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Let me ask you to do a little remembering today. I don't know specifically what it is that I'm asking you to remember: that will vary with each individual. In general, though, here is the assignment: I want you to remember "the good old days."

What comes to mind when you hear that phrase? What time? What place? What period of your life and experience first occurs to you when you hear a reference to "the good old days"?

When our oldest daughter was just five years old, she was sitting with my wife and me watching some of our home movies from the time when she was a baby and a toddler. After we had watched for a while, she sighed wistfully, and said, "I wish I could be a baby again!"

At that moment I recognized that you don't have to have lived very long -- you don't have to be very old -- in order to have the experience of looking back with longing, of remembering some "good old days."

I think it comes naturally to us as human beings. I don't believe that every yesterday is better than every tomorrow, but I do think that it is part of our nature to long for former times. Perhaps that was an instinct the human race acquired when our first parents were evicted from Eden. Perhaps it has been part of our emotional DNA ever since to long for better days gone by.

If you've found yourself in a group of people who share a common past, you know the group dynamics of reminiscing. The memories, the stories, and the laughter. I have watched three older couples recount, with tears in their eyes from laughing so hard, the story of the three men running to catch a bus together one winter night so many years ago. It was not an extraordinary event -- not a wedding or the birth of a baby -- but it was a simple slice of life from a friendship of many years, and the mere recollection and retelling of it was full of fondness and joy.

Then there is, too, the inevitable bittersweet quality that comes with the remembering and reminiscing. For in our revisiting of the past, we are forced to recognize the people that are gone and the circumstances that have changed with the passage of time.

I am a terrifically sentimental guy. I have joked with friends that, perhaps by the time I'm an old man, I will have raised the bar a bit, and I will only be sentimental about things that are twenty or more years past. As it is right now, I can work up a good deal of nostalgia for something that happened just last week.

The 1973 movie, The Way We Were, is a marvelously sentimental tale. Near the end of the story, we see two old friends, J. J. and Hubbell, sit back in a sailboat together and reminisce about times and places gone by. They had been through college together, World War II, overlapping careers, marriages, and divorces. Now, relaxed and laughing together, they enjoy an exercise of nostalgia. "Best Saturday afternoon?" "Best month?" "Best year?"

Hubbell is able to answer the first two with confidence. When J. J. asks, "Best year?" however, he pauses. This one is not so easy to single out. Finally, tentatively, he answers, "1944." Then, quietly and without explanation, he amends his answer: "1945." His voice trails off and the scene fades away as he says, "1946," and perhaps more.

As viewers, we have seen Hubbell live some of those years. They were actually difficult years, in many respects. "It was never uncomplicated," he admits in another scene. And yet, in hindsight, the years melt together into a single, beautiful memory, and he is unable to distinguish the "best year" from among them.

This is the nature of memory, of course. Sentiment and nostalgia soften, or completely excerpt, the difficulties of a time and place in the past, highlighting only what was beautiful and precious then and there.

You and I are accustomed to the juxtaposition of "before" and "after" pictures. We've all seen photos of the same person before and after a certain diet, photos of a room before and after some redecorating project, photos of an individual before and after some radical makeover. All of those before and after photos track a certain kind of improvement.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have also seen and been moved by photos of a neighborhood before and after a tornado, or photos of an entire city before and after a hurricane. These photographs record loss and devastation.

The pictures we are not so conscious of -- though we all have them -- are not the "before and after" variety, but rather the "during and after" pictures. This, you see, is the stuff of memory. How does a time, a place, or an experience look to us in the present -- that is, "during" our time there? And, by contrast, how does that time, place, or experience look to us sometime in the future -- "after" our time there?

The years right after the war looked very good to Hubbell. Better than they actually were. I know that my sentimental reflections on earlier times in my life are equally gilded.

But let us adjust our picture of reminiscences just a bit. Imagine friends who are remembering fondly a time gone by: their version of "the good old days." They cannot say with certainty which year was best, for they were all so good. Then rewind the tape and discover the lost era for which they long.

It is not the halcyon days of high school or the vibrant years of college. It is not the simple, early days of marriage or the fun and fast years when the kids were young. No, these friends are among the children of Israel, and the place about which they are feeling nostalgic is none other than Egypt. Egypt!

Ah, the difference between the "during" and the "after" pictures.

For hundreds of years, the descendants of Jacob had been oppressed foreigners within the land of Egypt. For generations, they had called out to the Lord for deliverance. Their bondage was cruel. Their labor coerced. And they longed for God to fulfill the promise he had made to their ancestors, delivering them out of their slavery and leading them to the promised land.

While he is still in chains; while he labors in the mud; while he is being watched and whipped by some cruel taskmaster, ask the Hebrew slave where he would like to be one year hence. And he will answer, "Anywhere but here!"

Less than one year later, he and his fellow Israelites are free. They are en route from the land of their bondage to the land of God's promise. The journey, however, includes miles of wilderness, and the people are feeling the pangs of hunger. As they sit and talk together, they say, "If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread."

In the end, this episode from Israel's exodus experience becomes a story of God's abundant and miraculous provisions for his people. For their attitude, they probably deserved punishment, but God taught them a lesson in a different way: overwhelming them with his gracious supply.

For our purposes today, though, I want us to consider the trap into which God's people had fallen. "If only," they said longingly. "If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread."

What's wrong with our memories that we should long for Egypt?

To daydream, however unrealistically, about a place we have never been is somewhat excusable. To fancy that the "someday" future will be infinitely better than the present may be delusional, yet it is at least understandable. But how can we justify our hazy picture of a place where we've been? How can we be sentimental about our slavery?

This foolishness, you see, is not quarantined with Israel in the wilderness. It is a diabolical part of our human condition. While you and I have not left Egypt behind, we have been delivered from slavery. Jesus and Paul both speak of sin as slavery (for example, John 8:34; Romans 6:16-20). That is the bondage from which the Lord endeavors to set us free. And that is where you and I run the risk of becoming sentimental slaves.

Peter quotes a proverb to identify the problem: "It has happened to them according to the true proverb, 'The dog turns back to its own vomit,' and, 'The sow is washed only to wallow in the mud' " (2 Peter 2:22).

Lot's wife may be the poster child for this tragic flaw. The stench of Sodom and Gomorrah's wickedness was so great that it evoked a rare and apocalyptic sort of judgment from God. Before the catastrophe hit, however, Lot and his family were forcefully rescued by angels. And yet, as they fled from the place (which perhaps they ought to have left voluntarily years before), Lot's wife looked back, and it proved fatal.

Why look back to a place like that? To Sodom. To Egypt. When God has delivered you, and his best plan for you is ahead rather than behind: Why look back?

Perhaps because it's home. Sodom had become home to Lot and his family. Egypt was home to those Israelite slaves. And we always tend to be sentimental about home.

For us today, we must remember that, at some level, sin is home for us. That is to say, we were born and raised in it. It's where we come from.

When the Jews sit down each year to eat their Passover meal, they include bitter herbs, which symbolize the bitterness of their bondage. That's an important reminder to build into the Passover menu, lest the people's memory grows hazy, and the recollection of Egypt tastes more like fleshpots and bread than bitter herbs.

When Moses said his farewell to the children of Israel in the book of Deuteronomy, one of his great recurring exhortations was, "Remember!" He understood that memory would be key to the people's faith and faithfulness.

And so it is for us, too. We must not let a little discouragement, a little challenge, a little difficulty in our journey send us scurrying back to some memory-mirage of a smorgasbord back in Egypt. Instead, let me ask you to do a little remembering today: to remember clearly the bitterness, the bondage, and the ultimate emptiness of sin.

God provided manna for those hungry souls in the wilderness. A jar of it was kept in the Ark of the Covenant as a constant reminder of God's faithful provision. He responds to the needs of his people, and he shows that he can meet our needs even in the most inhospitable and improbable environments. And in the end, that manna was the foretaste of the real "bread from heaven": the ultimate provision for all sin-sick souls. Amen.