Good morning,
Each year in America we have a holiday called Memorial Day that was designed to help us remember the bravery and suffering that our brave soldiers have faced at the risk of their lives, so that we could live in freedom today. This year has been especially interesting for me because of how God reminded me of why we need days to remember. Because one of Marty’s grandson’s was getting married we stayed at a hotel to be near the wedding. Next to the hotel was a memorial, plain and ignored, to the soldiers of World War I who fought about 100 years ago. When we returned home we had a magazine waiting for us that had lots of stories from World War II that ended about 70 years ago. We still remember those days ourselves. While we were eating breakfast in the dining room of the hotel just before we came home, we were bombarded with TV pictures of people screaming at the police because the police had killed two men who put a lot of people in danger, but they weren’t carrying guns. Instead of unity of purpose and the respect for authority, the people on the streets were acting out of hatred and demanding the right to express themselves as part of a mob acting against legitimate authority.
Sadly, it only takes a few generations for people to move from a righteous determination to do good at any cost, to become self focused and demand special attention from others at little or no cost to themselves. This principal works the same way for Christians as well as cultures. Moses and the prophets spoke again and again about the importance of remembering what God had said, and what they were to remember about loving and obeying their God. When Jesus, our Creator and Savior, was training his followers he kept stressing the importance of remembering and obeying what he was teaching them. On the night before he died on the cross to pay for our sins, Jesus gave us what we call the communion service to remind us to remember him on a regular basis. The Apostles who wrote the New Testament wrote to the churches of their day with the commitment to remind those who came after them the truths of God’s love and holiness. When Peter wrote his letters to the churches of his day he said, Therefore, I will always remind you about these things—even though you already know them and are standing firm in the truth you have been taught.(2Pet. 1:12) Alas, in our day, our churches as a whole have taken the same track as our cultures. Reading, studying and obeying the Bible have been replaced with activities and culturally approved life styles borrowed from God’s enemies. So called Christians are struggling with things like creation, sexuality, marriage and the meaning of faith and salvation as though the Bible was a book of suggestions instead of the voice of God. Dear Lord, please help us to remember what else Peter wrote in the verse below.
1 Peter 1:17 And remember that the heavenly Father to whom you pray has no favorites. He will judge or reward you according to what you do. So you must live in reverent fear of him during your time as “foreigners in the land.”
Roy Wisner
