Are We Forgetting God?
You have forgotten God your Savior; you have not remembered the Rock, your fortress. Therefore, though you
set out the finest plants and plant imported vines, though on the day you set them out, you make them grow,
and on the morning when you plant them, you bring them to bud, yet the harvest will be as nothing in the day
of disease and incurable pain. -Isaiah 17
Are We Forgetting God?
The holidays are over . . . Now it’s time to get back to normal. Take down the decorations, pay the credit card bills, check out our new gifts, put the bags of ripped wrapping paper in the garbage, finish up the eggnog, watch someone else’s team in the NFL playoffs, and catch up on our rest by skipping church to sleep in Sunday . . . Wait! What was that last one?
We used to laugh about people who only came to church for Christmas and Easter. But it really was just a small percentage of the folks gathered. The attendance at church was larger because everyone came. The people who came every week, came; those who came three times a month, came; those who only came once or twice a month, came. So on the holidays, everyone came, and the church was full. Plus we had a few extras who only came a couple times a year.
But now it isn’t funny anymore. People are giving up on church, giving up on faith, giving up on God. It isn’t so much a conscious choice, but rather a long, slow drift. Those every week people are only coming two or three times a month. The once or twice a month people are coming every couple months. . . and little by little, we are forgetting God. He gets lost in the hustle, the business, the work and play of life. We end up with a Holiday God. Christmas, Easter, baptism, confirmation, weddings and funerals. But is that good enough? In Isaiah it tells us when Israel forgot God they witnessed the things in life they wanted blessed (their work, homes and families) were cursed instead. Is that where we want to go?
This happened before. Actually at the birth of our nation less than 20% of Americans regularly attended church. It grew to nearly 40% by the Civil War, but dropped back to less than one in three in the late 1800s. The high point was 30 to 60 years ago when two-thirds of Americans were involved in a church. In the Bible, we read consistently of the people turning to God, and then turning away. The low point was when they began a blessed life in Israel that ended in slavery. When Moses arrived to call them to the Promised Land, they had almost forgotten God. Over the next 40 years they learned to love, embrace and follow God again and they were blessed.
So over the next few weeks we will look at these stories from the desert to discover how we can turn back to God and stop the drift in our lives and turn back to God.
Pastor Tom