Sermon Tone Analysis

Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory

60 Minutes

Remember every day of their lives… what they wore… what they ate… how they felt… every day.

I’m Not Like that.

There are very few who are.

I have big stuff in my life I haven’t forgotten yet.

Show PICTURE 1 — Harding Auditorium

Show PICTURE 2 — Isaiah and Jonathan

Going to Windermere is an experience for me like Life in Ozark has been and is for many people — a memory or set of memories that they have not yet forgotten which are meaningful.

There isn’t any way to properly consider Life in Ozark if we overlook the value that so many place on remembering time spent and people met and enjoyed here.

Life in Ozark is a life full of memory.

One of the most important functions of our memory, isn’t so much the way that our memory helps us to recall the past.

It’s most important feature is how our memories help us to anticipate the future.

And we see this all through the Bible.

God and the Rainbow Covenant

When we see the rainbow, it’s function in our memory is most meaningfully about a way that God wants us to place our faith in God in the future: that God will never again destroy all flesh by rain and flood.

Joshua and the Promised Land

Remembering the word from Moses — given to Moses by the Lord — wasn’t primarily a sentimental view of the past as much as it was an assurance to the future that God was and is going to grant to the children of Israel the Promised Land.

The Israelites in Exile

Lamentations 5:19-

They are invoking God to remember their and God’s past in hopes that as they look toward the future they can anticipate something other than God’s anger to endure.

God’s anger has never been what has endured in the past.

It has been God’s unending love that has endure forever.

Jesus invites us to remember our history so we might be sober-minded and holy in our living.

Jesus with the Thief on the Cross

The Resurrection

Luke

The Study on those with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory

Yesterday, our memory is as good as their memory.

A few days pass, our memory is almost as good.

A week passes, and our memory of the day a week ago is very, very different from theirs.

A month or year passes, their memory of a given day is as good as it was at a week.

We recall almost nothing.

“They are not great learners; they are very poor forgetters.

Their rate of forgetting is small and ours is large.”

What we need to remember, is a prompt.

Have you ever had that experience… you can’t recall something then someone prompts you and then you recall the day as though it happened yesterday.

When we come to this table, we are not only remembering the past… but we are remembering the past in light of the future… that Christ died once for all… and so we all died.

And now, through him, all can live.