours are made into a plea for new gifts. We are annoyed at the beggar who comes again and again so hopefully, because he has so often come successfully. God loves to bless those whom he has blessed. We may never think of him as tiring of blessing.

I. WHAT MAY WE THINK THE LORD REMEMBERS? See two things.

(1) That he had to be very gentle and merciful toward us.

(2) That he had to keep his promise to help us. Remembers his mercy and truth; his loving kindness and faithfulness. See what persuasion to new "mercy and truth" is in such quickened memory.

1. The exercise of the passive graces purifies and ennobles character, and makes us more able to exercise them, and more anxious to find objects on which to exercise them. Do some act merely for a person, and you may find it tiresome to have to do it again. But show a kindness, be merciful, pitiful, tender, gracious, and you will want to be all these over and over again.

2. Every claim upon a man of truth is an establishing and confirming of his truth, and makes him more determined that men shall have absolute trust in his word. If it be thus with men, how much more so with God!

II. HOW MAY WE VENTURE TO QUICKEN THE LORD'S MEMORY? By telling him freely what is in our memories concerning his dealings. This is the way of love. The lover tells his loved one his memories, and that is the best quickening of hers. - R.T.

Mr. Booth, of the Blue Ribbon Army, told me that on his first journey to England, before he started, he said to his wife, "I have dreamed a dream. I have dreamt that I shall be wrecked and be the only person that will escape; and what a thrilling story that will be for me to tell." He left home, and there was a collision, both ships were in very great danger, but by the wonderful providence of God both ships got back in harbour, and there was nobody lost whatever. So he said to his wife, "Is not this a much more thrilling story to tell? Is it not a much more happy thing to have to say, 'Saved, and all saved that sailed with me, not one of them lost'?" Oh, that we might have the privilege of saying, "Here am I, and the children that Thou hast given me."

( C. H. Spurgeon.)