REMEMBERING OUR JOY

FEBRUARY 21, 2010

1 SUNDAY IN LENT
ST

DEUTERONOMY 26:1-11

Focus: How well do we line up with the gratitude and joy of this text in our lives together as the
church? Do we remember with joy what God has done? Or do we go through the motion of
duty, which kills joy?

Introductory Comments

This text is about remembering. There is a lot to remembering. Usually, we forget things. We
have to write things down, put them in the calendar, and repeat things to ourselves to embed
them in our memories. Even then, we are a forgetful people. When a loved one dies, one of the
things that seems to happen is that the face of a person, which we presumed would be etched into
our brains forever, begins to fade. We have help now, photographs, and video, and such. This
may sound strange, but I have on our answering machine at home a message from my late
grandmother Wadsworth, who left a message for me on the occasion of my birthday. I had
stored the machine for several years, thinking I might never need it again if I just used my cell
phone. But when Sara and I moved to Jackson, we decided to get a landline at home, and I drug
out the digital answering machine and discovered there were still old messages on it. It startled
me to hear her voice at first. But I like it. It helps me to remember her and how much she meant
to me, how much she loved me.

This is a text about remembering. It is a text about remembering God. It is a text about
remembering God in worship. Because, just as is the case the closest loved ones, we can forget
God. We can forget who He is and what He has done. This text helps us with the important act
of faith called remembering. In fact, I would go so far as to say that worship serves to key
functions in a life of faith – the first is remembering the mighty acts of God in the grand story of
salvation in which we are a part. The second function of worship is to rehearse, to practice, for
that will become our eternal vocation in the kingdom of God, the praise and enjoyment and
worship of God.

What does this text call us to remember? Let’s find out together.

Exposition

Verses 1-4

I’m going to re-read the first four verses of the text now. Listen closely, and see if you can pick
out the one word that captured my attention as I prepared this message:

[1] “When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance
and have taken possession of it and live in it, [2] you shall take some of the first of all the
fruit of the ground, which you harvest from your land that the Lord your God is giving
you, and you shall put it in a basket, and you shall go to the place that the Lord your God

Copyright © 2010 by Christopher Donald Drew

 will choose, to make his name to dwell there. [3] And you shall go to the priest who is in
office at that time and say to him, ‘I declare today to the Lord your God that I have come
into the land that the Lord swore to our fathers to give us.’ [4] Then the priest shall take
the basket from your hand and set it down before the altar of the Lord your God.

I realize that I was dropping not-so-subtle hints. The word, of course, is “give.” This text
reminded the Israelites that everything they had, the land, the produce of the land, was a free gift
from God. They did nothing to earn the Promised Land. God chose them, and then they were
given the land.

And we are no different. Those called into discipleship by Jesus are not those who have earned
the right to be called, but are those called by his amazing gift of grace from death to eternal life.
The gift of eternal life spent enjoying God and glorifying him forever is something no one
deserves. Romans 5:6-8, Paul writes:

[6] For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. [7] For one
will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would
dare even to die— [8] but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners,
Christ died for us.

Our lives, our families, our children, our friends, our homes, our means of survival – our daily
bread – all of these things come to us as unmerited gifts out of the love of God the Father. But
we forget. We forget that the house over our heads comes from God. No, we say, that house
was the result of all of my hard work. Well, you made you capable of working? You might say,
well, I did. I went to school, studied hard, graduated, etc. Indeed. But what did you do to give
yourself life? You did nothing. God gave that to you, using as tools your parents, to bring you
from nothing into a living, breathing human being. And if he gave you life, he’s given you
everything in your life.

So the first thing we remember is that life is a precious gift, God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ.
We do this each and ever Sunday, and we’re called, during this penitential season of Lent, to
give extra exercise to the self-discipline in remembering God’s saving work in Jesus Christ.

Verses 5-10

The next five verses can be considered a creed, an early Israelite creed, recited as the offering of
the firstfruits was handed over to the priest:

[5] “And you shall make response before the Lord your God, ‘A wandering Aramean [if
you’re wondering who this is, it was Jacob] was my father. And he went down into Egypt
and sojourned there, a few in number, and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and
populous. [6] And the Egyptians treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard
labor. [7] Then we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice
and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. [8] And the Lord brought us out of
Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs
and wonders. [9] And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing

Copyright © 2010 by Christopher Donald Drew

 with milk and honey. [10] And behold, now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground,
which you, O Lord, have given me.’ And you shall set it down before the Lord your God
and worship before the Lord your God.

This creed is a litany of gratitude. And when I read these verses, I wonder about our worship life
together, specifically, our offering. Is it a duty? Or is it gratitude? When we collect our offering
each Sunday in worship, how often do we make the attempt to remember what God has
accomplished for us in Jesus Christ? If you’re anything like me, what frequently happens is that
I end up flaying around for the checkbook, having of course forgotten to make one out prior to
the service, and I end up never reflecting with gratitude upon the mighty work of God, especially
that most precious work of his Son Jesus Christ. Nope. It’s get the check out, plop it in the dish,
and then on to the next step.

But what would it be like to instead pause just for a moment, and remember, for example, the
answer to the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism, which is in our denomination’s Book of
Confessions? The first question asks, “What is your only comfort, in life and in death?” Imagine
for a moment that you’re like the Israelite bringing the offering of firstfruits to the place where
the Lord has chosen to make his name dwell, and then, like the Israelite reciting his creed, you
give the answer to that first question:

[My only comfort is] [t]hat I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—not to myself,
but to my faithful savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for
all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil; that he protects
me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head;
indeed, that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy
Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready
from now on to live for him.

That’s gratitude, isn’t it? It’s a gratitude that comes from an upwelling of joy, not the rote work
of duty. It’s absolutely not a coincidence, then, that the concluding verse of our reading talks
about joy:

Verse 11

[11] And you shall rejoice in all the good that the Lord your God has given to you and to
your house, you, and the Levite, and the sojourner who is among you.

Joy is the appoint end of God’s grace in our lives. How cool is that? But we forget about it. We
forget that the object of worship is God, and that when we make Him our pursuit our joy is filled
up. He gives us Himself, and in giving us Himself gives fulfills the longing of our heart to be
filled to overflowing with joy. We sinners are prone to slide into rote and duty. Duty kills joy.
C.S. Lewis once said, “A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty. He'd always want
the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love, of God, or of other
people.” God doesn’t want our duty, our rule keeping. He wants us and desires us so that He
might be glorified. He wants our giving to be joy-filled, which is why the last verse commands
rejoicing. You cannot rejoice unless you are truly grateful for what God has accomplished, and

Copyright © 2010 by Christopher Donald Drew

you will not be grateful until God gives you the eyes of faith to see the great things he hath done.

Doctrine

We began Lent on Ash Wednesday, a time of remembering our mortality. For those who were
there, do you remember the words I spoke when the ashes were imposed on your foreheads? I
said, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” We need to remember in this
day and age more than ever before. We are a people who so often make the mistake of thinking
that just because something is new it is also good. As the supreme Good, God, who is eternal, is
quickly forgotten. I read recently that there are churches that, in an attempt to be “relevant” and
“engaging” have decided never to sing a hymn which was over 15 years old. The writer
suggests, and I think this is true, that such a decision “evinces a wider attitude that says the past
—even God’s sacred past with his people—has nothing to do with us, nothing to teach us.”1

Isn’t that an odd thing to suggest in a faith where the very core of Christian life is a sacrament
wherein the person who instituted it said, “Do this in remembrance of me?”2 He commanded us
to remember who he was in his body and blood, and to remember what he did when his body
was broken and his blood was shed. The act of remembering plugs us to that night over 2,000
years ago, to that meal, to that person and his saving work. We need to remember that.

We are in the season of Lent, loved ones, a season specifically set aside to encourage the practice
of remembering. You are invited to join our predecessors in faith, even those Israelites in
Deuteronomy, to remember. Remember that we are wretched sinners who would otherwise be
destined eternally for the dust. Remember that we have been saved from that cursed destination
once and for all. Remember that your salvation is by grace through faith in the one who saved
you, Jesus Christ. Remember with gratitude and joy the eternal joy and glory that awaits you.
Amen.

1
Hoezee, Scott. “Deuteronomy 26:1-11.” Calvin Seminary Institute for Excellence in Preaching. Accessed 2/18/2010.
<http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/thisWeek/viewArticle.php?aID=374>.
2
Ibid.

Copyright © 2010 by Christopher Donald Drew