Ebenezer, The Discipline of Remembrance, and Modern Day Altar Stones

Scripture quoted from www.Biblegateway.com

For a girl raised primarily on contemporary Christian worship (Lord I Lift Your Name on High, anyone?), I am learning to appreciate the profound beauty of hymns. One of my runaway favorites is “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Before you read the rest of this blog, watch this beautiful version by All Sons and Daughters and ponder the breathtaking, staggering, stupefying lyrics.

Here I raise my Ebenezer

What on earth is an Ebenezer? Isn’t that the crotchety old man spouting “Humbug” in Dickens’ famed Christmas novel? You would be correct, but this was not the intended use of the word penned by twenty-two year old former “hoodlum” Robert Robinson ninety years before the publication of A Christmas Carol. He had something far more ancient and awe-inspiring in mind…

Soak in this incredible story in 1 Samuel 7:7-17.

Have you ever noticed the reoccurring pattern in the Old Testament?

God does something amazing.

Israel trusts in God.

Israel forgets God and seeks idols.

God send his punishment upon the Israelites.

The Israelites cry out to God.

God remembers his covenant and rescues the Israelites.

And Repeat.

What was Israel’s problem?  Israel forgot God. Their forgetfulness led to their unfaithfulness. Glad we never do that, right? If you are anything like me, you’ve read these stories, and on your superior moral high ground thought how incredibly stupid and illogical the Israelites were.  Here’s the thing:

We are exactly like the Israelites.

Nearly six years ago, I had the incredible privilege of being a member of the 50^th graduating class of the Focus Leadership Institute at Focus on the Family. God worked in INCREDIBLE ways through the process leading up to that summer and through that summer. The details were simply incredible! More on this later, but for now you should know I felt clearly that I was to stay out of debt. Unfortunately, I still owed about $2,100 the day before graduation, which meant my transcripts would be held until I paid off the balance. On that day, an anonymous donor paid $2,000 toward my account! What a miraculous and amazing move of the Father to accomplish His purposes He had called me to in His way. Want to know what I was doing before I started working on this blog post? Worrying about money and wondering how I was going to pay for an upcoming missions trip to Ukraine. (This post  was written months ago and, as always, God came through with all the finances I needed).

As I said earlier, so glad I am nothing like the Israelites.

Despite the Israelites stubborn bent towards forgetfulness, there is another pattern at play here. Throughout the Bible, God combats this tendency toward forgetfulness with a single, extraordinary word:

Remember.

The ancient Israelite laws and culture were fraught with rituals and practices of remembrance. This ranged from holy days marking miraculous works of God such as Passover (see Exodus 12) and Purim (see Esther 9) to oral history to altar stones.  Joshua 4:1-9 contains one of my favorite altar stone stories about when the Israelites entered the promised land. 

And they are there to this day! 

Many of you probably read this title and thought to yourself, “What kind of cult is she in? Altar stones?” I think it is about time we break through that particular taboo in Christian culture and started setting up our own altar stones! We need more Ebenezers and Jordan stones that remind us “thus far has the Lord helped us” and that remain “to this day!” Now, most modern day altars look less like boulders and more like journal entries recounting the Father’s faithfulness to us in detail, beloved faces, and everyday things.

A modern day altar stone can be anything you decide in your heart to remind you of specific works or characteristics of the Lord every time you see, hear, touch, taste, or think of that someone or something. 

Life-changing author of “One Thousand Gifts,” Ann Voskamp, talks about buying a little steel bucket and placing it on her windowsill as “a daily visual for the meaning of being, the meaning of life.” 

(Check out the whole, phenomenal story here. For Katie Davis Majors, author of “Kisses From Katie” and “Daring to Hope” it was a banner drawn by her daughter and hung up in the kitchen.   Some of my all time favorite personal altar stones are my Christmas ornaments. I’ll dig into that in more detail when the Christmas season comes back around.  (Which for me, by the way, begins roughly in late October. I’ll try to spare you my Buddy the Elf-like enthusiasm. And then again, maybe not…)

And the list goes on. What will yours look like? Will they be landmarks? People? Songs? Refrigerator magnets? All of the above? I would love to hear about your experiences with this! Please share your favorite altar stones in the comments!