Daily Devotions

What does it mean to celebrate?

For many of us, a celebration includes a party, some modern expectations of hospitality, maybe a social media post… We’re told to “celebrate” the truth of Jesus regularly, and while that’s something we could regularly acknowledge intellectually, it would appear that our regular remembering of the Gospel falls somewhere short of what’s deserved.

Why is that? It’s actually pretty easy to understand. Yes, it has to do with our brokenness, but it’s perhaps even simpler to grasp: No matter how good a worship song is, no matter how great even a special service like Christmas Eve can be… life is still challenging.

No matter how powerful you feel in the moment, no matter how present God feels, the threat is to allow our current problems to be greater than what God has already done for us. We forget what God has already done for us. We forget what God’s already delivered us from because we’re already consumed by the next thing in our line of sight.

A celebration is a remembering; to celebrate is to hold a memory in view, giving it priority because of its importance, and allowing your choices to revolve around that priority. 

Some of the major events in the book of Genesis might feel difficult to relate to because we can’t imagine what it would be like to experience a flood and be chosen to carry on humanity. But God had chosen them. He had saved them. This is cause for celebration! That is something to remember! I mean, how could anyone forget? Certainly, after experiencing something so powerful, they wouldn’t fall away from God, right?

Well actually, as we read, Noah and his descendants do what we do: we forget God’s grace because of our current problems. Genesis 10 includes a genealogy of what happens after the flood. Time goes on, people go about their lives, and despite what God has done, the next chapter in Scripture is the Tower of Babel, where people try to build a tower high enough to be like God. It’s been a few generations, but how would you forget? How would you lose track of what God has done for you?

Well, we do, too. We get caught up in our own business and lose the perspective of not just how powerful God is, but how much God loves us. Yes, they shouldn’t have tried to be like God, because that’s only for the Lord. But the thing to orient our hearts around:

They didn’t need to be like God. They already had a God who loved them. 

Questions for reflection: