"That's just who I am. I've always been this way." "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." These are among the phrases I've heard throughout my years of ministry regarding why people can't change. I could give you an endless list of excuses and rationale many people use for staying in the same destructive pattern of behavior. Any objective observer sees through facade.
Yet many of us are so shaped by our past or are so haunted by our past that it makes it hard for us to enjoy or even to live in the opportunities of the present and future. I love this passage from Isaiah 43:18-19. God tells us to forget the former things and not to dwell on the things of our past. He says that He is going to do a new thing. He tells us that He is making a way in the desert and refreshing streams in the wasteland.
Living in the mistakes, circumstances, oppression of our past can make us feel like we're in a desert. We feel trapped and worthless. It saps our dreams and leads us to depression, anxiety, guilt and probably a myriad of other emotions and mindsets. It's really hard for us to imagine how God could do anything significant in our lives or how our lives could be anything different.
If anyone understood the imprisoning power of past life, it had to be the Apostle Paul. He like many of the Bible heroes had his fair share of skeletons in the closet. There were plenty of dark moments that Paul would have just as soon faded away into oblivion. I'm sure the echoes of cries and screams of persons and family members he put to death haunted him each night as he placed his head on the pillow. As he closed his eyes he could see the faces of desperate mom's, wives, children of the men he ordered to die.
Yet, Paul found relief, hope, direction, refreshment in Christ. Perhaps that is one of factors that drove him to share the message of the Good News of God through Jesus. In Ephesians 3:14-21 he shares a prayer of restoration and relief and hope for others. He prays for us to find that inner strength that comes through the Spirit of God. He prays that we would discover the incredible depth, width, breadth of God's refreshing, forgiving, redeeming, restoring, empowering love. The kind of love that truly transforms us.
For those who say, "I could never change," or "I could never amount to much," or my situation is hopeless," Paul proclaims, "Now to Him is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power at work within us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever! Amen."
God, you said that if anyone be in Christ Jesus he or she is a new creation, that the old is gone, that we have been made new. But it's hard for me to escape my past. It's filled with disappointment, devastation, blunders, pain that keep me chained and burdened. It's hard for me to see anything but that. I want to see your new thing. Give me a glimpse. Work your change in me. Free me the old things of my past that hold me down and prevent me from enjoying life with you.
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