BELIEVERS REMEMBER THE LORD’S BLESSINGS
Deuteronomy 26:5-10 March 9, 2003
Deuteronomy 26:5-10
5 Then you shall declare before the LORD your God: "My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. 6 But the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, putting us to hard labor. 7 Then we cried out to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our mis-ery, toil and oppression. 8 So the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an out-stretched arm, with great terror and with miraculous signs and wonders. 9 He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; 10 and now I bring the firstfruits of the soil that you, O LORD, have given me." Place the basket before the LORD your God and bow down before him.
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Dearest Fellow-Redeemed and Saints in the Lord:
Today’s text reminds us to have a good memory. As we age, sometimes our memory about certain events becomes a bit fuzzy and we forget. About other events, our memory often stays quite sharp and we never forget. That’s what the Lord would have us contemplate today…that we would always remember and never forget all of the things He has done for us. As we start this Lenten season, that is actually what we do. We remember very clearly and poignantly all the things that Jesus did in order to pay the price for our sins. The psalm writer talks about all the blessings God has given us in Psalm 103. "Praise the LORD, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits"(PSALM 103:1,2). The rest of the psalm (go home today and look at it) talks about the benefits of forgive-ness, of eternal life and salvation. That’s what Moses reminds us of in our text today…that we would forget not all the benefits of the Lord. We want to look at these words of God in the theme
BELIEVERS REMEMBER THE LORD’S BLESSING
I. The Lord hears our cry and delivers
II. We worship our Lord with our best
I. The Lord hears our cry and delivers
Deuteronomy is, in a sense, not real interesting reading if you are reading it. It gives all the rules and regulations concerning worship. It talks about the number of sacrifices, the kind of sacri-fices, when they ought to be brought, when they ought to be offered and for what sin, for what rea-son they ought to be given. These offerings really don’t apply to us today. There are a lot of rules and regulations. Chapter 26 is in the middle of those rules concerning worship. It talks about the rules concerning offerings. It says to bring those offerings to the priest in a basket. In our text it says:
5 Then you shall declare before the LORD your God: "My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, power-ful and numerous. As they brought their offerings, they were to remember the Lord’s blessings. They were to say, ‘Our father was a wandering Aramean.’ Jacob, when he came to Egypt, (re-member he came there after the great famine and Joseph had his family brought to Egypt) there wasn’t a great number of Israelites. They came there in great humility. They came before God with their offerings in humility, realizing they were a small nation. The Lord blessed them. What did He say? They became a great nation, powerful and numerous. And so it was, the Israelites were blessed in the land of Egypt, a land that wasn’t their own, a land in which they were aliens and strangers. The fact is they became so powerful; they became so great that the Egyptians were scared of them. The Egyptians didn’t know what to do with this great and powerful nation of the Hebrews. They put them to work. They made them slaves, building the pyramids and other great monuments. The people cried out to the Lord God of our fathers. 6 But the Egyptians mis-treated us and made us suffer, putting us to hard labor. You may remember that when they com-plained, they put them to even harder labor. Pharaoh demanded them to double their output.
When they complained, Pharaoh told them to gather their own straw to make the bricks. Next we are told: 7 Then we cried out to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression. The people realized they needed help. They called out to the Lord and He heard them. He looked at the children of Israel and saw their mis-ery—which they were suffering at the hands of the Egyptians their toil, their oppression from their slave-masters, the Egyptians. The Lord heard, He saw, He listened, and He helped them. 8 So the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with miraculous signs and wonders. Just about everyone knows of those plagues that came…the snake, the water that turned to blood, the pestilence, the hail, the darkness…miraculous signs and wonders. The Lord showed that He was powerful. Even Pharaoh had to acknowledge that this God of the Hebrews was the true God. He admitted that, even though he had hardened his heart and would not let the people go. Finally, with great terror, the children of Israel were sent away af-ter the first-born of every one was put to death. Except for the Hebrews for they were passed over by the angel of death. The people remembered the Lord’s blessings. They remembered as they came before the Lord’s altar and brought to Him their offerings.
We also remember the Lord’s blessings. We look at our life and we see that it has been blessed abundantly in an earthly way. The Lord would also have us remember that the blessings that He provides for us are beyond even earthly things—they are also spiritual. Yet we become attached to this world. Sometimes as we remember the Lord’s blessings, we cry out to the Lord and demand even more of Him, as if we did not have enough. Sometimes we ask for things that aren’t so appropriate. Sometimes, we may even forget to ask and just expect them because that’s really just the world in which we live. We’ve grown up having been given the very best and always expect the best. We stomp our feet when we don’t get the very best. The Lord reminds us that we need to cry out first. Listen to this from James. "You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God"(JAMES 4:2). The Lord does indeed know what we need, but He also wants us to ask, to come to Him with our prayers to seek His help. He wants us to sit down and take an ac-count of our life and see what we really need, not just what we want.
What do we really need for our lives? List those things and then come before Him and ask. Our Lord is a gracious God. He loves to hear our prayers. He loves it when we come to Him and speak to Him with our heartfelt needs. He loves that because He is anxious to hear us. More than that, He is anxious to deliver us as we cry out. He hears us and delivers us and He does so in a very miraculous way just as He did for the Israelites. Paul writes to us in Ephesians: "God is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us"(EPHESIANS 3:20). He reminds us that sometimes we ask for very small things in comparison to the greatness of God. God is able to do more than we would ask. He’s able to do more than we could even imagine. Again, the Lord wants us to focus on those things that are spiritual. A good model that we have is the Lord’s Prayer. We look at the Lord’s Prayer, and when we pray that, we divide it up into the seven petitions (the seven parts) and of those seven petitions, all of them ask for spiritual things except for one. The fourth petition says ‘give us this day our daily bread’ and in essence does not ask for daily bread but reminds us to be thankful for the daily bread that God gives to us. The Lord reminds us as we ask that we remember the Lord’s blessings and as we cry out, to ask for those things spiritual which are more than we sometimes imagine, and which the Lord is more than anxious to give us.
During Lent we remember the Lord’s blessings. We remember like the children of Israel—they cried out for deliverance. The Lord raised up Moses and they were delivered. For genera-tions the people cried out for deliverance and finally the Lord sent His Son as our Savior. We are delivered! We are delivered from the power of sin. Satan no longer controls us and even death itself has been abolished. "He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us"(2 CORINTHIANS 1:10). He has de-livered us from all those enemies. He continues to deliver us day by day from temptations. He protects us from harm and danger. On Him we put our hope as we remember our blessings from the past that He continues to deliver us. He doesn’t just deliver us once and then forget about us. The Lord is constantly delivering us, protecting us, guiding us and directing us.
As believers, we remember the Lord’s blessings. We remember that whenever we cry out, He hears us and delivers us. Our reaction is just like the children of Israel in that we worship the Lord with our best.
II. We worship the Lord with our best
The children of Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years. They ate manna, the same food, day after day. There was always enough. The Lord provided for them. They were de-livered from their enemies, the Egyptians. It’s worth reading that again…8 So the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with miraculous signs and wonders. They crossed the Red Sea on dry ground. What happened? Pharaoh and his army were destroyed. Because of that, the remaining Egyptians also realized the God of the He-brews was the true and living God. Because of that miraculous deliverance, the Israelites wan-dered in the wilderness, the nations around them (their enemies) also realized that here comes the Hebrews, here come the children of Israel whom the Lord delivered from the Egyptians. They saw the signs and wonders and understood that this was the true God.
9 He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; Con-sider that…for a generation, they walked in the wilderness. For a generation, they had no place to call home. Now they came to a land flowing with milk and honey, a land which the Lord had given to them, which He had promised to their fathers and now was theirs to live in. What was their reac-tion? They come to worship and bring their offerings. 10 and now I bring the firstfruits of the soil that you, O LORD, have given me." They came with the very firstfruits they had—a basketful we’re told. It wasn’t anything they had done, was it? It says, ‘that you have given me, O Lord, I bring you back the firstfruits.’ They worshipped the Lord with the very best—their offerings. Then he says: Place the basket before the LORD your God and bow down before him. They bring the basket and put it before the Lord, knowing that it was the Lord who gave it to them in the first place. Then they bowed down and worshipped before the Lord. This is their reaction as they re-membered the blessings of the Lord who they cried out to and delivered them and brought them to the Promised Land.
It is to be our reaction too, as believers today. None of us has to go through the wanderings as the Israelites did. None of us has had to eat for forty years the same meal. As we look around us we realize, that if indeed, there were ever a promised land, it is our land. Not only is it a land flowing with milk and honey, we would say it is a land overflowing with milk and honey. We live in a land of excess. We don’t have just enough to get by; we have plenty and even more than enough. At times, it might seem like we don’t. The world says we don’t have enough. We’ve al-ways got to have more. We’ve got to have better things, bigger things and more things. Some-times we’re a little dissatisfied with this life or think, ‘How are we going to be ready for the future?’ We know the Lord has provided for us in the past, He provides for us now. He continues to help us and will continue to help us to the end of our life or to the end of time, whichever comes first. We need to remind ourselves to remember the Lord’s great blessings, of how He helps us. An-other blessing is how He helps us to enjoy life. From Ecclesiastes we read: "Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work--this is a gift of God"(ECCLESIASTES 5:19). You may want to ask yourself, ‘Are we enjoying life? Are we happy in what we are doing?’ This is a gift of God. Even though the world would say we don’t have enough, we have to try harder, we have to work ourselves almost to death, the Lord says sit back and enjoy the blessed land we have been given.
Remember the promises of God that He has made and that He has fulfilled in our life. Then, as we reflect on that, (especially during Lent) we reflect on the sacrifice of Christ, His only Son, our Savior, we realize that He has given us everything. As our lesson said, if He is willing to give up His Son, isn’t He going to give us everything? Yes, He is! We react, then, with worship that is our very best because the Lord gave us His very best. We are moved because of His great love for us to love Him in return. We are moved as He gave us everything to give back what He deserves. It begins with our worship. "Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise--the fruit of lips that confess his name"(HEBREWS 13:15). He says to us a number of things here. Guard our tongues, offer blessing instead of cursing, and offer to God a sacrifice of praise from lips that confess His name. We offer Him our very best when the name of Jesus is on our lips.
We offer our very best in our gifts and in our offerings. In the Old Testament, they had all of these rules and regulations concerning their giving. The Lord says we give because He first loved us. That’s all He says. He reminds us, as believers in this world, that we give of our firstfruits…not of our excess, not what’s left over (which I think sometimes happens). We become caught up in the philosophy of the world in that we have to take care of our future and ourselves…otherwise; we’re not doing our job. The Lord says, ‘Give me your firstfruits and I will take care of all of the rest.’ From Luke (we had this a month ago): "Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the meas-ure you use, it will be measured to you"(LUKE 6:38). If we measure out to God in our offerings what is left over, you could expect that God could measure out to us His blessings of what’s left over. If we measure out to God what is second best after we’ve taken care of ourselves, we could expect God to do the same to us. We’re thankful that the Lord gives us always His best and He reminds us to do the same…not under compulsion, not under obligation, not because we have to, but because we want to. God loves a cheerful giver. As we remember God’s blessings, we see we are not short in anything. He has given us more than we can ask or imagine.
The Lord says it’s good to remember those things that are important. Yes, our memory grows fuzzy as we grow older because we don’t need to remember certain things. When it comes to the things of God, He says to remember all of His blessings. Remember that day in and day out, year after year and generation after generation, as we cry out, our God hears us and He deliv-ers us. As we remember that, that the Lord has taken care of everything for our parents and grandparents, He will do the same for us, He will do it for our children, then we also remember to worship the Lord with our very best. Just as Isaiah says: "In that day they will say, ’Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the LORD, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation’"(ISAIAH 25:9). The Lord says, ‘Let us rejoice and be glad in our sal-vation’ as we remember all of the blessings that He has provided and as we worship Him with our very best. Amen.
Pastor Timm O. Meyer
