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'Christ in You...'
by Dale Krebbs
"The Past"...
Two four-letter words that can exercise power over us like no other.
One of the greatest single hindrance to happiness, joy, peace of mind, and contentment in our world today. Millions struggle with it in their life day and night. Some call it "baggage", carried around as part of the memory, and passing through the mind with regret and sorrow. At times it can be accompanied by depression that burdens and distorts even personality and sense of reality.
The past was real then, when it was real, when it was experienced.
But not now.
Have you considered that the passing of the smallest measure of what we call time, when is comes and goes, is simply no more? Focusing on the past has been illustrated by someone trying to move forward in a boat to a desired destination while rowing forward while looking backward.
Technically, the past does no exist. It may be recorded in some way, as what was, but otherwise it does not exist. It not only does not exist, but it can never exist again. What occurred in your life, what you may have thought for a split second, every breath, every moment, every experience, every movement of body and mind is gone forever.
If you are a Christian, when you are resurrected, you will have a NEW body which will experience new things beyond imagination, but now every second becomes the past when it is past. You can learn some things from your past but your learning time, and what resulted from it, will also become the past. And what you learn as an aid for the moment or, even for the future, will only last until it also becomes the past.
The burden of your past will cease to exist then, and will never be again.
There is truth in the old saying, "let go and let God" which we all should have done many times in the past. Is your past haunting you, dogging your present and your perceived future, hindering your life in some way?
The Apostle Paul had apparently learned how to forget the many negative memories of his past when he said, "I do not consider, brethren, that I have captured and made it my own [yet]; but one thing I do [it is my one aspiration]: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead" - Philippians 3:13.
Nothing perhaps is more futile than minding the past. Ask Jesus Christ to remove the wrong value you place on your past. Perhaps you cannot remove permanently the bad memories, but He can guard your mind and emotions from its affect.
In time, He will deliver you from the shackles of your past. The memory may be there, but the burden of them will be gone. Just ask Him in faith, and leave the doing of it in His loving hands...and set your mind and heart on the time when bad memories will be no more. It will be as though they never were.
"For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth. And the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind." - Isaiah 65:17
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