At the last meeting, one of the major themese I tried to stress was "remembrance." God wanted Israel to remember their deliverance from Egypt, so He set up a couple of festivals they would hold yearly to remember what God had done for them. Sweet.
There was a side point I wanted to add to the discussion that I felt was very pertinent to the discussion. In my reading last week, I came across a passage that takes the concept of remembrance and really drives it home for us Christians. See the passage below, 2 Peter 1:2-9:
"2Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. 3His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
5For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; 6and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; 7and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. 8For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9But if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins."
I hope that if you understood what Peter is writing about, you nearly choked like I did. Could it be that I am not being spiritually formed because I have forgotten my salvation, my cleansing of sins? C'mon Pete, you can't be serious! But really, could it be that we do not fully understand our salvation, what we have been saved from, and what we are heading towards?
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I must admit I dislike the idea that we as the saved ones of Christ have as our most frequent failing and most important task the remembering of His cross. It truly puts our weakness in horrible perspective, and I suppose I delude myself with dreams of human perseverance.
Really? Being told to remember?
It makes me feel like a child. Then again, every time I hear of his death for me it is like some foreign, estranged truth from a chemistry textbook. It's not that it's new--I've heard the good news several thousand times--it's just odd: why would Christ do that, after all? Why was it necessary? And what good am I to be bought at such a price, anyway?
I submit that such thinking comes from our sin and its strangling effects on our relationship with God. I must come before Him, first to reckon with my sin, and then to be reminded that He saved me from death and He can surely save me unto life. He rescued me from the burning building, so He'll surely take me to Disneyland. I must merely give Him the opportunity, and sanctification begins.
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