Vol. 6, No. 18 – May 2, 2021
Walk Backward into the Future?
2 Corinthians 5:17-19
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. –2 Corinthians 5:17-19
How valuable is our looking? Is it more valuable to look where you are going than to constantly look back at where you have been? If we major on backward looking, we miss the future God has for us. I do not know about you, but the past is so yesterday, regardless if there are things we learn from the past. We live, however, in the present to have impact with people’s future lives.
The past should be a springboard, not a hammock. –Edmund Burke
It is a difficult task, a most impossible task, to plan our future simply based on the past. No one can walk backward into the future. Do you ever get bogged down in the past? Those whose yesterday still looms big, struggle with doing much today.
Our future contains more joy than any past experience you may remember. The believer, a born-again one, has no past, except in the eyes of the world. A believer is a new creation, not a remake of something from the past. (2 Corinthians 5:17) God does not continually bring up your past to decide your future in eternity once you have accepted Christ as Savior.
Ever felt miserable? Misery is a yesterday person trying to get along with a tomorrow God. –Mike Murdock. We should not let our past mistakes become memorials. We should not let our past mistakes interfere with our advancement in God’s Kingdom. Past mistakes that haunt should be seen as under the blood of Christ, and they should be cremated, not embalmed. Following our confession of faith, we should walk forward to discover our future.
Life Application
Paul wrote, Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained (Philippians 3:13-16).
Do not be like those who live in the past, talk predominately about the past—they are going backward. People who only talk of the present are just maintaining. However, those who speak of their future grow in the Lord.
Some stay so much in the past that the future is not present on their mind. It is gone in their thinking. The future for them is frightening because they only see the past. I had a lady in one of my churches that was convinced she would die at 67 years of age. She believed that because her mother died at that age—because of the past experience it is all she saw for herself. She could never come to the place of being used of God because she was living in the past.
Do not be captured by the past—be the new creature that God intends.
