BULLETIN STUDY QUESTIONS:
1. List some of the benefits of journaling you HAVE experienced, or would like to.
2. Journaling can help cement your bond with your partner if you write down your deepest thoughts about your relationship. In one study, couples who did so were more likely to be together months later compared to the couples who were told to just write about anything. The pairs who wrote about their relationships also had more positive things to say to each other (RealAge tip of the day, Feb 13, ’07)
3. What “rhema” word do you need from God right now?
4. For what unseen things do you need a faith & hope booster shot?
5. What promises or deeds of God do you need to write down because you do not want to forget them?
6. What are some cesspools you’re sipping from? What do you need to do to drink deeply from the springs of Living Water, Jesus?
I. Read article from Reader’s Digest p 204 Oct ‘04 for all the benefits of journaling from secular studies [copy]. Seems it may help cement your bond with your partner if you write down your deepest thoughts about your relationship. In one study, couples who did so were more likely to be together months later compared to the couples who were told to just write about anything. The pairs who wrote about their relationships also had more positive things to say to each other (RealAge tip of the day, Feb 13, ’07)
II. One of the most challenging aspects of a sermon like this is to convince people of its relevance and importance. The verses from Habakkuk struck me w/ a thunderbolt of importance: “Write down the revelation” (Hab 2:2). "Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it," (Ex 17:14) God said to Moses after a great victory, as Israel wandered through the wilderness and experienced God's providential care.
A. The “revelation” in this Scripture is the same word (“chawzone” Heb) in (Prov 29:18): “without a vision (revelation) the people perish.” That’s a great verse for casting visions and getting people all excited about a leader’s dreams--for a church, a corporation or country. But here it has a specific meaning and it means a revelation or Word from God.
B. It may be a “rhema word.” That’s a message from God that’s just right for that specific situation. It may be a general word for your church, club or country. But it’s from God. That’s enough. God said to Hab: “Write it down.”
1. I understand we are not prophets on Habakkuk’s pay grade. What God tells us is NOT going into the sacred Scriptures. But the question we have to ask is: “Does God still speak to us/ME, special or general messages and might He still want us to write them down, as He did Habakkuk?
2. I believe most of us here believe the answer to the first is “Yes,” or we WANT to believe that. The answer to the second isn’t quite as clear.
3. But I believe He DOES want you to write it down for the same reasons you have to write down grocery lists, or “to do” lists. If we don’t, we forget.
C. In the Bible there are 274 commands to remember. That doesn’t include the command: “Don’t forget.”
1. Why? Because we tend to forget.
2. That’s why God was always telling His people to dig a well, build an altar (stones of remembrance), and celebrate this feast…all to help us remember through symbols and stories.
3. Written words are symbols for remembering God’s story, our story, and how the two connect.
D. Journal keeping can also help you see others the way God sees them vs. how you see them; reality vs. appearance.
E. The journal has a way of humbling us if for no other reason than when we look back we realize how wrong we often were, how limited our perspective often was. How often do we look back and see how silly and insignificant an argument was that I was willing to bleed over, and how small was my faith before God came through big. Humbling!
F. Journals boost our faith and hope. They keep us longing for things we haven’t yet seen (Heb. 11:2).
1. I remember distilling a quote from the journal of one of the greats, CS Lewis. It has kept my hunger for heaven aroused ever since I read it: “Just the presence of unexplainable hungers in our heart, like heaven, is the best indication that this world isn’t all there is.”
2. This entry helps me when I get weary of this world and wonder why; when I’m tempted to think this old world is my home, I’m reminded: “We’re not home yet.”
3. Greg and Debbie Milliken and I were talking about how they haven’t really felt at home in the church they’ve attended for six years. They admit they’re comparing it to here. There’s no place that will ever take the place of the church you found the Lord in. They admit they really connect with their small group; a lesson on the importance of that connection that we also insist on. But we also reminded each other that the reason that place doesn’t feel like home is we’re not home yet. This is not our home.
K. Journaling can serve as the incubator for infant visions and dreams. How many of my half-brained ideas I’ve put into the incubator of my journal to let them grow there for ? until they were ready to be born. How this congregation has been spared pre-mature “births” of vision by my journal keeping and by lay leaders and staff members that will say “whoa!” in many ways.
1. And you have suffered by the times my ideas did NOT incubate in the journal first. Instead I brought I those infant ideas, all wrapped in the nice blankets (PR wrappings) I could package them in. But they were infant ideas, with all the mess and chaos infants bring.
L. Remember that journal keeping for me is always blended with God’s Word and prayer. So when I’m talking about not taking it to the journal, it means I didn’t take it to prayer either, or hold it up to the mirror of God’s Word.
III. Back to a theme I introduced earlier, as Israel wandered through the wilderness and experienced God's providential care, He had them build monuments/altars and/or dig wells (fairly permanent things) so that they could look upon them…and remember (Josh 4:4-7).
A. One day I realized that every day of journal writing was piling up stones of remembrance so that I would not forget and so I could tell my children stories of God’s faithfulness. We talk about legacies. What better legacies to pass onto your children than being able to point to stones of remembrance, then telling them the story about God’s faithfulness. Journal keeping is a great way to do that (Ps 78:3-7).
B. There are other ways. Each Jan 7 we call son, Eric, and remind him of his deliverance from the septic tank back in 1987, and how God has a great purpose for his life because he saw fit to spare him. Every Aug 8 we call Katie and remind her of the deadly diagnosis of melanoma that came that day back in 1993. Turns out it was false, but we lived w/ that death sentence for several weeks.
1. The alternative is forgetting what God has done and the consequences of that are horrible (3 things 78:9-11). God warns us so often in His Word: “Don’t forget…remember!” (Dt. 6 & 8; Josh. 4:5-7).
2. Journaling helps us remember. Journaling keeps us from making the same mistakes and stumbling over the same sins over and over (Heb. 12:1-2). Are you tired of that?
C. Journals have a way of bringing hidden things into the light so that they may be healed (Ps. 32:3-5; I Jn. 1:8-9).
1. When dark things are brought into the light they lose their power. There is a reason the deadly black mold thrives in basements. There’s a reason heating and cooling experts have now attached ultraviolet lights to furnaces--to kill the last remnants of impurities that even the best filters can’t remove, but they are killed by the light.
2. Even the most dangerous things die when they get out of the cellar of our soul and into the healing light of Christ (I Jn. 1:7). Why not here, now?
D. Journals challenge us in ways nothing else or no one else, except Jesus, can. Mine challenges me to see when I’m getting in God’s way; when I’m trying to fix something that only He can fix. It reveals (when linked with Scripture and prayer) when I’m relying on my own strength and solutions vs. instead of His.
1. I’m afflicted with the same “fix it…I can do it” curse many of you are. We think we can fix problems and people who resist our best efforts at repair (co-dependence).
2. So what do is to work harder and grow weary.
3. Or we beat ourselves up because, in spite of our best efforts, we’ve failed.
4. Worse, we blame God for failing us when we really never gave Him a chance. We were in God’s way. Like me trying to get the bail out of the bailer when I was about 9. Sometimes the baler wouldn’t get both strings of twine on the bale and it would be coming out, spreading out, falling. I’d struggle and try to pull it off the baler without it falling all apart. My uncle would step up behind me and just cut the twine. It would fall away. We bailed it next round. How often do I need to stop struggling, let God cut the bale loose, and take care of it in His time?
IV. Jeremiah’s journal challenges me (Jer. 2:13).
A. One of the heart breaking scenes that motivated one of our classes to give over $24K to clean water well projects in Africa is millions of Africans going to shallow, polluted rivers to get their drinking water or bathe their children. These rivers full of life-robbing diseases that are entirely preventable simply with clean water.
1. I commit two sins when I dip into my own resources instead of God’s. That’s dipping into stagnant, shallow cesspools where I store all my solutions. That keeps me from going to the spring of living water, who is the Lord, the second sin.
2. Are you “sipping from the cesspool or the spring” this morning? Are you relying on yourself, your solutions, and your ability to fix that problem, that person?
3. Cover the cistern and drink deeply from the spring this morning. Jump into Jesus, the Living Water. May I get you started in the right direction, this altar. Come, sip here.
4. (Hab 2:2) All these are revelations of God that I have in my journal. They have enriched my life. I share them now to bless, build and give life.
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