Remembrance day talk outline

With thanks to Marc Lloyd for the twist at the end...

Remembrance 2011

November is a month of remembering

5^th – Remember, Remember

11^th – Remembrance

Here in the parish, 13^th and 26^th – King James Bible events re 400 years

Ø  November has lots of remembering                                                    

BUT it’s not just November is it? We humans love remembering:

Birthdays

Anniversaries

Big events like today – Remembrance Sunday                                                                   

One that we often forget is,       the most important – God           -              we humans are good at forgetting our Creator HENCE the Christian Scriptures has a lot about remembering...

The actual word ‘remember’ comes up 166 times

Other forms of remember come up 75 times                     

Ø  The Bible recognises that we’re very forgetful so it urges us, calls us to remember... to remember the important things in life and in our Scripture reading today we have one of the more famous things we are to remember – Ecclesiastes 12:1...

§  God wants us to start remembering early as later in life it’s harder – “troubles come”

·         Illustration: think of some of the young folk who went to war. What sorts of horrors did they experience/witness? How easy then to seek God? As you grow older, it gets harder to remember

Ø  Therefore remember God/seek Him today

Surprisingly however although the Bible keeps telling us to remember, in it we discover that God forgets. Scriptures repeatedly tells us to ‘remember remember’ BUT, God in fact forgets – Here is what God forgets...

“I will forgive their wickedness and remember their sins no more” (Hebrews 8:12)

 For those who are in Jesus Christ, God our Creator says I will forgive and forget your sinfulness – He will stop remembering them completely which is not to say that God is absent minded, as we so are. Rather, God promises that He will not to call to mind the sins of those who believe in Jesus. Yes, he knows all about them, but he doesn’t relate to us on the basis of them. God forgives and “forgets”. He doesn’t hold our sins against us if we cast ourselves on his mercy.

That surely is worth remembering.