The great baseball pitcher Satchel Paige used to say, “Don’t look back, someone may be gaining on you.” It is good advice. Water under the bridge can’t be brought back. Many live their lives in regret, always looking at the mistakes of the past. The control of the backward look is one of the chief secrets of personal power.
Lloyd George liked to tell of an old doctor of his acquaintance who left this message at his death: “Throughout life I think I have always closed the gates behind me.” The successful person has an eye not only for the openings of opportunity, but also for the closing of settled questions. Paul says in Philippians 3:13, “forgetting what is behind, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”
We liked to tell people in the churches that I pastored, “We are not interested in your past but in your tomorrow in order to help you get to where God wants you to be”. Even Jesus declared in Luke 9:62, “no one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”
“What might have been” is useless speculation. Hebrews 6:1 challenges every Christian to leave the elementary teachings about Christ behind and go forward to maturity. Anyway, 2 Corinthians 5:17 declares, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.”
Stop beating on yourself about the past. Make peace with the past. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins.” (1 John 1:9) Romans 8:33 affirms you if you have given your past to God: “Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies.”
Like I said, don’t look back
“Thank you, God of my Tomorrow and my Eternity, that You have called
me to look forward to tomorrow’s challenge and tomorrow’s reward. Amen”
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