Your Past is a Non-Reality

Your past is a non-reality. Yes, it was real and the mistakes you made back then were real, but today you have no power to change anything back there. Today you only have the power to effect today and tomorrow. You could allow your past to act like a GPS and guide you into tomorrow or you could decide today that only today is real and today you have the power to change your tomorrows. This is a conscious decision. A discipline of doing. You must discard the default mindset that has been dictated and directed by the strong gravitational pull of your past and adopt the new mindset that comes through a relationship with Jesus Christ.

You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you. The God who started a good work in you will see it to completion. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. You are a new creation in Christ. You are more than a conqueror. If God is for you, who can be against you? God can handle your past. He is bigger than your mistakes. He’s done great things through some messed up people. People who were no better than you. And what He will do for one, He will do for others.

Think about David. The shepherd boy who became king. For starters, God didn’t choose someone from a royal blood line or from great wealth to succeed Saul as king. He chose a poor boy. Apparently David’s own father, Jesse, didn’t think he was too praise worthy because when Samuel went to their house to anoint the next king, Jesse presented David’s seven older brothers. Samuel said, “Nope these guys aren’t who I’m looking for. You got anyone else?” Jesse replied that he had one more son, but he was the youngest who was out tending the sheep. The rest is history. The least of 8 brothers in his own father’s eyes would be the next king. God uses the least for His greatest purposes. Then David, who the Bible states was a man after God’s own heart, didn’t sit around singing Kumbaya and living a life of Godly perfection. Before he became king, he ran from King Saul and went to visit a priest for food and refuge. While there he told the priest a couple of lies that cost the priest and 84 of his buddies their lives. But he still ultimately became king. Then while king he took an unhealthy interest in a married woman and got her pregnant. He sent her husband off to the front battle lines and ordered his troops to withdraw from him knowing that he would die.  David himself should have been on the battlefield; instead he was conspiring murder and indulging his sinful pleasures. Through all of this, David repented and didn’t allow his past to ruin his future. Yes, he suffered consequences that carried into his future, but he moved forward and became the greatest king of Israel.

David never lost God’s love; a love that was so wide and long and high and deep that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, could separate him from that love. The parameters of this same love should be what gives us the power to overcome our past and allow our futures to only be shaped by what we do Today. The past is not real anymore. Stop giving it the authority to determine your future.