When I was in seventh grade, there was a boy named
Mark Munschausen who used to make fun of me incessantly. I was the tallest kid in the school and he
was the shortest boy in my class. He
used to try his best to humiliate me in front of my schoolmates for what reason
I don’t know. Of all the other kids at
the school, I was his victim. After
perhaps six months of this, I finally exploded.
On the grass field of the school playground while a group of us including
Mark were playing football, he said something to me that set me off. I chased him down and tackled him, began
punching him relentlessly and then started choking him. All the while tears were streaming down my
face. I had never been in a physical
fight before…and haven’t since. Someone
must have pulled me off Mark because I don’t remember quitting on my own. The fight ended, as much as you could call my
pummeling him a fight, and as far as I can recall, I was never disciplined for
it, never even brought to the principal’s office. We settled our dispute on the playground and
he never made fun of me again. As I look
back upon the “encounter” I must say I never made it my goal to look for other
Munschausens in the world to fight them.
I never took out my rage on others of German decent. I didn’t make it my determination to crush
all other short people. The name Mark
has never had a negative connotation for me since the fight. And freckled kids (Mark was freckled) have
not stirred my anger. All I have since
then is a rather indifferent attitude toward the whole business. I don’t feel guilty for what I did and I am
not in any way still disturbed by the teasing I suffered back then. It might as well have never happened it is so
insignificant to my life now.
There is much made of how our past influences who we
are today and there certainly is a great deal of truth to that contention. Children who have been abused are generally
scarred for life by it. Plenty of men
and women are afraid to get married after their first marriage failed. Many people have trust issues because they
have never forgotten how someone they loved betrayed them. Some people won’t eat peas because they got
sick at one time eating them. There are
adults who have never gotten over their fear of swimming because someone they
knew drowned or of dogs because they were bitten when they were young or of going
into dark rooms because they were molested when they were a child. Perhaps you had a tough time liking someone
who reminded you of someone else. You
might flinch when a car comes too close to you as you are driving after having
been rear ended. Plenty of people who
came out of the depression continued the rest of their lives saving milk
cartons, old cans and scraps of wood just
in case they might someday need them.
Many people try to run from their past by moving as far away from their
home town as possible. Some leave
careers because of bad experiences that traumatized them. The past for many is a terrible prison where
they have been trapped; for others the past has kept them from trying new
things and making new friends. The past
is not always our friend.
There is a person in the Bible who never escaped his
past and it caused his downfall. The
third son of David, King of Israel was haunted by his past. His sister was raped by his older
half-brother and for three long years, Absalom plotted how he might avenge the
crime. As the years went by, Absalom
grew increasingly bitter about the lack of action his father took when he heard
about the rape and decided he would take justice into his own hands and take
vengeance on his sister’s rapist .Absalom never said a word to Amnon,
either good or bad; he hated Amnon because he had disgraced his sister Tamar. (Genesis 13: 22 NIV) Finally, Absalom made
his move and murdered Amnon, his half-brother who had committed the rape. But Absalom’s rage was not stemmed by his
revenge. He then began to plot the
overthrow of his father’s government and take the crown from him. Absalom planned four years the revolt and
eventually had enough support within the nation to rebel against his father’s
rule. He was eager in fact to have his
own father murdered in the process.
Absalom, for whatever reason, his father’s lack of support when Absalom
was young or David’s seeming indifference to the rape of Absalom’s sister Tamar,
never forgot how he had been wronged by his dad. In the end, Absalom’s
inability to forget his past cost him his life when he was killed in battle
trying to destroy his dad.
There are millions around the world like Absalom who
do not let go of their past even though it damages them psychologically. In contrast Joseph was sold into slavery by
his brothers and despite winding up in prison for a crime he did not commit was
not governed by all the wrong done him.
In fact he faced his brothers fully and rather than condemning them,
reminded them of the part God played in his exile to Egypt. “And now, do not be distressed and do not
be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that
God sent me ahead of you. For two years
now there has been famine in the land, and for the next five years there will
not be plowing and reaping. But God sent
me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives
by a great deliverance. So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God. He
made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt.”
(Genesis 45:5-9 NIV)
Notice in this that Joseph never blocked out his
past; he saw it as redeemed by God. He
did not deny the evil that was in the hearts of his brothers, he redefined
though their work. Nothing you or I have
endured is too monstrous to be reconstituted into a resurrection of sorts. Joseph did not forget his past; he was in a
sense governed by it and not how the vast majority of us are governed by our
past. Getting sold into slavery was the
only way Joseph would have voluntarily left his father to resettle in
Egypt. When Joseph was falsely accused
by Potiphar’s wife of trying to rape her, God used her accusation to bring out
Joseph’s own true loyalty to God and moral fortitude and establish the two
joined together as his determining personality trait. The idiotic assumption Potiphar made that
Joseph was guilty led to Joseph gaining a rock solid trust in God to see him
through any trial he might ever face. It
also landed him in the sole place where he could establish for one of Pharaoh’s
most important officials the power he possessed as God’s personal servant and
prophet. We must not pass by this too
quickly. Only at the point of great
desperation and need could Pharaoh’s cupbearer be ready to ascertain the most
important bit of information he would encounter ever. The Lord was intervening in his life and he
might never have known this without meeting Joseph in prison; might never have
been able to help Pharaoh see that God was intervening in the king’s own life
if he hadn’t met Joseph in prison.
Given the monumental place our past has with regard
to our present, we must see it for what it is.
The Apostle Paul had every reason to be consumed by the pain of his
past. After all, each time he made it
back to Jerusalem he must have encountered some widow or orphan Paul personally
put in that condition. He came across in
cities all over the western world men and women who had ugly scars because of
what Paul had done to them. It is not
easy to live with a past such as Paul’s, especially given the insatiable hunger
Paul had to love each soul he met. If
anyone had a dreadful past he must have wished to bury, it had to have been the
Apostle Paul. Yet he never seemed
emotionally crippled by his past and he certainly never buried his past. This is why.
Everything changes when we take for ourselves Jesus
Christ crucified, including our past.
When Jesus, God in flesh died on the cross, He redeemed us. That means He gained for Himself by dying everything
there is about us and immediately transformed it into something completely new
including what we have faced before. The
transformation cuts both ways…forward and backward. We have a future that is different and
eventually perfect and we have a past that is different and eventually
perfect. When we are born again, God
does not leave us with a fragmented and awful heredity that leaves us
psychologically crippled. He makes our
past right and good. No experience we
have had once we have been totally redeemed by the Cross of Christ is a gaping
wound…it is God’s own place of strength.
Imagine a separated shoulder that after it is surgically repaired is
stronger and more helpful than ever.
Your past, once God has had His way with it through the Cross of Christ
is your ally and valuable resource for the enhancement of your life as well as
the lives of a multitude of others. It
is only as we defy our Lord to make good of our past by unbelief that we limp
about, crippled by our past.
Paul’s rallying cry, of “forgetting what is behind”,
was not a spin doctor’s challenge to pretend like nothing happened to us
before. He simply stated how it is when
we give our lives to Christ. The past is
just as good to us as our future not because we decide it is but because it
really is. Consider this about the
forgetting. Imagine you have suffered a
terrible back injury. All you think
about is that back of yours because it through pain demands your
attention. Day and night, each movement
and activity is ruled to some degree by your aching back. Your back comes up in your daily
conversations, is a big part of your praying and constitutes your rapt
attention. But suppose that back of
yours begins to heal. You think about it
less, pray about it more infrequently and it comes up in fewer and fewer of
your conversations. You don’t even
notice your back when you lift something or sit or take a walk. It is so completely healed that you forget
your back. That is what Paul is talking
about your past. In Christ, as you in
faith put your past into the body of Jesus crucified, your past gets more than
healed; it becomes perfected…the perfect past for one as important and beloved
of God as you.
The revelation from God that you have sinned is the
point at which you start to see your past become your great friend. The Bible makes it clear what you must do
about your past. Repent, then, and
turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may
come from the Lord, and that he may send the Christ, who has been appointed for
you — even Jesus. (Acts 3:19-20 NIV) When you turn from your sin and face
God squarely, which is what “repent” means, a miracle happens. The Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you are
not the same person you were before.
Christ enters you and you begin to work in His power and you think with
His mind working by means of your mind and you love through Christ and bless
through Christ and help through Christ and encourage through Christ and heal
through Christ and pray through Christ.
Everything changes when you turn from your sin and face God. Your mind does not think with a limp and you
do not act lamely but capably, effectively as Jesus Christ lives through all
you do. Repent, for you as a Christian,
does not mean a groveling, despair over your past; it is a turning to God that
Christ may live thoroughly through you. Our road map through our past into our future is Galatians 2: 20. I
have been crucified with Christ.
That is your past. And I no
longer live but Christ lives in me.
That is what you are now. And the life I live in the body I live by
faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. That is your past combined with who you are now
determining what you will be from this point forward. Take a moment to remember some things that
you have had happen in your past…good or bad that have shaped you and
influenced you now. Fling those memories
of what happened into the crucified body of Christ and miraculously, perfectly,
God will transform them and they will be…each one of them, cause for you to be
happy. They are and forever will be your
friend and your help as you move forward in Christ.
If we look back upon
the losses we have endured over the years, we might see certain trends...bad
breaks, poor timing, lack of attentiveness to crucial details, slovenly habits,
dysfunctional relationships, distorted views of self. It could be that we got sick at the wrong
time, were tripped up by our lusts or were mistaken about the character of
certain people. The regretful glance
backward that morphs into self-pitying is corrosive to the working of God in
you. The very thing He came to do,
redeem your life completely gets hindered by the regret you keep eyeing. If we take God at His word, that Christ came
to save us from our sin, then the obstinate pout must be put away. But you may wonder how God could do this, how
He could make the ugly moments of your past "redeemed". His answer to you is the same as it was for
the withered Elizabeth past child bearing.
"Nothing is impossible with God." The worst of your circumstances are made new
by Christ upon His sin bearing. They are
bought back and rebuilt...remade just as thoroughly as if an old wreck of a car
were blown to smithereens and the molecules of it put together into the most
spectacular of yachts. "Nothing is
impossible" includes your past and what has been done to you and by you is
of no account anymore. What matters is
what God will do with it and that is, "make all things new." The Lord is not afraid of your past even if
you have built it up into a monster. He
has faced it squarely while dying on the Cross and mastered it. You have nothing to hide anymore...it is
out in the open...out in the bright sunlight of God's love for you. Is it not perfectly reasonable that the
bearing of your sin took place as day splintered off into darkness and the
redeeming of your life came to pass as the first sparkles of sunlight broke
upon the dawn? You can moan about the
missed opportunities and the regrettable decisions you have made but what is
the point of that? It is like weeping
over winning the lottery or despairing over the successful surgery that saved
you from cancer. You have been
redeemed! Never look past that.
