One of the good gifts that God has given to human beings is that of memory.
Remembering our own personal past is absolutely vital to knowing who we are and having a sense of personal identity. We all know how diseases that ravage a person’s memory destroy the ability of that person to function in any meaningful way in the present.
The same holds true for communities and nations. When a nation forgets its past and where it has come from, it finds itself completely disoriented and ultimately unable to move ahead into the future. Of course, like any good gift in our fallen world, this gift of remembering can be abused. It can bind a person, and even a community, to the past in hopeless regret or unforgiving bitterness or even vengeful hatred.
Ignorance and vulnerability
But if it is true that knowledge of the past is vital to meaningful living in the present and the future, and I believe it is, then evangelicals in the West face a very uncertain future, for we are living in a day when knowledge of our past as evangelical Christians is abysmally low. Who were our forebears and what did they believe? What was their experience of God and how did that shape the churches they founded, churches which we have inherited?
Far too many Western evangelicals neither know nor do they care. In this regard, they are actually indistinguishable from Western culture, which is passionately in love with the present, eagerly anticipating the future and totally disinterested in the past, or if nodding interest is shown in the past it is used as a vehicle for escapist entertainment. There is no serious grappling with the past to derive wisdom for the present or the future. Evangelical forgetfulness of the past is thus a species of worldliness.
Remembering is vitally important
The Scriptures, on the other hand, make much of remembering:
• Deuteronomy 24.9: ‘Remember what the LORD your God did to Miriam on the way as you came out of Egypt.’
• 1 Chronicles 16.12 / Psalm 105.5: ‘Remember the wondrous works that he [that is, the Lord] has done, his miracles and the judgments he uttered.
• Luke 17.32: ‘Remember Lot’s wife.’
• Hebrews 13.7: ‘Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.’ Note that this call to remembrance comes after the longest chapter in Hebrews, chapter 11, where God’s heroes of faith are remembered.
500 years
In this year of 2017, exactly 500 years after Martin Luther initiated what we call the Reformation by nailing the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg in Germany, we will take each month to remember different significant events and people from that movement of revival and reform. We do so because the events of the Reformation have given rise to the host of evangelical churches that exist today.
If the events of those revolutionary years had not happened, things would be quite different today. We are going to remember that era not only to gain a better idea of where we have come from, but also because people from that day can give us wisdom and guidance in the present.
Three important questions
Speaking concisely, the Reformation was necessary because people during the Middle Ages forgot the answers to three very important questions:
• What saves a person from judgment and hell?
• Who saves us from judgment and hell?
• How do we know the answers to these two questions?
In the months to come in this quincentennial year of the Reformation, we will see how the Reformation answered these three very important questions and remember the glorious things that God did at that time – and this to his praise and glory!
