06-06-2023

LETTING GO

OR

LIVING A GODLY LIFE BY LETTING GO OF THE PAST

 

The Lord led me to talk about something today that many, many Christians really don’t even realize that is a problem that is hindering them on a day-to-day basis in their lives.  Now before I begin this, I want to say that, just because we are getting older, we DO NOT have to have an attitude of, “Well, all those promises of healing and all that other stuff are for the younger Christians - as you get older, you just have go through stuff - I don’t think those promises are for we older Christians.”  Now I know that probably no one would ever admit thinking like that - but it is a lie from the devil that has hindered many older people from using their faith and claiming the promises in the Word of God.

 

SO - THE LORD SAID TO TACKLE THIS!  SO I AM!

 

First, I want to talk about a truth from the Word which is very important for us all to get ahold of.  Let me just say that every single one of us needs to get ahold of this deep down within us.  I’m going to state it very simply first.  WHEN YOU ACCEPTED WHAT JESUS DID FOR YOU - BY BELIEVING IN YOUR HEART AND SAYING IT WITH YOUR MOUTH - AND WERE BORN AGAIN, ALL YOUR SINS WERE FORGIVEN - PAST SINS, PRESENT SINS, AND FUTURE SINS.  NOW, SOME WILL SAY, “HOW CAN THAT BE, TO FORGIVE SINS BEFORE THEY HAVE BEEN COMMITTED?”  WELL, YOU BETTER HOPE IT’S TRUE - BECAUSE YOU WEREN’T EVEN BORN YET WHEN HE DIED ON THAT CROSS!  

 

He took the sins of humanity into His being and died, paying the price that humanity could not pay - and the only part humanity had in it, was each individual had to accept it for himself.  He wouldn’t force it on anyone.  Therefore, when a human being accepts what He did, all that person’s sins have been paid for.

 

Now, a lot of Christians live their lives remembering all the bad stuff they’ve done, feeling guilty about it, sorrowing over it - remembering relationships that went haywire, terrible arguments, extra-marital relationships, bad treatment of others, bad words - swearing, cussing, and on and on and on.  And you know what that does.  IT’S LETTING YOUR PAST HAVE AN EFFECT ON YOUR PRESENT.  A lot of people just cannot get ahold of the fact that they really, really, really have been forgiven of all that stuff and they have to LET IT GO!  

 

Then, along with that, every time they lose their cool in their day-to-day life, they feel like they have to beg God to forgive them again.  They don’t really understand what God’s forgiveness through salvation really is.

 

 

I’m going to read some verses from the Book of Hebrews, which teach some things which we all need very much to understand.  Hebrews gives some clear enlightenment about what being born again, and being a child of God is.  

 

Hebrews 4:9-11 - “There remains therefore a rest for the people of God.  For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His.  Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience.”  This is comparing us entering into His rest because He forgave us for all our sins - to the rest that God entered into after He created the world.  God didn’t have to keep on creating.  In the same way, we don’t have to keep on trying in our own strength to do everything exactly right and then go get forgiven again when we fail.  

 

Before we were saved, no matter how hard we tried to be good, we never could measure up to what God desired.  So He had His Son pay the price for us - ONCE AND FOR ALL.  All we have to do is receive it - and enter into that rest.  AND LET GO OF THE PAST MESSES WE MADE.  Unfortunately, so many Christians are still LABORING, INSTEAD OF ENTERING INTO REST.  And it’s hindering the life that God wants them to walk in.  WE HAVE TO LET GO.

 

Hebrews 6:11-12 - “And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end, that you do not become sluggish, but imitate those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.”

 

I think the writer of Hebrews was directly talking to we older Christians - telling us not to be sluggish!!!!!!  In other words, keep worshiping, keep resting in Christ, thanking Him for all He’s done, letting go of the past - walking in His blessings.

 

Now I’m going to read these next verses and, as I read it, think of this -  this is a quotation from Jeremiah and Isaiah and he is referring to the time of the Old Covenant and then the New Covenant - which is what we are living in.  Hebrews 8:10-12 - “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord.  I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts and I will be their God and they shall be My people.  None of them shall teach his neighbor and none his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord’ for all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them.  For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their lawless deed I will remember no more.”

 

What wonderful words from the Lord!  He’s not even remembering all the messes we made, or the bad things we said and did - or even the ‘naughty things’ we thought about.  But if we are holding on to them in our memory, we are allowing them to hinder us.  

 

What we think about, ponder on, relive in our mind, remembering every detail - is what keeps us from living in that REST that the Lord wants us to live in.

 

That’s the reason those verses in Romans 12:1-2 are so important.  “I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to the Lord, which is your reasonable service.  And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

 

You have control of your own mind - what you think about, ponder on, and God has given us the answer as to how to think on the good and not think on the bad.

 

I have often pondered on the life of the Apostle Paul and the Lord has shown me that this man, who was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, who went about arresting Christians, having them killed, having them imprisoned, and on and on - this same man had an encounter with the Lord that day that totally changed his life.  After his encounter with Jesus, he spent about three years in the desert - communicating with the Lord - he didn’t go learn from the Christians in Jerusalem yet - it was just him and Jesus - and he was truly transformed.  

 

Listen to these verses - Hebrews 9:13-14 - “For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit, offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”  

 

Man oh Man - I believe that’s exactly what happened to the Apostle Paul.  His conscience was cleansed.  That doesn’t mean that you deny that you ever did anything wrong - it means that you are so in love with God and His forgiveness, that you are deeply aware that you are free from the constant guilt of all you did bad - to the point that His forgiveness is more real than all your past bad.

 

That’s what God wants for all of us.    Of course, that does not mean that we just go do bad stuff still - NO - It means that your relationship with the Lord is the most important thing in your life!!!!!!!

 

After studying the Word for about 70 years now, I believe that, when Paul had that encounter with the Lord, and then spent about 3 years in the desert, talking to the Lord, receiving from the Lord - that was the reason that he was so changed, and so completely in love with God, that his mind was being renewed - and, therefore, he was no longer the same person he used to be - not just in his spirit - but in his soul, as well.  That doesn’t mean that he didn’t remember the bad stuff he did - it means that he had LET GO of it to the point that he didn’t PONDER on it anymore.  IT WAS THE PAST!  I personally believe that is one of the main reasons that God could use him as He did.{By the way, Paul says in Galatians 1:15-17 that he spent 3 years in Arabia before he went to Jerusalem to confer with the leaders of the church.  The book of Acts doesn’t include that - but Galatians makes it clear.}

 

 

Brothers and Sisters - that doesn’t mean that we have to go to the desert!  Laughing.  It just means that Jesus has to be more important to us than anything else - including our past.  That way, God can show us, reveal to us, enlighten us, help us, guide us……and on and on.  Isn’t that what we all want?  Of course, it is!

 

Now - here’s another portion of Scripture - Hebrews 9:24-26 - “For Christ has not entered the holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of GOD FOR US; not that He should offer Himself often, as the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood of another - He then would have had to suffer often since the foundation of the world; but now, once at the end of the ages, He has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.”

 

This is a picture of comparing what Jesus has done to the way things had to be done to take care of sin before Jesus died on the cross.  He has done it ONCE FOR ALL FOR US!  We don’t have to sit in our comfy chair and think about all the stuff we did wrong 40 or 50 years ago.  The Apostle Paul didn’t and look how God used him.  We have to SEE OURSELVES CLEANSED!  Does that mean that we never sin again?  No - our soul, where our mind, will, and emotions are did not get born again.  BUT IT IS BEING RENEWED, AS WE ARE TRANSFORMED (as it talks about in Romans 12:1-2).  That’s what we do, as we learn to think like Jesus thinks, love like Jesus loves, forgive like Jesus does, and on and on.

 

Now listen to this verse - I love this verse - Heb. 10:17 - God says this - “Their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.”

 

What a God we serve - I am awed at His absolutely powerful and everlasting LOVE FOR US!  He doesn’t want you to waste away the rest of your life, wallowing in the memory of all that you’ve done wrong - and His love is so REAL AND STRONG, He wants us to know that even HE is not remembering and doesn’t want us to let ourselves be defeated by our past.

 

I have learned, through the years, that what Jesus did on that cross, suffering punishment and pain and death - FOR US - has to become so real to me that it overcomes the guilt and pain and suffering from all the wrong in the past.  Now I’ve talked about this before but I’m going to mention it here.  Imagination is a very powerful gift that God has given us.  Instead of letting the memories of all the bad stuff stay alive in our imagination (which is being able to see the unseen in our mind) - we need to imagine the good things (like Jesus’ death and resurrection) to the point that they are more real than all that old bad.  Now I talked about imagination and its connection to hope - and I used this verse - Romans 4:17 - “as it is written, ‘I have made you a father of many nations, in the presence of Him whom he believed - God, who gives life to the dead and calls those those things which do not exist as though they did.”  That’s talking about God calling Abraham a father of many nations before it was so in the flesh.  That’s using imagination and hope together.  I have imagined Abraham sitting outside his tent and looking at his feet in the sand, and looking up at the stars in the sky, and saying, “Lord, You told me that my seed would be as many as those stars up there and as much as this sand my feet are in - I believe You, God!”

 

So-o-o-o-o-o I believe that imagining all that God has done in the past, remembering the good things - what it looked like - what it felt like - and imagining the stories in the Bible - in the Gospels - all those miracles - you being right there -  can have such an effect on you that the bad in the past just kinda’ fades away til you can hardly even remember it anymore.

 

I believe that we have to keep the GOOD ALIVE TO US AND bury the dead stuff.  I believe it is very, very important to share the good stuff with others.  Your ears need to hear your voice talk about the good.

 

So - I’m going to share a couple of miraculous things with you - because they are still alive to me and I want to share them with you.

 

First - We were living in Three Hills, Alberta, Canada - my husband was a student at Prairie Bible Institute - our kids were in Kindergarten and 1st Grade.  It was about half way through the year - and we were out of money, and out of food.  We just didn’t know what to do.  We were considering calling both our parents and asking if they could send us some but we really didn’t want to do that.  We had a huge big bag of potatoes and that’s all.  We had gotten down to ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE LEFT - even salt - milk - and everything else.  I was boiling potatoes for the 4 of us for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  IT WAS AWFUL!  This had been this way for several days.  We were praying like we never had before.

 

This one morning, the kids had gone to school, and my husband had gone to class.  I was laying on my bed, crying.  I flipped my Bible open, and my eyes landed on this verse.  It’s Psalm 37:25 - “I have been young and now am old; Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging bread.”  I read that over and over and over.  Then I jumped up and sat on the side of the bed and began reading it outloud, over and over.  Then, I prayed - and told the Lord I believed what the Psalmist had written - that He was truly loving of us and that we were righteous in Jesus and that we and our little ones needed food.  I started thanking Him for loving us and providing for us.  I got up and began to sing praise songs as I did the things I had to do.  Lunch time came, and we had potatoes.  The afternoon was spent doing the norm - dinner time came, and we had potatoes.  It came time to put the kids to bed, and about 30 minutes later, there was a knock on our door.  My husband went to the door and there were several men standing there with boxes and boxes of food of every kind.  We didn’t know these men.  They all came in very quickly and filled up the dining room table, chairs and even the floor with all this food. - THEY DIDN’T TALK TO US - THEY JUST SMILED - AND THEY LEFT JUST AS QUICKLY AS THEY HAD COME IN!

We were standing there in absolute AWE.  We looked at one another with our mouths open.  We didn’t know who they were or where they came from, or even how they knew.  We really hadn’t talked to anyone about our need.  We stood there, holding hands and looking at the food.  Then, my husband saw some bags of all kinds of cookies.  Then, he said, “I’m going to get the kids up - we’re going to have a party - with cookies and milk.”

 

He went to both of them and said, “God had people bring us food - get up - let’s have a party with cookies and milk.”  They got up and came hurrying to the dining room - and THEY JUST STOOD THERE IN AWE - LOOKING AT THE FOOD AND THEN LOOKING AT US.  We certainly had a party - eating cookies and drinking milk and praising God.  We never found out who the guys were or anything about it.  I can still remember so much about that miracle.  And you know what?  It’s way, way more important in my memory than the problem itself was.  I can remember the cookies and milk better than I can the potatoes!!!!!

 

Now - I want to share one more GOOD THING with you.  This was a few years later - we were living in Indian Hills, Colorado and pastoring a lovely church there, living in a parsonage.  The kids were in elementary school - things were going pretty well.  It was the days of the Charismatic Renewal - and I talked about that last week.  We both had received the Baptism in the Holy Spirit and we were going to home meetings 2 or 3 times during the week.

 

This one night, we were going to a meeting in our VW Bug, with our two kids in the back seats.  The mountain roads in Colorado are absolutely beautiful but, when you are traveling through them at night, you really have to be careful because the roads go around and around and around.  You must not drive fast and you must be always aware that you stay focused on the curves - or you could be driving your car off the mountain road and crashing way, way, way below.  When you live there, you just get used to it and it’s not all that scary.

 

So - we were driving along, around and around the curves, and, we were approaching another one and ALL OF A SUDDEN, WE WERE ALREADY AROUND ON THE OTHER SIDE - AND THERE WERE PEOPLE AND CARS EVERYWHERE AND POLICEMEN!  We stopped the car, and this policeman ran to us and said, “HOW DID YOU GET AROUND THAT CURVE?”   WE JUST LOOKED AT HIM AND MY HUSBAND SAID, “I DON’T KNOW - WHAT’S GOING ON?” - THE POLICEMAN SAID, “THERE’S BEEN A ROCK SLIDE, YOU COULDN’T HAVE DRIVEN AROUND THAT CURVE.”  

 

We just looked at one another - then we tried to look at the curve we had just somehow gotten around that could not have been done.  There was no road there - only rocks - a terrible, terrible sight - there were police car lights shining on it so we could see it a little bit.

 

The policemen (there were several) just shook their heads, and walked away from us.  We just sat there in our little VW Bug and looked at one another and at our kids - who were absolutely sitting still with wide eyes, and not saying a word.

 

Then, almost at the very same moment, the Lord reminded Jerry and me (both at the same time) of the story in Acts, about Philip, who was ministering to the Ethiopian Eunech, and then baptized him and then was immediately TRANSLATED TO ANOTHER PLACE.  He was one place and, then, all of a sudden, he was in another place.  Both of us began to tell that story to our kids and we all began to praise the Lord because He had done a miracle to protect us.  We didn’t know - and had no way of knowing - that there was a rock slide and it had destroyed the road.  We were just doing what God had told us to do - go meet with these other believers - get to know them - study the Word - learn more about God - learn how to pray more and more - and on and on - AND GOD HAD INTERVENED AND HAD PROTECTED OUR FAMILY FROM BEING KILLED THAT NIGHT.  WE WERE TRANSLATED!

 

I will never forget that moment - the realization that we couldn’t have driven on the road around that curve because the road have been destroyed by a rock slide - there was no way to explain it.  It was a miracle.  And you know what that did in us - It taught us that if you give yourself to the Lord, like it says in Rom. 12:1-2, and you follow Him, the way He wants you to be, say, think, love, and just simply trust Him, He will work things out for you that only He knows about.

 

I remember one of those little songs from a long time ago: Trust and obey

For there’s no other way

To be happy in Jesus

But to trust and obey

 

It is hard for me to even explain this that I just shared with you - because - one moment I was just in our car getting ready to go around a curve and the next second, I was still in our car and we were already around it - and there wasn’t any road to have driven on - just rocks like I had never seen before.

 

Now - the reason that I am sharing these things with you is (1) because God said to, and

1. I have learned that committing yourself to God, or becoming a living sacrifice, as it says in Romans 12:1-2, causes you to walk so close to the Lord that your life is filled with the knowledge that He brings you, the enlightenment, the miracles, the help, THE RESTING IN HIM, and all the other things that you remember.  You find yourself pondering on the good.

 

Now, when you are RESTING IN HIM, THINKING ABOUT HIS WORD, AND ALL THE THINGS HE HAS DONE FOR YOU, THE BAD FROM THE PAST JUST SEEMS TO FADE AWAY.

 

I am sure that’s the way it was with the Apostle Paul - and, honestly, I have to say, that the longer I live here on this earth, the less the memories of the bad stuff even comes into my thinking.  

 

IT REALLY IS KINDA’ DAILY LIVING IN THE REST OF GOD - AND FOR ME, THAT IS THE WAY THAT WE BECOME TRUE FOLLOWERS OF JESUS!  BUT - ONE OF THE CHIEF WAYS THAT WE FOLLOW JESUS IS TO REALLY, REALLY, REALLY LET GO OF THE BAD STUFF OF THE PAST.  YOU’RE NOT LIVING A LIE - PRETENDING THAT THEY DIDN’T HAPPEN - YOU ARE LETTING GO OF THEM - SO THEY NO LONGER HAVE AN EFFECT ON YOU - IN YOUR MIND, AND YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE LORD DOMINATES YOUR LIFE - NOT YOUR PAST!

 

Scriptures used for this lesson

Hebrews 4:9-11

Hebrews 6:11-12

Hebrews 8:10-12

Romans 12:1-2

Hebrews 9:13-14

Galatians 1:15-17

Hebrews 9:24-26

Hebrews 10:17

Romans 4:17

Psalm 37:25