As much as I like to live a simplified lifestyle, I also understand that there are many things in life that are definitely NOT simple, and I am thankful for the purposes that those things serve. Well most of them anyway. ;) So today I'm going to take a look at a complex issue, and hopefully simplify it a little.
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No matter how you chose to live your life, you will always have to interact with other people, and boy can that be a complex thing to have to do! Let's just take a tiny, tiny fraction of the myriad of relationship issues out there and talk about that - dealing with the past.
I've had several friend speak with me lately on the subject of their past; mainly about being discouraged with things they had done in the past. This is such a hard issue, and I've struggled in this area A LOT as well. Then I saw this quote the other day - "Don't stumble over something behind you."
It made me laugh and realize how silly I would look if something BEHIND me made me trip and fall. I'm pretty sure I would be considered the clumsiest person alive, and I would have the nickname "Grace" for the rest of my life...
But metaphorically this is exactly what we do when we look to the past and allow it to trip us up emotionally or cause us to fall spiritually. To combat this temptation I believe we must look to truth found in the Bible, as personally I've found it to be the only way I can truly fight sin, with lasting effects.
In 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, Paul says that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God (or will not be able to receive salvation), and he goes on to list many sinful deeds. But then he writes verse 11, and I am so thankful for it!!! He says, "And such were some of you (writing to the Corinthians), but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of The Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." Basically he's saying, you were once unrighteous sinners, but now you are free of your past and are made righteous by Jesus Christ!
I broke down verse 11 because I wanted to really study and understand what it was saying. The order in which Paul lists the process is absolutely perfect! (No surprise there because this is the inerrant Word of God I'm reading, right?) First, we are washed, which is pretty self-explanitory. We are cleansed from the sin in our past.
Second, we are sanctified. In a very, very small nutshell (let's keep things simple), sanctification is being separated from sinful things and being dedicated to God. It is an internal purification for the renewing of the soul!
And thirdly, we are justified. According to Strong's Concordance this is simply declaring or proclaiming that a person is just, righteous and such as they ought to be through Christ. I'm sure that there is a much longer answer out there as to what justification is, but in my humble blog post we won't go into that. ;)
To wrap this all up, when we start to get discouraged about things that have happened in our past I think we must remember that, if we are Christians, then we have been washed, sanctified, and justified through Christ, and can leave all of our "baggage" at His feet. And we should also remember that sanctification and justification are continual processes that apply to sin that will happen in the future as well.
Truth for today: My past does not have to plague me. 1 Cor. 6:9-11
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