Issues From The Past — Morning Devotions

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Transcript

You sometimes think back to the yesterdays of your life. I think we all do that from time to time, but guess what, the past is the past, you can’t change it. No matter how much you want to go back and change what’s happened, you can’t. You may want to blame somebody, and you know that passing the blame will really not help you change anything.

If we live blaming our spouse, our parents, our job, the government, or others because of what’s happened and never take responsibility ourselves, we’ll never truly be free. And who wants to live with constant regrets of yesterday? A fearful past that is not dealt with can cause a fearful future, and that’s not a way I want to live.

How do we move forward?

If you’ve wasted valuable time thinking if only I could have done it that way or this way, I think we need to stop thinking like that. I know that you’re not going to forget your past totally. You need your past to remind you of what not to do or how to refocus your attention.

But I think your job is to be honest with yourself and to surrender the past to God, to seek forgiveness and take responsibility. I read this statement and thought it was an excellent summary. It said, I can never change yesterday. I can only influence today and tomorrow. I heard about a lady who accidentally ran into a group of other women that she’d gone to high school with. They had not been very happy days for her with fights and bullying directed towards her.

And yet they were pleased to see her. They were soon comparing notes about their old school days, and they turned to her and said, “We’ve always felt intimidated by you because you were attractive. You got good grades“. Well, she was very surprised by this admission because she always thought they didn’t like her. An incorrect assumption can make a big difference. How easy it is to think the wrong way.

What about being stuck in the past? There’s nothing wrong with thinking sometimes about the past, but don’t stay there. Do you feel like you’re not worthy of moving forward? Maybe you’ve hurt someone and you think staying stuck in the past is your punishment. Are you holding on to a grudge because you think your anger diminishes somebody else’s life? Maybe someone hurt you and you’re afraid that moving on would mean that what they did wasn’t that bad. Well, sometimes dwelling on the past is an easy way to distract yourself from the present.

If you find yourself unhappy, you might be tempted to romanticise how much happier you were back in the old days. And some of the best lessons in life can be learned actually from the toughest times that we’ve endured. Your vision of the future should be about who you want to become, not who you used to be.

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So while you can reflect on the past and learn from it, make sure you let go of it. All of us have a certain amount of baggage that we carry from our past. Some carry lighter loads than others, and we don’t want to live distorted and unhappy lives. If you’re still stuck in the past, ask God to help you out of this. If you’re willing to enter into a full surrender with Him, then He will start to move and help break you free from the hurtful past. Work with the Holy Spirit once He starts to show you the specific areas that He can work with.

And you will start to see some remarkable changes. It won’t happen overnight, but accepting Jesus into your life will give you a new start, and God will fully heal your mind and your emotions and your heart so that you can start to fully function once again in the real world and get on with what He has in store for you in the future. When God wants us to learn how to let go of the past, I believe He is targeting more of the bad things in our past.

Especially those things that’s going to play with our mind and our emotions. We have many good things from the past, and we’ll have a certain amount of treasured memories that we’ll never forget, and that’s good. God wants us to keep all of these memories, the good memories, fully intact. There’s no harm in going down memory lane from time to time. So my message is don’t let the past beat you up. God can make good things happen out of bad. He is the master potter that takes the broken clay and reshapes it. He has a plan for your life.

You don’t need to live in the past. Your past will influence you, actually, for good or bad, but your past does not have to determine who you are and what you’ll become. The apostle Paul in God’s word, I think, has the answer. It certainly worked for him. It can work for you. In Philippians chapter 3, he said, I know I have not arrived, but there’s one thing I am doing. I’m leaving my old life behind, putting everything on the line for the mission. I am sprinting toward the only goal that counts – to cross the line, to win the prize, and to hear God’s call to resurrection life found exclusively in Jesus Christ.

Let’s Pray

Heavenly Father, how easy it is to get stuck in the past. There are issues, Lord, that I’d rather forget. Help me to look and constructively say, today is today, and you are with me today and tomorrow. Amen.