Bowling Green Covenant Church

“Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus is calling us.”
—Philippians 3.13-14 [NLT]

Everybody has regrets about their past.

Even the apostle Paul had regrets. As a Pharisee and a Hebrew of Hebrews his knowledge of Scripture gave him tremendous insight into the person and work Jesus the Messiah. However, there were some things Paul did as a Pharisee that haunted him with regret. As Saul, the Pharisee, he gave his approval to the death of Stephen. As a Pharisee, he breathed out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. As a Pharisee, he persecuted the church and tried to destroy it. You want to talk about regrets? Paul had a ton of them.

We all have regrets. It’s part of being human. How we handle our regrets is the issue. Paul chose to forget his, not because he thought it was a good idea, but because the blood of Jesus Christ dissolved their hold on him. Whenever Paul was tempted to wallow in his regrets God reminded him that what is past is the past. He was forgiven—as far as the east is from the west so far had the Lord God removed his sins from him.

I like what Steve Brown says about regrets. He says, “It would be nice not to have any regrets. But, then, if I had no regrets, I would never grow. Regret is a sign of two things. First, it is a sign of God’s working in my life and secondly, it is a sign that God wants me to do it different next time.” Brown suggests that we deal with our regrets by asking the following four questions:

1) What makes you think that if you did it again you would do it any better?
2) Do you think God made a mistake?
3) If things were different and you had fewer regrets, would God love you more?
4) Where do you learn? In the places where you do it right, or in the places where you do it wrong?

God intends our past to be a tutor to help us grow not a prison from which we cannot escape. Press on. The surest way to grow in our knowledge of Christ is to forget the past at the same time we press on toward the future. Some things that have happened to us in the past may simply hurt too much to just say, “Forget it and move on.” Yet even they must be let go if we hope to press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called us heavenward in Christ Jesus. The prize for which God has called us heavenward in Christ Jesus is the final achievement of our faith. It is the moment when God calls us by name to stand before Him and be welcomed into His eternal presence with the words: “Well done, you good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master.”

We can press on toward the prize and reach for the glory of what God has in store for those who love Him and follow Him in faith, or we can wallow in the regrets of past failures. Here is good news: what God commands us to do He empowers us to achieve. He calls us to forget what lies behind so we can press on toward what lies ahead. We can press on toward our future in Christ because God has made it possible for us to know Jesus Christ and the power of His resurrection.
God is sovereign. His grace can erase our regret. Our future is secure in Christ. By the power of His resurrection we have the freedom to confess our failures well as the courage, to press on in spite of them.

You think about that.

MM