The Past is Past...Moving On

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“The Past is Past…Moving On”

Your Rear-View Mirror?

"Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and staining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." Phillipians 3:13-14

It is more valuable to look where you’re going than to see where you’ve been.

Constantly looking back will choke off and limit your destiny that God has for you!

“The past should be a springboard, not a hammock.” Edmund Burke

Three Truths about your past:

1. You can not plan your future by looking at your past.
2. You can not walk backward into the future.
3. If your yesterdays still look big, then you probably aren’t doing much today.

Two ways of looking at the past that keep us from moving forward:
1. Believing that the past was so good that our future can not compare to it.
2. Believing that our past was so bad that the future has been ruined.

The truth about reason #1…because of Christ:
1. Your future contains more happiness and potential than any past that you can remember.
2. Celebrating a good past will steal from you the beauty of your even better future.
3. Satan wants you to believe that the best has been…literally getting you to look backwards… not seeing the new thing that God is doing. (Is. 43)
4. You and I are as Christians are involved in continual growth: Ephesians 4

The truth about reason #2…because of Christ:
1. God does NOT decide your future based upon your past. (2 Cor. 5:17)
2. God has not turned your past into your memorial…he has not embalmed it… but cremated it!
3. Satan does not want you to enjoy God’s forgiveness… because then you have a future.
4. Misery is a yesterday person trying to get along with a tomorrow God.

Your speech says a lot about what you really believe.

If you predominantly talk about…
the past you are going backward.
the present- you are simply maintaining.
the future- you are growing.

A question…
Are you staying so far in your past that the future will be gone before you get there?