I Remember You

Jeremiah 2: ‘I Remember You’ Oct 09

Thesis: God remembers our devotion.

Introduction: I remember hearing the sad story of a young man who climbed mountains, swam rivers, rowed over oceans and crossed deserts to prove his love to his girl, and when he returned home she had already married someone else. Saying you love someone is one thing, doing it is another.

To say we love God is one thing, to live it is another. Israel had at one time loved God and followed the Lord, but now their love had begun to decrease. Their passion was fading.

What about your relationship to God? Is your passion for Christ fading? What do we do when we find this is happening in our lives? Lets take a look together at what the prophet Jeremiah had to say to those ancient people whose love had faded.

I. The Courtship

Do you remember your courtship? Remember how sweet it was when you first started dating? Remember how he would buy you gifts and take you out and you would flutter your eyes and smile so sweetly? I know some of you haven’t yet made it to the point of courting the one your going to marry so I just want you to know you have a lot to look forward to.

God calls to the people of Israel’s mind a time when they had a relationship much like a courtship. They were to remember a time when God was taking them places and they were so in love with Him they followed Him wherever He led. They were to recall a time in their relationship with God when they were devoted to the Lord, God was first in their lives, and the Lord was their protector.

A. They were to remember where God brought them from.

1. He brought them up out of Egypt. That means God delivered them from being enslaved.

It seems some people would rather be enslaved than be free. Numbers 11:5 recounts the sad plea, ‘We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic:’ They didn’t eat for free in Egypt, they were in bondage. They had a faulty memory. For some reason they couldn’t remember the taskmasters and laboring over making the bricks. They didn’t remember the bitterness. They didn’t remember the tears or the fears they lived with.

It is too often that way with us. For some inexplicable reason we forget the sorrow sin brings. We begin to toy with it. We begin to think that we wont have any problems. We somehow convince ourselves that bad things only happen to other people.

I Cor. 10 tells us, ‘Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, upon who the end of the worlds have come.’ When we read the OT and the account of the children of Israel and the mistakes they made, we need to understand that those things were written to help us avoid the same mistakes. Sadly we are too often like the child who rebels against the parents even though the parent has poured his or heart out and told the child from personal experience the pain of some bad decisions.

God calls us to remember the love we once had. We are reminded of Jesus words to the church at Ephesus in Revelation 3. The Lord says to the church, ‘Nevertheless I have this against you, that you have left your first love.’ Have you left your first love?

Some 30 years before John penned this letter to the church at Ephesus, the Apostle Paul had written the same church and commended them for their love for all the saints. What had happened to them in those 30 years that caused them to leave their first love?

God remembers what you were like when you first gave your life to the Lord Jesus. What has happened to you to cause your passion for Christ to dwindle, diminish or die?

II. The Change

We also see the Lord ask a question of the Israelites. He ask, ‘What injustice have your fathers found in Me, that they have gone so far from me.’ The question God is asking is what has He done, if anything, to cause them to walk away from Him. The question assumes, because the Israelites had abandoned God, He must have done some injustice to them. I wonder the same thing about us. What has God done to so many who have seemingly abandoned Him and ceased to love Him.

Lets think about what God has done?

A. He delivers from bondage. He had delivered the Israelites from bondage. How awful of God to hear the cries of His people and act to deliver them from bondage. Who could imagine such a thing? God is terrible isn’t He?