The key to life change is forgetting,
not remembering. Try remembering that next time you
are sitting with a friend or counselor who is digging deeply into your past in
the hopes of impacting your future for good. Consider the life of Joseph. If
anyone was a candidate for ten years of therapy because of a painful past, it
was Joseph. This guy was coddled by his father, pampered as the youngest, and
ridiculed and ultimately rejected by his brothers. Finally, at one point his
eleven brothers stripped him naked, threw him into a pit, then hauled him out
and sold him as a slave in Egypt. Now would that mess with your mind? Then
Joseph got a job in Egypt; he was working hard and trying to build a life for
himself when his boss’s wife flipped out and falsely accused him of trying to
have sex with her. Sounds like the Jerry Springer show. Unable to defend
himself, Joseph was chained up in some rat-infested prison and completely
forgotten for several years.
Now
you would think that Joseph would be messed up for life or certainly would need
endless hours of therapy to process all that pain. Yet the Bible teaches
something quite different. In all of it, Joseph saw a sovereign God who was at
work. Was Joseph devastated at times? Yes, but he was not destroyed. Was there
pain and loneliness and heartache and, at times, despair? Yes, but Joseph found
a better way to deal with his pain. He would forget the injustice, trust a wise
and sovereign God, and move ahead with his life.
In Genesis 45:8, Joseph looked into the
eyes of the brothers who did so much to hurt him and said,
“So
now it was not you that sent me hither, but God: and he hath made me a
father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the
land of Egypt.”
Just
to make sure the point is made, the Scripture quotes Joseph affirming that
message once more in Genesis 50:20. “But
as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to
bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” Did they sin
against him? Yes! Was it evil? Yes! But did God use it for Joseph’s good? Yes!
God did. As a confirmation that Joseph found healing by forgetting his past, he
named his first son Manasseh, which means “the
Lord made me forget.”
Why
not ask God for the grace to forget your past? This digging-up-the-past thing
is a worldly and unbiblical method for life transformation. True heart change
is not about remembering, and it’s not about digging up things that may or may
not have even happened! It’s about forgiving and forgetting. It’s about
trusting a sovereign God. It’s about focusing in on my own need to change and
saying with the apostle Paul, “forgetting those things which are behind”
(Philippians 3:13).
Is it important to deal with your past? Absolutely!
God doesn’t want us to pretend. He wants us to face our past and to deal with
it by focusing on forgiveness, and putting it behind us. The answer is not in
the past and no process of myopically scouring our past will lead to the change
our heart desires. God’s plan for your past is that you would honestly assess
it and then displace it through forgiveness.
If you have been trying to change by going over and over your past, get
a big green plastic bag and put that approach to health and healing where it
belongs
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