Remembrance Day inspires faith in God
Remembrance Day 2018 has now passed into our history books. Again we have remembered those who have sacrificed their lives in defense of the free nations of the world.
There is much more that needs to be said about the word remember from a biblical perspective.
The Bible speaks of things that we should remember, and things that should not be remembered. Psalm 25:6 states, “Remember, O LORD, your great mercy and love, for they are of old.” However, verse seven states these contrasting words, “Remember not the sins of my youth, and my rebellious ways; according to your love remember me, for you are good, O LORD.”
These verses from Psalm 25:67 reveals our God as one who remembers to bless human beings, while God choosing to forget the sins of mankind from his youth because of God’s love and kindnesses.
When Jerome Hines was 21, he said, “God does not answer prayer, for He is not a personal deity who busies himself with the mundane affairs of two billion individuals.”
Jerome was a promising young opera singer, but he had never had a prayer answered or seen anything that came close to being a miracle. In the course of the life of Jerome Hines, he was led into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and the opera star who in his younger years hadn’t believed in a personal God and didn’t believe in prayer was now talking to God regularly and experiencing miracles in his own life.
Late in his career, Hines was invited to Moscow for a final concert. In advance of that concert, he prayed, “Lord, do your servant just one more favour. Give me Khrushchev, the Russian premier as an attendee at my performance at the Bolshoi.” Hines’s manager said, “It is the 1960s and there is a Cold War between Russia and the United States. That is impossible, the International situation is too tense for that to occur!”
But Hines had a personal relationship with the God who remembers to bless, while forgetting the sins of one’s past. And just before the curtain opened, Hines heard, “Khrushchev’s coming!”
So Hines responded, “What a God we’ve got! Jerome Hines discovered and developed a relationship with God, who cared enough to die for him in the person of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ!”