Day Sixteen | March 11 Healer of My Past

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”

Guilt. Shame. Regret. They are heavy words.

Ugly words.

Crippling words.

But Jesus is our Healer – even the Healer of our past.

In truth, too many of us are carrying around the weight of yesterday’s baggage. And the darkness loves little else more. “Get them to remember their pain! Get them to remember their faults! Get them to remember their failures and brokenness and sin!” the devil howls. “Get them to remember everything except the love and grace of God! Distract them from the cross! Distract them from the promise! Distract them from the Gospel of forgiveness! Make them remember their past at the expense of their future,” he schemes.

Guilt is a liar; and shame, a thief. They are the sworn enemies of grace. And while we cannot change the past – what we’ve done or what others have done – we can learn from it. We can grow from it. We can allow Christ to redeem it, to transform it. Though we cannot change our past, we can allow it to change us. And it will. For better or for worse, our past does change us: it will leave us bitter, or it will leave us better – there’s no avoiding it. The trick is to allow Jesus into that intimate, internal conversation.

And what might feel like guilt may actually be the voice of the Spirit. What may feel like shame may actually be conviction – not the power of the devil trying to pry us away from God, but the power of the Spirit trying to woo us back to God. That’s how God works. That’s how God heals.

He pursues us. Think back to the Garden of Eden. It was there where God first went looking for us there, in the land of our own disobedience, there, in the shadow of the tree of our pride and stubborn arrogance. Clothed in homespun garments, God found us; ashamed and confused, God found us. And He healed us. We, who’ve eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, the Almighty still invites to partake of the Tree of Life.

But we have to be real. We have to be vulnerable. We have to be honest about what we’ve done, about what we’ve left undone, and about what we’ve allowed to be done. We must confess that we’ve broken God’s will … and God’s heart. But in the same breath, we must confess, too, that God still loves us, that God still pursues us, that God still calls us beloved. These are the words of conviction. These are the healing words of grace.