“Forgetting What Lies Behind…”

Memories. Sometimes they are a source of great joy, thankfulness, satisfaction, even pride. Other times a source of regret, grief, anguish, and sorrow upon sorrow.

As you look in the rear view mirror of your life’s journey, do you see failures, dashed dreams, damaging blunders, failed relationships, hopeless or hapless in your efforts to achieve something you valued highly? Do we begin a new year with just more “resolutions”-an annually renewed effort at the task of living with hope that this time around “it will be different”?

Work out gyms, and exercise facilities are always crowded at the beginning of the new year. Many of those enthused “resolutionists” often fade away by March. “Getting in shape” just takes too much work. Most everything we value however, takes sustained and persevering effort to achieve and maintain.

The apostle Paul was a very driven man. Even before he met Christ in a quite dramatic encounter, he was on fire with zeal for God, to the point of aggressively persecuting Christians. He had acquired an impressive list of “badges of honor” according to how they were defined in his day. A sort of noble birth and upbringing, raised under the strict rules of Judaism, a Pharisee, and persecutor of the church, and according to his own words: “as to the righteousness which is in the law, found blameless” [Philippians 3:6]. But he abandoned his “badges” after meeting Christ on the Damascus road. In fact he says that “whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss [i.e. worthless] for the sake of Christ [Phil 3:7]. Paul was zealous for God, but in his ignorance about Christ, he ran hard on the wrong track, the wrong road. But meeting Christ changed everything for him. His “petal to the metal” zeal for God was now rightly directed as a newly recruited bond-servant of Christ, and he appears to have spent little time regretfully hand-wringing over his past misdirected and dreadful blunders. He says that his newly determined mind-set is that of “forgetting what lies behind, and reaching forward to what lies ahead….I press on toward the goal of the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus [Phil 3:13-14]

2021 is not just another new year containing more joys and sorrows, though it certainly will include them. It is really 365 new days, each of which presents the opportunity to forget past failures, unproductive or misguided efforts , and instead, to press forward in our pursuit of Christ more deeply in view of the “surpassing value of knowing Him” [Phil 3:8].

May I suggest that we all take our eyes off the mirror of negative memories and fix them on the One who has gone before us, pursuing Him with all our heart. [Hebrews 12:1-3, Psalm 27:8]