Bright Spot: Don't forget our relationship with God
People who are fast approaching 70 give a bit of thought to becoming forgetful. There are so many precious memories we don’t want to lose. To lighten the mood on this serious subject, I will often joke that my problem isn’t forgetting, it’s that I remember too much.
Just so we don’t forget God.
Abraham Lincoln warned us about this possibility in November 1863, in the midst of the horrors of our Civil War, as he called our nation to prayer and repentance: “We have been recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever known. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand, which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings, were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.”
Ben Franklin, not exactly known as a conservative Christian, nevertheless exhorted us not to forget God as the Constitutional Convention ground to a stalemate: “We shall be divided by our little partial local interests, our projects will be confounded; and we ourselves should become a by-word down to future ages..I therefore beg to move prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, to be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate at these services.”
Our spiritual forefathers, the Jews, were exhorted by God not to let success make them complacent and self-satisfied so that they forgot Him: “When the Lord your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers ... to give you – a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant – then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the Lord God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery … Remember how the Lord your God led you ... when you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God ... you will become satisfied ... then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God …” (Deuteronomy 6:10-12; 8:2, 10-14).
It seems that what these statesmen were warning us against more than forgetting is the arrogance that comes from thinking we did it on our own. That sets us up for unhealthy self-satisfaction and forgetting God.
Forgetting is a two sided coin, as is satisfaction. Some things we’d like to forget. Being satisfied keeps us from coveting and an inability to enjoy and rest in our accomplishments. But self-satisfaction can make us forget God.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke like an Old Testament prophet when he warned America and all the Western world that it was imperiled because it had forgotten God, in his infamous speech at Harvard that stunned the world: “My people have committed two sins; they have forsaken the spring of living water {Me] ... my people have forgotten me.” (Jeremiah 2:13, 32)
He’s the Nobel Prize-winning Russian novelist who spent years in Soviet concentration camps for severely criticizing Communism and all those regimes in his homeland. It proved to be a message people did not want to hear.
Rick Sams is pastor emeritus at Alliance Friends Church.
This article originally appeared on The Alliance Review: Bright Spot: Don't forget our relationship with God
