sermonette: Lessons on Remembering

John W. Ritenbaugh
Given 09-Nov-02; Sermon #583s; 17 minutes

Perhaps one of the best proofs that we are listening rather than merely hearing is whether we remember well enough to put into action.

I am getting older, as all of you are, and I find that as I get older, that my memory, which in the past has usually been pretty good, is failing me. There are times that I walk from one room to another fully having something in mind that I want to do, and I get into that other room, and I pause, and say to myself, “Why did I come here?” And what I have to do is repeat my steps and go back to see if I can recapture that thought that started me on that little journey.

But I find that I lose track of things that happened recently. Evelyn can tell me in the morning to pick her up at such-and-such a time, but I have found now that unless I have Diane remind me, writing me notes, putting it on the front of my computer, the chances are very great that I am going to forget to go pick her up. I need help.

But on the other hand, something that maybe happened 6 months ago, or better still, something that happened maybe even 50 or 60 years ago, I remember like it just happened yesterday. I guess it is a quirk that takes place in your brain as you are getting older. And maybe there is a kind of law of compensation there. Maybe those things that are close we do not even really need to remember.

One of the outstanding examples that I have witnessed with my own eyes and ears of memory, happened to us following a feast day here in this area when a number of us, I believe that there were 15 of us all together, went to a restaurant in one of the shopping centers up there on Highway 51. The restaurant was an Italian one called Los Piada. They featured rotisserie chicken. That is what piada means, apparently, in Italian. And we all went in there, and they lined up a long row of tables for us, and we were sitting all around it.

Well, here comes this young Japanese fellow, working in this Italian restaurant, and he takes our order. All 15 of them. He never wrote down one thing. I mean, he took everything—wine, salad, the kind of salad dressing, the meals that people wanted, the vegetables, and everything else! And he got it all right! You know, it was all apparently up here.

I was impressed. You can see it really affected me. “Wow! Why can’t I do something like that?”

But forgetfulness has a very serious side to it. Those of you familiar with the Bible know that (especially I think that is in Deuteronomy, and also in the Psalms) the word remember or the words forget not appear very often.

Now, people who study into these things tell us that within one hour of hearing something like a sermon, we lose about 10% of what we heard. And then we have to remember to add to that, that we really did not hear everything. Within 24 hours we have lost about 70%. And after that, the decline is small, and we will eventually retain for normal use only about 10% or less of what we hear.

We had a very fine Feast of Tabernacles. But the only way that we can receive a lasting benefit is to remember the inspiration, the encouragement, the correction, the enjoyment that we had in fellowship, the instruction in righteousness, the counsel and advice that was given to us in the course of those sermons.

Now when we think about life, what is it? Is it not a long series of experiences, one upon another? And we understand from God's Word that what He wants to do is make each and every one of these experiences (as much as we possibly can) a series of character-building situations. But it is very difficult to build character if we do not remember what we were told to do. And instead we fall back upon habits that have been ingrained in us in the past; those things that as we age begin to be more readily called the mind, or easily called to mind, than the things that we just had recently.

Again, these people, who study into these things say that everything that has happened in our experience is recorded in our minds. And yet we forget much of what has occurred within our experiences. So it begins to become very clear that it is human to forget. And there are some things that maybe we should forget.

But a lot of times forgetfulness is really nothing more than laziness, or as Evelyn accuses me, I am just not listening. And that is probably true (most of the time anyway). And now that my hearing is kind of losing its sharp edge, I need all the more focus of attention to be able to hear what she says, or anybody else says.

There are even some things that we do not want to remember, and so we put them out of our minds purposefully. But in many cases unfortunately, we are then consigned to continuing to make the same mistakes over and over again.

Now I mentioned to you that there is a serious side to this. In Jeremiah the second chapter and in verse 29, He says,

Jeremiah 2:29-32 "Why will you plead with Me? You all have transgressed against Me," says the LORD. "In vain I have chastened your children; they received no correction. [That is, they resist it.] Your sword has devoured your prophets like a destroying lion. O generation, see the word of the LORD! Have I been a wilderness to Israel, or a land of darkness? [Something that cannot give back to them.] Why do My people say, 'We are lords; we will come no more to You'? [Now here is the part that is really poignant.] Can a virgin forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire? Yet My people have forgotten Me days without number.”

The Israelitish people do not even know who they are. They know nothing about their real heritage; that they are truly descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and David and all of those great names in the Bible are ancestors of ours. Our identity has been lost through the years because as the Israelites were making their trip from their captivity to the lands that God set aside for us, they forgot who they were. And they have not been able to pass that on.

We are suffering because of that, because we will not acknowledge the fact that we are the Israelites of the Bible. And maybe it is especially a problem for us, because Joseph named his oldest child, “Forgetting.”

We are Manasseh. Now that can be taken two different ways—positively and negatively. And I am sure that Joseph intended it positively, because he named him “forgetting.” (How would you like that for a name? Forgetting! Here forgetting! Come on over here!) But he did that because he was forgetting the pain and anguish of his early years in Egypt, and of what happened to him when his brothers threw him in the pit and then sold him into captivity.

And so, in order to never forget that, he named his son Manasseh—forgetting. I think that he did that to remind himself to never forget who he was, so that he would remain humble, and a servant of both God and the people of Egypt. That—Israel has forgotten. We very easily forget.

Now again, those people who study into this subject say that there are three basic laws to help one remember a lot better.

• The Law of Impression

• The Law of Association

• The Law of Repetition

Now, the law of impression is probably the most important. What it involves is the principle of getting a vivid picture in one's mind. Now in order to do this, one cannot be daydreaming all the time. And so, one has to be concentrating on what one is doing at the time in order to get the most vivid impression in the mind as possible.

I want to have you turn to Exodus 19 simply because it shows what God did in order to get the most vivid impression possible into the minds of the Israelites when He gave the law.

Exodus 19:16 Then it came to pass on the third day, in the morning, that there were thunderings and lightnings, and a thick cloud on the mountain; and the sound of the trumpet was very loud, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled.

Now the way to get the most and vivid—the best impressions—is to involve as many senses as possible at the moment you are trying to remember something. Look what God did here. He involved the eyes and the ears and the feelings, at the very least, of these people, because of the dark clouds, the lightnings that were flashing, the trumpet that was sounding, and the ground that was shaking.

What is so incredible is that Psalm 78 says that they forgot. I think that in our vanity we would think that we would never do such a thing. We could never go through the Red Sea and ever forget that situation. We could never stand there at the base of Mount Sinai and know that God was up on the top of that mountain, and it was shaking all over the place and going off maybe like a volcano. We would never forget that. But they did. And it is possible for us to forget as well.

Regardless of how vivid things are in our experience in living, there is the possibility that we will override it, and forget.

Well, in order to support that, it has to be followed with the law of association. I want you to turn to James 1.

James 1:22-24 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was.

So the law of association reinforces the law of impression so that after we get an impression, the next thing that has to be done is to do something that will associate the impression to something that is happening in your life. And growth occurs when associations are made and applied. So in order to do this, impressions must be analyzed, evaluated, and then associated with the self and the self's experience, so that it becomes personal to you.

Now the third thing is the law of repetition.

II Peter 1:12 For this reason I will not be negligent to remind you always of these things, though you know and are established in the present truth.

And so, in order to reinforce the others, things have to be done over and over and over again, and fresh associations and fresh impressions made all the time. God does this: every Saturday we keep the Sabbath. That is a repetition. We keep the feasts in the same manner, always repeating the same general things even though new things come up and new impressions can be made.

So there are the three laws. They have to be actively done. We have to do this consciously. We have to get a vivid impression, make associations, and then deliberately repeat things over and over again to engrave them deeply in our mind.