Tuesday, January 8, 2008
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My wife and I were on a flight headed for a speaking commitment and I was in the window seat working on my messages. She was in the aisle seat with headphones on, listening to one of the airline entertainment channels. And, man, was she laughing! Which made it a little hard to focus on my work. Finally, I asked her what she was listening to; what she was laughing at. It was actually Bill Cosby talking about life at 50, including this hilarious description of an all too familiar experience - getting up to get something from another room, forgetting what you went in there for, going back and sitting down, and then remembering what it was, and so on. You forget and you wander. My wife was laughing because she says that's us. Well, I don't know if it's because my brain is fuller than ever or because my memory is going, but there's a lot I don't remember these days. You may say, "Well, yeah, that's a problem for you old people." Actually, memory loss is a problem for all ages.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Soul Amnesia."
Not remembering has a history of getting God's people into spiritual trouble. Listen to our word for today from Psalm 78:40. Speaking of God's ancient people, it says, "How often they rebelled against Him in the desert and grieved Him in the wasteland! Again and again they put God to the test; they vexed the Holy One of Israel." Now, listen to this. "They did not remember His power."
Spiritual forgetfulness - spiritual amnesia, just like God's ancient people, we tend to forget all God has done in the past, and as a result of our memory problem, we keep wandering into rebellion, mistakes, and detours from the perfect will of God. It starts when we forget God's past deliverances and we strike off on our own to fix things or decide things ourselves.
Good decisions are rooted in remembering God's history in past situations like the one we're in now. Remember those mountains that once loomed so large in front of you; the things that looked insurmountable, impossible? They're gone. Yesterday's mountains are now monuments to the love and power of God. But now there's this mountain, the one that looms in front of us. It's so overwhelming - this illness, this family crisis, this financial need, this deep wound. It's so overwhelming that it's causing you to forget how much God has done in the past; how much in control He is.
And that's when you start to panic, to hot-wire your own solution, to turn from God. But the history of your life is a series of cliffs you came to the edge of, but never went over, because of the intervention of your Lord, of times when waiting for His answer was worth it and when rushing into yours wasn't, of times that looked like the end, but then God wrote one more chapter that changed everything.
He's parted the waters over and over again, but maybe today's Red Sea has made you forget that. When the Jews stood at the entrance to the Promised Land and saw the giants, they forgot what God had done at the Red Sea. They retreated. They wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. It's expensive to forget what God can do.
So settle back and start flipping through that scrapbook of God's adventures in your life. You'll see that He has always, always come through, and He will this time - in His time. So don't go wandering off somewhere because you've got spiritual amnesia. Many a major spiritual mistake is because of spiritual memory loss. So as you face this mountain, don't forget the miracles!