Remember Who You Are And Who You Were | Pastor Greg Ford Sermon | One Church Columbus

We are in a series, we're starting the year, we're calling it Forget Not.

We know certainly that when a new year comes, it's not some sort of magic reset that all of a sudden uh you know everything's fresh and new.

But we do know that when you start a new year, it's a good time to take a step back, to think deeply about some things, to reconsider maybe your goals or to define your season, to take some time to kind of understand that and and maybe make some appropriate changes.

And uh what we're doing is looking at some places in scripture uh that we are uh invited to uh remember or to not remember certain things.

So we started last week with a uh portion of scripture in in Isaiah 43 that says to forget the former things.

And when it's talking about forget the former things, it's not saying wipe your memory of the former things, it's saying don't focus on, don't put to the forefront of your mind, don't anchor yourself to, and then it talked about some of those things.

Today we're gonna look at uh the book of Deuteronomy, and we're gonna look at the concept of remembering and forgetting not.

Now, this is um uh unique because usually when when I preach or teach, I'll take a portion of scripture like I did last week, Isaiah 43, uh verses uh 17 and 18, and we'll focus on that.

What I'm gonna do is really preach through kind of the theme and some of the uh big picture of the whole book of Deuteronomy.

Okay, the book of Deuteronomy, and we'll we'll jump into some specific verses, but I want to preach the whole book.

Um, okay, so Deuteronomy is a beautiful book.

Uh it's the last book of the Torah, or what you might call the Pinateuch, the first five books of the Bible.

And the book of Deuteronomy is uh is set, the scene is set, after the children of Israel have been brought through the Red Sea, have been brought out of Egyptian bondage and captivity, they've been wandering for 40 years in the wilderness, and a generation has died.

And so now you have a young generation, a new generation that is right on the doorstep of the promised land.

They are about to come into the promised land, and you have Moses who's at the end of his life.

He's very, very old at this point, and he is giving them, he basically creates a ceremony that is a covenant renewal.

In other words, God made a covenant with Abraham, God made a covenant with Moses, and yet there's been some uh breaking of the vows.

There has been uh at times uh unfaithfulness by the nation.

And so God says, Before you go into the promised land, I want us to renew our vows.

I want to do a ceremony to renew the covenant, and he gives them three speeches.

In these three speeches, 30 different times he says, remember this or forget not, which essentially means the same thing.

Remember is a little more proactive, like you make yourself remember something, you put rituals in place to remember things.

Uh we do communion here, and we say we do this in remembrance of what Jesus did on the cross for a reason, because we don't want to get so busy with life that we forget the most important things.

And so there's remembering, and then there's forget not, which is what humans have a tendency to do.

Okay, we tend to sometimes drift.

All right, and this was written thousands of years ago by Moses essentially saying to the child to the new generation, there's a few things that are important, and there's gonna be a lot going on in your lives, but there's a few things I want you to make sure you remember, and so he he does this a few thousand years ago.

I think it's even more relevant now.

Because more than ever, your brain is being approached with all kinds of situations and information.

Um, like more than ever, like it is in the information age, in the social media age, in the in the smartphone age, um, we are being inundated constantly.

Uh people are spending gazillions of dollars to compete for your attention, to put a message in front of you, to get the tyranny of the urgent in front of you to try to make you think about it and make you focus on it.

And more than ever, if you're not careful, the things that are really important, the things you really need to focus on and remember will go by the wayside.

I want you to think about there's things you're aware of going on in the world globally, there are things going on nationally, there are things going on locally, there are things going on in your own home and in your own head.

If that's a pie chart of five things: global, national, local, home, and head, okay, chances are probably in that pie chart, all five pieces of the pie aren't the same size.

There may be some things you're like, I know what's going on globally, but but there's enough going on in my house, I don't really have time to think about that.

I I'm not saying the stuff nationally is not serious, but if you knew what was going on in my head, my heart, and my body, you would know it's consuming me.

So all the time you're going to have all of this going on, friend, it's not going away.

So the the message given to the young generation in Deuteronomy, the ones who are about to come into the promised land, the ones that that had been, you know, that were the new generation that after 40 years of hoping for and longing for, you're about to seize it now, you're about to come into this now.

Okay, he's teaching them to take the important things and to keep them in focus.

And so that's what we're gonna look at today.

I I want to look at essentially what those 30 different things, those 30 things are, they really fall into three categories.

Um, and you could certainly study all 30 of the remembers and forget nots, but they really fall into these three categories.

The first thing is this he teaches them to remember where you've been.

Remember where you've been.

Uh Deuteronomy 15, 15, he says, remember that you were slaves in Egypt, and that the Lord your God redeemed you.

That is why I give you this command today.

Deuteronomy 16, 12, he says, remember that you were slaves in Egypt and follow carefully these decrees.

Deuteronomy 24, 18, remember that you were slaves in Egypt, and that the Lord your God redeemed you from there.

This is why I command you to do this.

Deuteronomy 24, 22, remember that you were slaves in Egypt, and that is why I command you to do this.

By the way, these aren't the only four.

He says it over and over and over again.

And he's reminding them of where they came from.

Um, okay, this is this is interesting because he consistently calls them back to their bondage in terms of remembering, and you have to understand why he's doing this.

Um, he's not doing this because he wants them to think like people in bondage.

That's not, in fact, I'm gonna I'm gonna show you how he helps them to not do that, right?

Because that's a that that is a liability to be stuck in in bondage back in Egypt in your mind.

But what he's doing is he's calling them back to that because it's it's creating a sense of humility that you don't forget where it is that you came from.

Later on, he's actually gonna bring up their failures in chapter 9.

He's gonna he's gonna talk about, hey, don't forget when you made when when your parents and your ancestors, your grandparents, when when they made these choices, that there were great failures.

And and so he's taking them back to their failure in their bondage, not so that they'll stay in the failure in the bondage, but so that they will have the appropriate humility when they go into, think of again, context, they're going into the land of milk and honey.

They are going into the promised land, they're about to come into some money, they're about to come into some power, they're about to own some land and be in a position of influence and power.

And he's saying, listen, before you do, don't forget, once you get there and you get in the promised land and you're a big deal now, you've got the corner office now, you got the big title now, you've got the ability to move things around now, you're a mover and a shaker.

Don't forget where you came from, because if you mishandled the promised land, you can go right back into bondage.

He he says to them in Deuteronomy 8, 10 through 14, he says, When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God.

When you eat this good meal that you used to not be able to afford, he said, I want you to say, Glory to God, thank the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.

Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God, failing to observe his commands, his decrees and his laws that I'm giving you this day.

Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase, and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

In other words, he's saying when you go from having nothing and now you've got something and now it's multiplying, you might start to think you're like God.

You you might start to puff your chest out.

You might start to think too much of yourself.

He's saying, I'm not trying to keep you in the mindset of bondage, I'm trying to keep you aware of the possibility of bondage where you've been so that you don't go back there.

I don't want you to lose what I've given you because you were unwise with it, because you allowed pride to come in.

I'm always a little leery of people who tell me what they would never do.

And I'm even more leery of those who tell me what they could never do again.

I I hear your heart that you're saying, uh, I've been there and I learned from it, and I sure hope you did, but but you might not want to say, I could never do that again, because if you did it once, you've proven that you can.

If I did it once, I probably should could definitely do it twice.

And so at the same time, I don't want to uh be in the mindset that uh, oh, you know, that's all I'll ever be, and then I'll go back to it.

But there's a certain amount of wisdom of remembering where you came from and allowing yourself to have a humility around that to go, I never want to go back there.

Here's how I got there, and now that I have something, I I want to make sure that I never forget where I've been.

This is a really powerful text because you have Moses being incredibly generous at the end of his life in a very specific way.

He's going back as a man who is frankly not going to enter the promised land.

And he's telling them the full story.

If you look back on where you came from, uh, the people who brought you up, your parents, your grandparents, your environment, your family, okay, sometimes uh we have a funny way of relating to that.

Some of us, when it comes to that, you may have, you may tend to remember it better than it was.

Sometimes we look back, and especially if you have a heart to want to honor, that's a good thing, that's a good instinct to want to honor.

But if you're not careful, if all you do is remember the good things, and you even do a little revisionist history to make the good a little better than it was, you miss the opportunity to see the things that were missed or the things that were off so you can learn from them.

Frankly, there's a temptation on the other end too.

Some of us maybe look back at where we came from and it was a painful thing or something that's been uh a cause of anger for you.

And so you may have a tendency to swing the pendulum the other way and to look back and to see it as worse than it was.

Okay, so we go, how do we do this?

How do we do this?

Moses is standing up at the end of his life, and he's taking them through, and certainly paying attention to the areas of the good and honoring that, and then giving grace for the areas that were wrong, but at the same time wringing every drop of learning out of it.

I want to encourage you, like, especially if you have a desire to almost uh uh tell only part of the story of where you came from, to look back and to look at it in its totality.

Give grace to the areas of failure and the areas of bondage, but at the same time, don't waste the learning that's sitting there right in front of you.

All right.

In fact, I would say it's a unique way to honor the people who brought you up, to acknowledge the good and to give grace for the bad, but to learn from everything.

I'm doing my best in this life to do the very best I can to set an example for my children.

I'm trying to set an example for the people closest to me, the people who I get to serve and lead and get to work with.

I'm trying to get it as right as I can.

Unfortunately, I'm not nailing all of it.

Okay, I look back at some stuff, okay, from the past and I go, man, you know, that that wasn't the best it could have been.

Okay, it was the best I could do at the time.

It wasn't all bad, but it wasn't all good.

And so I'm trying to learn as much as I can.

Here's what I'm gonna tell you: as flawed as I am, my deep desire is that the people who I love will learn from my life, and I'm doing my best to have as much of that learning be from what I do right, but I love them more than I love my ego.

I love them more.

It's more important to me that they ring every drop of learning, even the stuff what not to do, that they ring every drop out of my life and they end up healthier and better than I am, that I set them up for success.

It's more important that they learn even from the negative than it is that I come out with some legacy that I got it all right.

And so what we see with Moses here is he's leading them methodically through a discipline process of looking at where they've been.

And he's saying two things specifically.

One, don't forget your bondage, because you're out of bondage now, you're free.

But if you mishandle the promised land, you can go back into bondage.

And he's saying, remember your failures so that when you come into something, when you you remember what it was like to be broke now that you got some money.

I know you've got some power now, but remember what it was like when you couldn't move anything.

I know you've got some influence now.

Don't forget what it was like to be invisible, so that you can learn from your failure, learn from your bondage, and you can stay free and you can make better choices moving forward.

So the first thing that he teaches them is remember where you've been.

The second is to remember who you are.

One of the questions a lot of people have is like, well, why were they wandering in the desert for 40 years?

It wasn't a 40-year journey from the Red Sea to the Promised Land.

It shouldn't have taken very long at all.

But they wandered around, and it's kind of a long answer to why they wandered, but a big part of why they wandered around in the desert was because they were unwilling to fight the battles they needed to seize what was theirs.

And part of the reason was because they were intimidated.

If you remember back to an earlier story, um they are right back at this spot at the footstep, they're right at the doorstep of the promised land, and they send out these spies to go basically uh uh do a military assessment.

Let's find out, uh do a little feasibility study here.

Let's go find out how feasible it is for us to go in here.

And so they go to the land and they're like, guys, good news, this land is amazing.

It is prime, okay, it's flowing with milk and honey, it's got you know grapes the size of your fist, it's just it's everything you ever thought.

And he said, But the problem is it's inhabited by giants.

And they said, when we looked at the at them, they looked like giants and we felt like grasshoppers.

And you think about the fact that for generations, 400 years, they'd been in bondage and in captivity to the Egyptians, and coming out of that, God had brought them through the Red Sea, He had brought them to the Promised Land, He had invited them to seize it, but because they they they had a warped view of who they were, they looked in the mirror, they saw a grasshopper, therefore everybody else looked like a giant.

And so their insecurity, it wasn't about the giant in the land, it was about the grasshoppers in their mind.

And so in this process now, Deuteronomy, Moses is standing up in front of this new generation, and and he's he's he's telling them who they are.

Here's what he says in Deuteronomy 7, 6 through 8.

He says, For you are a holy people, people holy to the Lord your God.

The word holy there in Hebrew means sanctuary.

It's like you you are God's sanctuary, you are where his presence dwells.

It says, the Lord your God has chosen you.

Now think about that.

He's saying to a group of people who felt passed over to a group of people who had been in bondage, whose parents and grandparents had been in bondage and could not get the grasshopper mentality out.

They could not move on from it.

He said, I want you, when you think of yourself, don't think of a grasshopper, don't think of uh of somebody who was a slave in Egypt.

He said, I want you to understand this.

You are the one that God chose.

The Lord God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasure possession.

The Lord did not set his, oh, I love this, the Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than the other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples.

In other words, he's saying there's going to be some things mathematically, there's going to be some things logically that are going to make you feel deficient.

You're going to look and see there's more of them than there are of us.

They said, God didn't choose you because you were the smartest, he didn't choose you because you were the biggest, he didn't choose you because you were the best.

He says, he chose you, verse 8, it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.

So what he's doing is he is saying, don't forget not only where you've come from, where you've been, but I want you to remember who you are.

You got to witness firsthand a group of people whose minds were were bound in the insecurity of from their ancestors.

Don't do the same thing.

Think of yourself as God's chosen people.

God chose you, and he didn't choose you because you were the biggest, and he didn't choose you because you were the most.

He picked you because he loved you.

And because he loved you, he chose you.

And he and don't forget, he redeemed you.

Right?

And so it's remembering where you've been, remembering who you are.

And then the third thing is to remember who God is and what God has done.

So a lot of these remember forget nots are about remembering the character of God, remembering that God is a redeemer, and remembering that God is a provider.

So He'll remind them, hey, remember when you were in the wilderness and you didn't know where you were gonna get water, God provided it.

Remember when you didn't know how you were gonna get food, God brought manna.

Remember when whatever you needed, you had it when you needed it.

And yes, there was some paycheck to paycheck season.

You're about to go into a uh a promised land and you're not gonna be paycheck to paycheck anymore, but don't forget what paycheck to paycheck felt like.

Don't forget that God can take that he took care of you.

Don't forget what he provided for you.

Remember God's faithfulness, remember his redemption, remember his provision, and remember his character.

It says in Deuteronomy 4.31, for the Lord your God is a merciful God, he will not abandon and destroy you.

So he's bringing, again, coming back to the love and the character of God.

In Deuteronomy 5.15 it says, Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, the Lord your God brought you out with a mighty hand, redeemer, outstretched arm.

And then he says this, therefore, the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.

Okay?

So what he does here in introducing the Sabbath is giving a system to go with the forget not.

So he says, you know, remember this.

How are you gonna remember it?

He says, every Sabbath, every seven days, because you've got uh things globally going on and you've got things nationally going on, locally, in your home and in your head, you need to consistently come together, and you need to not work, and you need to set those things aside, and you need to hyperfocus on what you need to think about so that that is on the forefront of your mind and it doesn't get drowned out by the Amalekites and the Amorites and the Philistines and the Assyrians and whoever is bearing down on you.

And so he's giving them consistency.

It's not about the legalism of the Sabbath, it's not like, hey, if I miss church or something, God's mad at me.

It's about consistency and systems going with wisdom.

So I want to make sure that I have something consistent.

For some of you, every seven days is not enough.

You need it every day, or you need it three times a day or five times a day, depending on what's going on.

So he's talking about.

Consistency.

Um, I end with this.

Uh, have you ever walked into a room and can't remember why you went in there?

Thank God.

Okay, I see some heads nodding.

It's good, thank you.

Praise God.

Um, you feel like you're losing your mind.

Okay?

I mean, you walk in the room, something told you, hey, I gotta, you're like like a few seconds ago, it's not that long of a walk through the house.

A few seconds ago, you're like, I need to go in that room and get that thing.

And between here and there, you get there and you're like, why am I here?

And then if you're like me, my eyes start darting around the room looking for clues.

I'm looking for something to jog my memory as to why I came in.

And I'm sad to tell you, 99 times out of a hundred, it doesn't jog my memory.

I'm looking around, I'm like, I don't know, and then I walk out and I think I'm nuts.

Uh I think I'm losing my mind.

The reality is you're not losing your mind.

You've got a lot on your mind.

So what happens is just 15 seconds ago, 20 seconds ago, you were crystal clear about what you needed.

You were crystal clear about where you needed to go and what you needed to do.

And you get there, and in that short period of time, you forgot.

And it seems to be happening more these days.

Not sure if I'm just getting older or if I just have more on my mind than ever before.

So think about this.

What is literally happening?

Okay, what's literally happening is in one moment you were extremely clear on where you needed to go and what you needed to do.

And within a few seconds you got there, and other thoughts had crowded out what you were clear about a few seconds ago.

And if it works against us, Moses teaches us to have it work for us.

In this life that we live in, where we are so busy, there's so much messaging.

How do I combat the stress, the anxiety, the fear, the intimidation, the uncertainty, all of it that's overwhelming me, that is consuming me.

If I can forget from one room to the next why I went in there because thoughts are crowding out other thoughts, how about I get the thoughts I'm supposed to have and focus on them so much that there's no room for the thing I'd like to forget?

This is what Moses is doing.

There's a great cross-reference into the New Testament in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, when Jesus gives a parable and he says, it's kind of like this.

There's like um seed, which is God's word, and then there's soil, which is like a human heart, and the soil's fertile, but there are other things.

Like the seed hits the soil and it starts to grow, but then there's other stuff like rocks and thorns and things.

And so then if if you're not careful, uh things get going in life and it gets choked out.

So it's supposed to grow and bear fruit, but but this thorn or this rock caused the roots to not grow deep.

And then he starts to unpack.

Now, this is Jesus Christ talking.

He says, he starts to unpack it and say, Well, what does this all mean?

He said, Sometimes a good person, good soil, gets good word on their heart, it starts to grow.

But then he said, the worries of life.

The pursuit of wealth.

He said, the things, it's not that you're this nasty rebel, it's that you drifted.

It was starting to grow, it was starting to grow, and then something you got too busy, too many messages, focus on the wrong thing, and you forgot to have the repetitive consistency to come back and think what you're supposed to think and focus on what you're supposed to focus so you can feel what you're supposed to feel and do what you're supposed to do.

And so what Moses is doing here is he's setting them up for the promised land.

When you go in there, you're gonna have all kinds of threats, you're gonna be intimidated all the time.

And what I want you to do is consistently remember and forget not what is most important.

Remember where you've been, remember who you are, remember who God is and remember what God has done.

And friend, I want to tell you if this year you get better at reacting to an overwhelmed mind by focusing on some true simple things, you're gonna grow like crazy this year.

Spiritual formation happens most powerfully when God stops having to compete for space in your mind.

Start making room for Him.

And if you start thinking about and remembering and focusing on the simple, true, important things.

You start filling your mind with what you want to remember, there will be no room left for what you want to forget.

Let's take a moment.

And let's let's put this into practice right now.

Let's take a moment.

Go ahead, go ahead and close your eyes right where you're at.

I want you to take a moment just in the quiet of the room, and I'm gonna ask nobody to speak out, yell out anything.

Just let's just have a quiet moment.

I want you to do the first thing we talked about today, which is to think about where you've been.

For some of you, it might be the environment that you grew up in that the Lord has brought you through.

For some of you, it may be bondage that you were once in.

And although life's not perfect today, you look back and go, wow, like maybe, maybe I've forgotten what it's like to be free and I'm free today.

Maybe you look back at failures that were really painful lessons, and you look back at where God has you now.

I want you to just take a moment to ground yourself in where you've been, what God's brought you through.

And who you are not.

He says, remember you were once in bondage, but you are no longer slaves, your sons and daughters.

You are the ones I chose, and I chose you not because you were perfect, not because you were the biggest or the most.

I chose you because I love you.

And for some of us, you have so many messages, so many people treating you all kinds of ways, things causing you to feel like a grasshopper.

And today I want you to, regardless of who said what to you when, to ground yourself in a very simple but very powerful truth.

That he chose you, that he loves you, that he's redeemed you, and he will continue to redeem you.

Now, Lord, we take a moment to do what Moses encouraged a new generation to do.

To remember who you are and what you've done.

Lord, we thank you not only what you've done, redemption, but who you are is a redeemer.

We thank you, Lord, for your provision in our lives.

You provided during wilderness seasons.

You provide the promised land.

Now, Lord, when we eat a meal we used to not be able to afford, when we walk in power when we used to be powerless, Lord, when we experience some good things and some blessings, Lord, we come back to you and we we are reminded of who you are.

We thank you for opening those doors.

We thank you for bringing us out.

We thank you for providing all that we need according to your riches and glory in Christ Jesus.

We thank you for your protection.

We thank you for your faithfulness.

We thank you for your character.

We build our lives on that.

In Jesus' name.

In Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.