Talk About Them

 

            “Let’s pray that God gives us some good fish”, my son said this with a smile, knowing what I was going to say before I even said it. “Don’t forget to hold onto your rod during the prayer”. Giggles from several children as they remember Grandpa’s story about his rod being jerked right out of his hands during fervent prayers for fishing blessings.

            “Do you remember?”, my father asks it every single time we pass the old field. “Yes, Dad, God set that field on fire to answer our prayers for gas money. We prayed, with zero dollars in our pockets, and God sent us someone to help who would not say no to compensating the saving of his field.

            “Remember when Dennis did not even know it was formula? We told God we had no food for Ruth and no money to buy any, and went to church expecting God to send help…remember? Dennis didn’t even know what it was God was sending us. Remember he said, “I think this is baby stuff…and we knew it was formula?’

            “Remember when Great-Grandpa saw the German mortars coming right at the tank and cried out ‘Stop it Jesus?’ Then the mortars would fall right out of the sky.”

            “Remember when Great-Great Grandpa was getting run over by the wagon and he screamed ‘help me Jesus’, then gigantic hands showed upon thin air and lifted the wagon wheel over his head?”

            “Remember when God told us to pay off your house today, now do it today? When we obeyed, our entire neighborhood, saved and unsaved, ended up glorifying God and talking God’s power over even mortgages?

            Remember, remember, remember………

            Biblically God mandates us to remember. He asks us to remind our children and to talk about him and the things he has done. He asks us to attach the memories to specific places, events, and activities. Joshua 4:5b-7a says, “Each of you, lift up a stone on his shoulder to match the number of the tribes of the Israelites. This will be a symbol among you. In the future when your children ask, what do these stones mean to you?’ Then you will tell them that the water of Jordan was cut off before the Lord’s covenant chest”. I Samuel 7:12, tells us, “Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Jeshanah. He named it Ebenezer, explaining, ‘The Lord helped us at this point’.  Deuteronomy 6:7-8 states, “Impress them (the commandments) on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads”.

            When bad things happen and people run from God, maybe it is because they have not been taught to remember. The Bible is filled with stories about how easy it is to forget about God and all he has done for us. That is why we as parents are specifically called to train our children to REMEMBER. We need to speak about God all the time, throughout our ordinary tasks, like sitting, standing and walking according to Deuteronomy. We need to be willing to build literal and figurative memorials in our children’s minds about the things that God has done. They need to know about things God has done in history, in the distant past, in the recent past and yesterday. Life gets hard, that is why we need to Remember. The person who calls out for the Lord during a car crash instead of saying a curse is a person who remembers, “God is good, God helps his people”.  We as parents should constantly remind our children of the times both ancient and modern that the Lord was strong. God did not stop doing amazing things at the end of the New Testament. Do your children know and understand that the Lord is a living God working in lives today? When we remember what God has DONE, we remember to ask him to DO. Then we are able to build more memories of God’s faithfulness for the next generations.

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