“I know, I know, you don’t have to keep reminding me! Jeez!”
Anyone ever say that to your mom or dad or someone? Or want to say it? Or something like that?
Do you know why we get upset when someone reminds us, especially over and over about something? We feel that we are not smart enough to remember ourselves without the prodding by someone. It’s an attack that makes us appear stupid. And guess what? None of us want to appear or feel stupid. We’ll come back to that later.
Simply put, reminders are moments to remember - and that is a good thing. Remembering is continual learning. The more we see or hear about a specific thing, the more we remember about it. Think about your favorite song. I bet you can sing it word for word and listen to it enough that your friends are tired of it. But you know what? When they hear that song they immediately think of you.
What if you were one of the apostles? Your days and nights are spent with Jesus, being immersed in His teaching and encounters with people. You’d remember everything, right? [buzzer sound] Nope! Jesus reminded them on a number of occasions of what He said or did previously.
One situation with the apostles that stands out for me, for the apostles as a group, is in Matthew 16:5-12. The teaching in this passage is about the leaven of the Pharisees but the apostles are only focused on food for their stomachs. They aren’t getting it cause they are concerned they have no bread. Then Jesus comes in with the reminder, and I paraphrase, “Do y’all not remember when we fed all those people with only a few loaves? Seriously?! We did it twice!”
If the apostles can be distracted and need reminding from Jesus, so do we.
Let’s shift gears for a minute and think about this: 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. Quintillion!!! You know how many zeros are in that? 18! Here is what that looks like: 2,500,000,000,000,000,000. Maybe bytes aren’t your thing and you’re thinking “big deal”. Well, how about this: 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram a day. A day! More data has been produced in the past few years than in the previous history of humankind.
Bytes. Photos. What’s that got to do with remembering or being reminded or Jesus? Glad you asked.
So much information is put in front of our eyes and minds that we have to work harder to remember. We are at a unique time in history with the sheer volume of information that we see each day. The apostles encountered nowhere near the amount of information we encounter, yet their distractions took their attention away from Jesus. How much easier is it for us to be distracted from the Word?
Reminders are necessary. They are prompts to recall something that is important to do, someone to think about, or to continually learn. We aren’t dumb or stupid when we are reminded. We always need to be reminded of important things. Here’s a great reminder for us all: “For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” (John 1:16)
For fun: See how much data is generated every minute.