January 1  Stones Of Remembrance

And those twelve stones, which they took out of the Jordan, Joshua set up in Gilgal. And he said to the people of Israel, "When your children ask their fathers in time to come, 'What do these stones mean?' then you shall let your children know, 'Israel passsed over this Jordan on dry ground.'" Joshua 4:20-22, RSV.

Those weren't just any old rocks! Each had special meaning. They were stones of remembrance, stones of history.

The rocks themselves were common enough, resembling millions of others on the hills of Palestine. But these 12 pointed to something. They looked back to God's leading in Israel's experience.

The Bible is a historical book based upon a series of events beginning with Creation and the entrance of sin and flowing through God's covenant with Abraham, the Exodus, Israel's captivity and restoration, the incarnation and virgin birth of Jesus, His sinless life and death on the cross, the resurrection, and the Second Advent.

Thus the Bible is a book of remembrance of God's miraculous leading of His people.

When churches lose the significance of those remembrances they are in trouble. Adrift from their mooring, they have lost their way. In the Judeo-Christian realm losing the way begins with forgetting the past-more specifially, forgetting God's leading in the past.

When that happens Christians lose their sense of identity. And with a lack of identity comes a vanishing mission and purpose. After all, if you don't know who you are in relation to God's plan, what do you have to telll the world?

Christian history is littered with religious bodies who have forgotten where they have come from, and, as a result, have no direction for the future. And that forgetting is a very real temptation for Adventism.

It was no accident that an aging Ellen White alerted her readers to the topic. "In reviweing our past history," she penned, "having traveled over every step of advance to our present standing, I can say, Praise God! As I see what the Lord has wrought, I am filled with astonishiment, and with confidence in Christ as leader. We have nothing to fear for the future, except as wel shall forget the way the Lord has led us, and His teaching in our past history"(LS 196). 

As we shall see in our journey through Adventism's history this year, our church has its own stones of remembrance. 

We neglect them at our peril. 

The invitation of mercy is still full of love, the light is shining as brightly as when it first dawned upon his soul; but the voice falls on deaf ears, the light on blinded eyes(TFMB 92).