UTC Worship

UTC Worship
by Jeba Singh Samuel

Tuesday 22 November 2016

Senior Sermon - Kenny Manoj Kumar, BD IV

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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