Our Raw Material — A LifeWords Devotion

You know my pedigree: a legitimate birth, circumcised on the eighth day; an Israelite from the elite tribe of Benjamin; a strict and devout adherent to God’s law; a fiery defender of the purity of my religion, even to the point of persecuting the church; a meticulous observer of everything set down in God’s law Book. The very credentials these people are waving around as something special, I’m tearing up and throwing out with the trash—along with everything else I used to take credit for. And why? Because of Christ. Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life. (THE MESSAGE) 

We are the products of those who loved us and who failed to love us. Quite a bit about our present characters can be traced back to the love we have received or the love which has been denied us. That makes us a mixture of maturity and immaturity, of faith and fear.

We cannot go back in time and rewrite the narrative of our lives. We cannot unmake the bad things that have happened. We cannot disown the raw material that makes up our lives. We cannot pretend to be anyone other than who we are. And yet, this does not lock us into some predetermined way of life whereby our past dictates our present. We can change.

Paul offers an example of that. Once he went one way, now he is going another way. The gracious power of God can change the direction of our lives. Even so, it does not change our history. Rather, that history helps us become the people we are meant to be here and now. What has happened in the past is not wasted and not denied. Paul’s ongoing effectiveness was enhanced by his past experiences.

Becoming a follower of Jesus does not mean obliterating our personal histories. It means our God weaving all that has happened back then into the tapestry of our here and now lives.

Blessings

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David