Pete's Reviews and Sermons: Remember the Lord your God

Sunday, October 18, 2026

Remember the Lord your God

Preached at Christ Church, Billericay on 18 October 2026. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IQkXf3UZVE from 25:31 to 40:34

Prayer

Father God, open our hearts to hear your word. Remind us of your goodness, teach us gratitude, and help us to use Your gifts for Your glory and the good of others. Amen.

Introduction – Imagine

Earlier this autumn we visited RHS Hyde Hall. It is always a lovely garden. That day, however, they had some trails set out for the children. At each site was a large construction made of Lego, the plaque at each of them told us something about the creature that was depicted, how long it took to build, how many builders there were, and how many bricks were used. This dragonfly was my favourite. I have built a few Lego kits too, a Saturn V rocket, with the help of my eldest grandchild, and an F1 car, which I did by myself. Each time I was very proud of my accomplishment saying “Look what I’ve made.”

It wasn’t (just) you

Imagine if someone had immediately told me "Well, you didn’t make it, Lego provided the bricks and the instructions. Someone made the plastic, other people mined the raw materials, and brought together the box and all the plastic bags. Someone else designed the kit, and probably a team of people wrote the software they used." And so on …

Individualistic Society

In our increasingly individualistic society, we look up to people who have appeared to achieve a lot by their own efforts. We say “He’s a self-made man”. This phrase started to be used widely in the 1820s, and is still prevalent today. In reality this is never true. There were his parents, the schools he went to, the already existing roads and cars he used to travel around, the computers and software he used to run his company. The list is endless.

Deuteronomy 8 – The Promised Land

This idea of claiming that I built my life by my own efforts is what Deuteronomy 8 is talking about.

As Christians, we read these verses through the lens of Christ. We know that God's greatest gift is not fertile land or material wealth, but salvation through Jesus. Yet the temptation remains exactly the same: to enjoy God's gifts while forgetting the Giver.

In this passage the Israelites are about to enter the promised land. Here’s what God tells them they have to look forward to:

^7b a land with brooks, streams, and deep springs gushing out into the valleys and hills; ⁸ a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; ⁹ a land where bread will not be scarce, and you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron, and you can dig copper out of the hills.

After escaping slavery and wandering for forty years in the Sinai desert, it must have sounded like heaven. Of course there will be a lot of work to do. They have to plant the crops and harvest them, they have to grind the grain to make the bread, they have to mine and smelt the metals, but they will have everything they need and more.

The warning

But, there is a warning that goes with the promise of comfort and riches.

¹¹ Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving you this day. ¹² Otherwise, ¹⁴ your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
¹⁷ You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.”

And the warning continues, and becomes more serious past the end of the reading we had this morning.

¹⁹ If you ever forget the Lord your God and follow other gods and worship and bow down to them, I testify against you today that you will surely be destroyed. ²⁰ Like the nations the Lord destroyed before you, so you will be destroyed for not obeying the Lord your God.

This is more than an arbitrary threat. God is warning them that turning away from Him and adopting the practices of the surrounding nations will bring them under the same judgement that those nations faced.

Harvest

Today is our Harvest celebration. Unless you are a farmer or a gardener, you may not be that aware of the harvest. Our harvest has been going on since July, when the wheat was collected from the fields. In my garden we have already harvested all the carrots, there are still some tomatoes, runner beans and beetroot left, and maybe if the weather holds, I’ll get another courgette or two. We had plums and pears from the allotment too.

I am very well aware that, despite the work I do planting seeds and trying to keep them watered enough, it is not me that really provides the food.

If the seed is good, the soil is fertile, the weather is not too extreme, and the weeds and pests stay away we should get a good crop. Beyond these things, I don’t do anything, it just grows, as God has designed it to grow, and we get the abundance it delivers.

The other type of Harvest

Food, is of course, essential to our lives, but in today’s world we must recognise that there is another type of harvest. It involves our labour, skills and effort, but even these are gifts that ultimately come from God.

Living God’s way

The Israelites were warned that if they forgot God, and lived the way they thought best, they would be destroyed. Spoiler alert - They didn’t keep to God’s ways, and they were almost wiped out.

It seems to me that when societies forget God and reject his ways, they inevitably damage themselves and those around them. We should not assume that we can abandon God's ways without consequences.

We must remember God’s ways, and keep to them as closely as we can. We must acknowledge that what we have is not solely from our own efforts. As verse 18 reminds us:

¹⁸ But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth.

God gives not only wealth, but also health, opportunities, intelligence, skills, relationships and the countless unseen blessings that make our work possible.

Help to Remember

He also gave the Israelites several things to help them remember Him. Here are a few of them:

- the Sabbath Day, (Ex 20:8) one day a week when they stopped what they were doing and dedicated themselves to God. Christians have understood Sabbath in different ways, but we still need regular times set aside for worship, rest and remembering God.

- they had festivals, like Passover, where they ate special types of food as part of their remembrance. (Ex 13:6-9) The Passover festival includes telling the story of their rescue from slavery in Egypt and God's faithfulness in bringing them towards the land he had promised them. They are to teach these stories to their children. We, too, have festivals, mainly Christmas, where we tell of the birth of our saviour. And Easter, where we tell the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus. So we remember how God saved us from our sins. We too, believe it is important to tell these stories to our children, so that they can take God’s word to the next generation.

Actions

The stories are not enough on their own. We must also remember to act the way God wants us to, so that by living His way we will demonstrate the ways of God to others. Or “actions speak louder than words”.

The prophet Micah (6:8) summarised it like this:

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

This is as true for the Israelites as it is for us. There is a lot more detail in the Old Testament, so here are a few other verses we should take note of as we remember the Lord.

Leviticus 19:³³When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. ³⁴The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.

And verse 35 & 36

Do not use dishonest standards when measuring length, weight, or quantity. Use honest scales and honest weights.

The New Testament says the same things:

Matthew 22:39 "You shall love your neighbour as yourself."

Galatians 3:28 "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

Hebrews 13:2 "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."

These verses tell us God wants us to be kind, and generous of spirit and also generous with material things. That is what our harvest gifts show, but God wants us to be like this all the time.

Environment

God's concern is not only for how we treat one another, but also for how we care for the world He has entrusted to us.

Psalm 24
¹ The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it,
the world, and all who live in it;

² for he founded it on the seas
and established it on the waters.

Exodus 23 ¹⁰ “For six years you are to sow your fields and harvest the crops, ¹¹ but during the seventh year let the land lie unploughed and unused. Then the poor among your people may get food from it, and the wild animals may eat what is left. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove.

Deuteronomy 22 ⁶ If you come across a bird’s nest beside the road, either in a tree or on the ground, and the mother is sitting on the young or on the eggs, do not take the mother with the young.

These verses show us a little more of the detailed way God wants the Israelites to care for their environment. For us, it is more complex, because we have made it that way.I’m sure you’ve heard of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, by there is much more we can do, if we are to be good stewards of the environment God has given us.

Conclusion

Whenever we are tempted to say, "Look what I've made", Harvest reminds us to pause and remember everything God has provided: the opportunities, the abilities, the people around us, and the world He created. Our response is gratitude, generosity, faithful living, and praise to the God from whom all blessings flow.

Amen.