December 6, 2023
Author: Pastor Gordon Cook
December 06, 2023
“Therefore I intend always to remind you of these
qualities, though you know them and are established in the truth that
you have. I think it right, as long as I am in this body, to stir you up
by way of reminder.”
2 Peter 1:12, 13
I will never forget an experience I had in Canada. I might have been
in my second or third year of Bible College or first year at the
academy. During the summer in Toronto I would sometimes preach in local
churches and I was asked to preach in a church in a town called Delhi,
Ontario, that’s the heart of tobacco country in Ontario. While I was
preaching, there was a fellow to my right, a middle-aged individual, by
himself, and it appeared while I was preaching that he was having a
Bible study. After the sermon I asked him, “Can I ask you what you were
doing?” He said, “I was having a Bible Study. I wasn’t listening to you
because I had heard that all before.” So he did not want to hear what I
had to say. He had not heard that sermon, but he had heard that subject
of holiness and thought, “I have heard that before, why do I need to
hear it again?” But the question would be, “Don’t we always need to be
reminded when it comes to the things of God?”
The Ten
Commandments are repeated in the Bible. The Lord’s Prayer is repeated
twice, it’s given by our Lord in Matthew 6 and Luke 11, two different
occasions where Jesus repeated himself. And then Jesus, en route to
Jerusalem with his disciple friends, he repeats himself to them three
times. Remember he tells them three times, “I am going to the cross and I
am going to be resurrected on the third day.” So you could say, “Jesus
understood the importance of repeat, repeat, repeat. But in spite of the
repetition they forgot or maybe they didn’t even hear. Why is that the
case? Because of sin. We are prone to wander and we are prone to forget.
Dr. Albert Mohler talks about the Noetic effects of the fall. I
think it comes from the Greek word, noose. He mentions fourteen
different ways in which the mind has been effected by the fall or by
sin. Here are some of them: wrong thinking, distractions, intellectual
fatigue, intellectual apathy, intellectual pride, and forgetfulness is
on the list.
Do you think that Adam and Eve in the garden had a
problem of remembering? I don’t think so, it’s an effect of the fall.
Peter understood the importance of reminding us, “I am going to stir you
up to remember.”
We should do that frequently for ourselves. If
you have children it is a good idea to repeat things to them. And on
Wednesday nights we often go back to the Lord’s Day and seek to remind
ourselves of what we heard. It’s easy to forget what we heard.
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