Sermon:
Forget Not, To Forget Text: Philippians 3: 12-16
Remember,
Remember. Can we remember everything and every moment in our lives? Have we
ever thought how our memory works? How does our thoughts fight with each other?
Here
in the read text, Paul says ‘to forget what lies behind’. Let’s ponder over it,
Have we ever tried to do, what Paul has said. Are we straining ourselves
forward towards the Goal for which God has called us for?
Let’s
analyse the pericope, Paul notes that, because Christ have already laid hold of
him, he strives with the single-minded devotion of an athlete to lay hold of
the prize to which, God has called him, namely the immediate and unbroken
fellowship with God in Christ, which might term the resurrection of life. Few
scholars agree that this passage is understood as both accomplished fact and an
ongoing process. As Hendriksen and Kent would say, believers could put their
past behind them. For Paul this included his former life as a Jewish zealot and
all his success went up to that point. In all likelihood, the apostle was
thinking about his former life, since he had earlier described his attainments
as a pious Jew. Despite all his outward success and dedication to the Mosaic Law,
he had failed to acquire God’s favour or personal righteousness. He did not
want to recall his former achievements with the intention of, noting how they
had contributed to his spiritual progress. Nor did the apostle wanted to dwell
on his past sins, for God no longer held these sins against him.
1. Forget
not, to forget our dreadful past
Have
we seen to ourselves that, did we forgive ourselves? Does the situations and
events in our past bother us? Paul says ‘forget what lies behind’. Every person
under this roof wants to forget something or the other, if you would agree it
or not. Every person has a past and past does not only have good but the bad
and the worse things that have occurred. We hardly remember the good things from
our past, but we strongly remember the bad things for sure. For example, in the
case of people who commit Suicide, the major things that brings them to
consider suicide is that, they cannot forget their sins or the wrongs that has
happened or the events that has occurred in their life. It is on that situation
that has occurred and they would not forget it. And in this sense that haunts
them in every step of their life to go and consider suicide as an option.
Forgetting is the major issue that our lives and our minds wants. See the
Alcoholics, why they want to drink and doze to the extent that they would not be
in conscious. Because they want to forget, they want to forget who they are,
they want to forget the events that has brought them to the situation that they
are in. First, we need to forgive ourselves, which we see that Christ forgives our
sins to its totality and God would not remember it. In Hebrews 8:12, it is said
that, ‘for I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember
their sins no more’. When God said he will not remember our sins and forgets
them then who are we to hold them back to ourselves. It is the new covenant in
Hebrews that God set us free from our sins. ‘Let go’ of the past is the key
feature of this new covenant. It is, the ‘Sense of sin’ that remains in our
minds, a ‘self-loved’ mind that we tend to remain in it. But we need to see how
God deals with the Sins that we have committed in our past. Let’s have God
Consciousness instead of sin consciousness which holds to the sins we commit. It
is this guilt in our minds which makes to see down on ourselves.
Of
course yesterday’s accomplishments and yesterday’s sins were important then,
and continue to resonate in our lives even today. However the person who spends
too much time polishing yesterday’s trophies isn’t likely to win another trophy
today or tomorrow. The person who is wallowing in yesterday’s guilt isn’t
likely to have energy to meet today’s challenge or to grasp tomorrow’s
opportunities. We must be careful lest we allow our past to overwhelm our
present and to sabotage our future.
2. Forget
not, to forget other’s dreadful acts
‘I
will forgive you, but I will never forget what you have done for me’. How many
of us said this sentence in our minds? Do we really forgive people with a true
heart? If we would have forgiven them we would not said this sentence. We hold
grudge, vengeance towards them, seeking an opportunity to hurt them and show
them what they did to us. For instance, husband and wife would have fought and
abused each other at point of time. But as years passed by they would not have forgotten
the situation, and each time they argue and fight they bring back the past
events that have happened. Do we call this as forgiveness? And consider the
harsh arguments that happen between the mature siblings. These siblings would
have got married and would be living luxuriously but they will not even speak
with each other even as decades pass by. Is this a forgiving nature that God
has commanded? Doctrinally speaking, Forgiveness should be in a method of
reconciliation in dual relationships. It analyses the methodology and
application of forgiveness with an end result of reconciliation. John Webster
says that, reconciliation has emerged as a topic among moral theorists who
discuss the ethical issues that arise in the aftermath of everyday forms of
wrongdoing, such as transgressions within friendships or family relationships.
The ethics of reconciliation says, that it requires a ‘repairing of
relationships’ with the sense of reconciliation. For him, the ethics of
reconciliation centres on the idea of ‘good human action’. Forgiveness is not
only a form of freedom and purification; it is also associated with the idea of
forgetting.
We
have witnessed recently a person in Delhi, killing a woman just because she
didn’t love him back. He was in a vengeful act to an extant of stabbing her
almost 25 times. And in the case of acid attacks, we see it’s the act filled
with revenge towards the other person by a love failure one. People see it very
hard to forget the person whom he/she loved, instead they try to hurt, wound
and go to the extent of killing. The real love doesn’t cause evil for others.
God revealed his love through Jesus Christ by forgiving our wrong doings and
forgetting our sins. Through this God reconciled us so that there would be
perfect love between God and us. God’s love wouldn’t be true if he had not
forgotten our sins. Forgiveness is incomplete without forgetting. In a same way
we should forget others dreadfulness towards us, only then there would be
perfect reconciliation and perfect love.
In
Conclusion
Is
it easy to forget? Is it a command from God to forget? Or is it the inbuilt
quality to forget? It is with ‘implicit memory’ in our brains which tells us,
how to walk, how to talk and mostly things happen automatically at
non-conscious level. With ‘explicit memory’ which deals with the facts and
experiences that one can consciously know and declare, in which it requires
conscious and effortful work. When remembering an event you need to take notice
of the details which stores in sensory memory then retrieve constantly with
Short term memory and then retrieve constantly with long term memory. While
retrieving from time to time much of work is required and a lot of things go
wrong in detailing.
We
would have come across times like, Ah! It’s on my tip of the tongue and I can’t
remember at all. This will happen because of three things, failing to encode
the memory, failing to retrieve and the third, experiencing storage decay. The
basic factor for forgetting a moment is that we don’t notice and fail to encode
it, thus we don’t remember. Psychologists say that even the memories that have
encoded are vulnerable to storage decay or natural forgetting over time. A lot
of times forgetting doesn’t mean that our memory has faded to black but it’s because
of the retrieval failure. This is called as passive forgetting and it isn’t
something you can control it. But it turns out the same process which can be
done for active ways to forget things. Researches have done quite an amount of
experiments on ‘think no-think paradigm’. It’s on the idea of, repeatedly
stopping yourself from thinking about a memory one should eventually forget it.
The results of these scientific experiments have proved to an extent that
things can be forgotten. So avoiding retrieving often enough, eventually you
will forget it. As understood that forgetting is a natural process, but we try
to remember again and again that dreadful past which is unnatural. This is what
the retrieving process need much work in recollecting the memory. So you don’t
recollect or retrieve that past event which has hurt you. Of course we need to
remember the good of the past but retrieving of our dreadful past does no
better thing in us. Thus let us forget what we need to forget about ourselves
and others and try to relate with each other in true nature of forgiving and
forgetting where we can have a true relationships with each other. Let us
understand the real meaning of ‘forget what lies behind’. May God help us to
tune our brains and be good to ourselves and to others. Amen.
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