Becoming

It is fashionable today to look backwards in order to straighten out our lives.  Your parents weren't loving enough, someone abused you along the way, you were traumatized by some event, you didn't have the right opportunities, you lived on the wrong side of the tracks...  Whatever it was, it is located somewhere in your past and so you have tto be looking into the past to discover what you have to overcome.  Forward motion, in this culture, requires backward focus.  Progress then is overcoming, which also looks to the past.

The apostle Paul could not have disagreed more.  His notion is "fogetting what is behind me...I press on toward the goal...for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus" (Phil 3:13-14).  The strategy the Spirit reveals to us through Paul is to stop looking back, trying to overcome and start looking forward, embracing what God calls us to become.  We do not have tto overcome anything because Jesus assures us, "Take heart!  I have overcome the world" (Jn 16:33).

We don't have to fix anything, it is forgiven.  The wrongs, the sins, the failures, the losses of the past are nailed to the cross and need have no impact on our future.  We can live in the now, looking forward to a glorious future, in which we are "becoming like him [Jesus]" (Phil 3:10), as all of us who "were baptized into Christ have clothed ourselves with Christ" (Gal 3:26).

Please don't misunderstand me.  I am not saying that we have to deny or dismiss the pastt, I am saying that we don't have to be determined by the past and that overcoming the past is not the key to our future.  I am also not saying that we should live in the future or put life on hold, waiting for the future to arrive.  I am saying that we can embrace the present, letting the past go and thanfully looked to the future, which Christ has secured for us while we daily are becoming what God called us to be - not by our power but by his "for it is by grace you have been saved through faith - and this is not from youselvve, i i theggiftt of God - not by works, so that no one can boast.  For we are God's workmanship...(Eph 2:8-10).  Jus' Sayn.