Ezekiel 16:22, “In all your detestable practices and your prostitution you did not remember the days of your youth, when you were naked and bare, kicking about in your blood.” Don’t forget from where you came and more importantly don’t forget who got you to where you are.
One of the easiest things to do when you experience either success or failure is to forget from where you came. Part of this is because we have short memories. Part of this is because we do not think clearly in times of pain or joy. In Ezekiel God used a visual of his chosen people when he found them. He described their condition as being one of an infant lying naked in a field surrounded by their own blood. Not a pretty picture, but God described their condition as such and he said, “I took you from there and made you a great nation.” In their many successes and failures they forgot their beginning.
Why would God want them to remember their meager beginning? It was not because he wanted them to relive pain and suffering, rather it is because he wanted them to remember who brought them from the depths to the heights. There is a popular and familiar saying, “Whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.” That is not true. Whatever makes you look to God is what makes you stronger. One of the problems of joy and pain is we forget who has been with us and we put all of the focus on ourselves.
The truth is no one succeeded or failed on their own. The truth is no one has ever accomplished anything without God allowing it to happen. The Bible makes this clear in many passages: Ecclesiastes 3:11, 14 “He (God) has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end…I know that everything God does will endure forever’ nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does is so that men will revere him.” Paul said, “…everything comes from God.” (1 Cor. 11:12) and James said, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” (1:17).
Certainly no one remembered from where he came like Jesus. Paul explains this beautifully for us in Phil. 2:5-8. Jesus humbled himself from the highest of highs to lowest of lows in order to be obedient to God. Jesus remembered from where he came when he said the very food that sustained him was to do what God asked him to do. John 4:34, “’My food,’ said Jesus, ‘is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.’”
So the next time something good or bad happens to you remember from where you came and remember for those of you in Christ Jesus who will always be with you.
