“Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.” (Mark 13:31)
Now that we are “firmly ensconced” in our new digs, one of the daunting tasks in front of me is unpacking. You know how it is when you move. You end up with box after box of stuff you didn’t know you had. You know all this stuff was vitally critical to the survival of the human race at the time you put it into the box, but now as you go through it, you wonder what in the world it really is, and why anyone in their right mind would not have thrown it away. The boxes now take on a life of their own and multiply in the middle of the night when you aren’t looking. My area of weakness is with papers. I tend to save every receipt, every note to myself, every article on topics of interest, and of course, every Bible study note I have ever taken since I was saved 32 years ago. In my office right now are 16 Banker’s Boxes filled with God only knows what. There are two four-drawer filing cabinets in one of the classrooms I have yet to tackle. I have stuff at home to go through, and my desk is piled nice and full of more “important” stuff. Yet the one thing I really need right now I can’t find. Typical.
I know I am really bad with this. I am sure many of you have seen the reality TV shows on the “hoarders”. These people are way more extreme than I am. There was even a news report recently about an elderly couple of hoarders. The lady was reported missing by the husband, and after several months, she was found in the home dead under a pile of stuff. Hopefully as I sort through the mountain of boxes in my office, I won’t find a dead body.
Many people are just as bad in the opposite direction. They can’t hang on to anything. They blow all their money from paycheck to paycheck, they get in all sorts of trouble because they can’t learn a lesson and build on anything in their lives, and they begin every day as if God just spoke the Universe into existence at 6:00 that morning. It is not the issue of stuff, but the idea of keeping the word of God that causes many people such problems. Proverbs 4:4 says, “Let thine heart retain my words: keep my commandments, and live.” Jesus said, “Let these sayings sink down into your ears…” (Luke 9:44) I believe that with some Christians, their pastor could preach the same message every week and they would never realize it. Most of them forget the entire message before they get to the end of the parking lot. The joke is told of a man who kept coming forward to the altar every Sunday with the same prayer: “Lord, fill me with your Spirit.” Week after week, he would come and cry out audibly, “Lord, fill me!” Finally the pastor knelt down next to him and prayed, “Lord, don’t worry about filling him, just fix the leak!”
Certainly, we understand that the filling of the Spirit is an ongoing venture in life that we will never totally master. Also, we cannot expect to have such a photographic memory as to recall every word of every message we hear. But the growth of the believer cannot take place if we do not retain as much as we legitimately can. A child does not begin each school year with his colors and ABC’s. A graduate student in economics must remember that 2+2=4. (Would to God our elected officials knew that!) You don’t have to be a pack rat like me. But learn how to make the truths of the Bible build upon each other in your life. I encourage you to set up some form of system that works for you so you can refer back to notes and lessons you have learned. But keeping notes is only a very small part of building a life in Christ. To keep the word of God means to observe it and do it. The more you put into practice the truths of the Bible, the easier it becomes to remember them. When it is all over (or all beginning, depending on your viewpoint), the entire physical creation will “go up in smoke” (II Pet 3:10-12). Yet God will still have his Bible! He will “pack rat” his words longer than the current Universe will exist. When you stand before him, how much of it will you recall?
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