A Wise Man once said, “Forget the past; if you don’t, there is only sickness in your future. Get healthy in your thoughts and your body will follow suit. Look up to the stars, love the flowers, let God’s peace come into your heart and you will know the peace of God.”
The apostle Paul said, “This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”
It can be so hard to forget the past. But what has happened has happened, and after learning from our mistakes we must put them behind us and go on. We should use our past experiences as lessons to help us know how to move forward, but practice not looking back – unless we want to go that way.
The Lord Jesus Christ told us, “No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” A good farmer must set his eye on a goal in the distance and keep looking toward it or he will not plow a straight furrow. This is what Paul meant when he said he “pressed toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” Once Paul set his goal, he let nothing deter him from pressing toward it.
Are we like Paul in this respect? He told us to be followers of him as he was of Christ: “Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you.”
Like Paul, we need to set the kingdom as our goal and keep looking forward. Paul gave up all his “what might have beens” and refused to look back on what he had left behind. We must do the same. He describes his “what might have beens” this way: “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews: in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless. But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ.”
We have the greatest future of anyone on earth but it won’t be ours if we spend our time looking back. There is no joy in “what might have been,” however, there may be rough trials in our future as there was for Jesus.
We are told that the Lord Jesus “steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem.” He knew what would happen there, but in his life as well as in death, Jesus was able to look forward to the future glory promised him for obedience. Let us, “Look unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God”
We must not let the “what might have beens” sap our strength. We, like Jesus, for the joy set before us are able to endure the trials that come our way as we “press on toward the mark for the prize of our high calling in Christ Jesus.”
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One