Remember, Forget, Trust, Press Onward!

December 26, 2021 Sermon Isaiah 43:16-21, Jeremiah 29:10-14, Philippians 3:10-14

“Remember, Forget, Trust, Press Onward!”

I hope you are having a meaningful Christmas, where you find yourself drawing near to God or longing to draw near to God.

And here’s the thing about the meaning of the incarnation of Christ, about the love of God so scandalously expressed in His coming to this planet to be one of us. It is overwhelmingly beautiful. And I mean overwhelming.

When we take it in, when we let it in, when we take it personally as God intends us to take it, it can’t help but stir something in us. The message of the gospel, and of its component parts, including the nativity should stir something in us. It can and does transform people by the Holy Spirit as they, as we take it in.

Today we’re going to look at the 3 passages that were read earlier today, because they can help us understand what has happened in our lives, in our world, up to now, and they can help us know what to expect in 2022.

Isaiah 43:16-21 16 This is what the Lord says—he who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters, 17 who drew out the chariots and horses, the army and reinforcements together, and they lay there, never to rise again, extinguished, snuffed out like a wick: 18 “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. 19 See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. 20 The wild animals honor me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen, 21 the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.

Isaiah is speaking these words to the people of God who had experienced oppression for 400 years at the hands of the Egyptians. They cried out to God in the midst of their slavery to that nation, and God heard their cry.

Isaiah is reminding the people of the way that God delivered the people from oppression - that He caused them to go out from Egypt and then, quite spectacularly, he delivered them through the parting of the Red Sea.

Now in the moment as that was happening, Pharaoh's army fully expected to crush God’s people who they assumed were pinned between that vast army and the treacherous waters of the sea.

God instead, get this, miraculously parted the sea, enabled the people to walk through the sea bed effectively on dry land, and then as the Egyptian army followed them into the waters, those soldiers and chariots and horses were swept away by those same waters, released from their miraculous suspension by God.

So the army laid there in the aftermath, never to rise again, extinguished, snuffed out like a wick. Isaiah is reminding the people that this is how God delivered them before. This is how God demonstrated his power and his love for his people. He saved them from destruction, and turned the evil intent of Pharaoh back on himself. This is the One who speaks. And what does God say?

“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past”. See, here is where knowing the fuller story of the people of God comes in handy. You see, after the great deliverance that God gave His people, after this miraculous saving of their lives, the people messed up.

They forgot. They forgot the God who delivered them. Not a future generation. Not people like us who look back on the narrative of the miracle, who need to choose whether or not we believe the story.

But the very ones who experience this miracle, this extraordinary grace of God...they forgot, in very short order, and began instead to worship something they made with their own hands. They exchanged their miracle for literally nothing.

And sadly, as Isaiah is writing, he’s remembering the initial forgetting that the ones delivered from bondage. He’s remembering how that forgetting of God and chasing after false idols - that became a common practice of God’s people. It became normal to reject the God who delivered them.

I find that so sad...for them. But if I pause and think just for a moment, I realize that that same quality of forgetting is in me. God’s chosen people - arguably the best of humanity - rejected him in their daily lives. They minimized. They turned away. And, sadly, that impulse is one that I have to daily reject as I take up my cross, deny myself and follow Jesus. I think that’s why Jesus said: