You can’t stay in the past if you want to move forward into your future.

One of the greatest oppositions to moving forward in the freedom Christ purchased for you is the inability to be free from the past. As another new year begins, many remember, reminisce, and look back. Naturally, as we take the time to remember the past year, our memory takes us back further in our lives.

Negative experiences, hurtful circumstances, sinful choices, unwise decisions, and regretful moments often feel like a spiritual and emotional avalanche. If not processed in the right way, despair, guilt, depression, insecurity, and anxiety start to set in until we feel useless, unloved, and utterly defeated in life.

It is not the will of God or the desire of God for you to live in defeat by hanging onto your past. As a believer in Christ, you are not defined by your past; you are defined by Christ in you.

This means that you are no longer condemned, but innocent through the shed blood of Jesus Christ. He is your substitute. In other words, all of your past sins, mistakes, failures, the curses you lived with, and your hurts were placed on Christ, and in return, He gave you His righteousness, healing, wholeness, and freedom.

You may be asking, “But you don’t know my past. You don’t know my hurts. I don’t deserve to move forward and start over. I don’t deserve to be forgiven and free.”

It’s not about deserving it. Letting go of the past means that we trust Christ has already taken away the penalty of our wrong choices and defeated their power to keep us down. Jesus settled the penalty and power of our past once and for all!

Since Jesus settled it for you, you must rest in Him and be settled. When you look back, own it and learn from it, but rejoice that it has no control over your destiny. God’s grace gives you the permission, right, and authority to lay it down and move forward.

The apostle Paul was once a man who made havoc of the church, ensuring that men and women would be persecuted. He didn’t deserve it, but God’s grace came to him. Jesus transformed him. He was a changed man when he put His trust in Christ’s sufficient sacrifice on the cross.

Though he had a regretful past, it no longer held him down, defeated him, nor kept him from moving forward. He writes, “I don’t mean to say that I’ve already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me.

No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing: 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 3:12-13, NLT).

Let go of the past! You have the right and authority to do so in Christ!

LIFE APPLICATION

1. Spend time alone with God today: Sit in His presence, rest in His unconditional love and acceptance of you. Begin to worship Him, thank Him, and praise Him for providing complete forgiveness and healing from your past.

2. Meditate on the following scriptures: 2 Corinthians 5:21; Jude v.24-25; Romans 8:1; Ephesians 1:7

3. Declare over your life: “I forget those things that are behind and reach forward to those things which are ahead” (Philippians 3:13).

4. Move Forward: What in the past needs to be forgiven or released? What lesson can you learn from the past that makes you a better man or woman of God today?