Most of us regularly lose things: keys, wallets, TV remotes, glasses, and phones. Some of us are more prone to misplacing things than others. It’s not surprising that men are twice as likely to lose their phones than women. One study concluded that the average person misplaces nine things a day and spends an average of fifteen minutes looking for lost items. Why does this happen? What is the psychology and science behind it? It comes down to a breakdown of attention and memory. When we misplace our belongings, "we fail to activate the part of our brain responsible for encoding what we're doing." The hippocampus part of our brain is responsible for taking a snapshot and preserving the memory in a set of neurons that can be activated later. We lose things when we do not have a clear reference point of when or where we put down objects like our keys or glasses.
This can be similar to how things are in our spiritual lives. Sometimes the most intelligent people are the most forgetful. Well what do I mean by that? Sometimes the people who know the most—they have the most spiritual knowledge, they can parse the finer nuances of doctrine, they understand the deeper things of theology, those type of people can easily forget the foundation for the hope and knowledge that they have. It is so often the case that the more you know spiritually, the less you remember about the hope you have in Jesus. Sometimes the more knowledge you have, the more you lose your love for God. Just like we can misplace or forget our physical possessions, we can misplace our hope, peace, joy, and love. And as we come to our text things morning, Paul takes time to remind Titus and the churches in Crete about their hope—he calls it “the hope of eternal life”. And his goal for the believers to whom he ministers in his day, and for all of us today, is that we not forget this wonderful hope that we have. So he reminds them and he reminds us, just what this hope entails. And from this reminder we get our big idea for today:
Big Idea: Don’t forget the hope of Jesus
