Each year, as New Year’s Day arrives, believers wrestle quietly with one of the Apostle Paul’s most puzzling assertions: “One thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal” (Phil 3:13-14).
How—exactly—is it possible to “forget what lies behind”?
The year just lived was full of slights and insults: they fester unforgettably each time that face or name appears.
The year just past brought wounds—both planned and unintentional. Can willing it remove the evidence of scars?
The year gone by saw failures—ours and others—whose effects cannot be trimmed by noting January 1. Will the famed power of positive thinking erase the pain of choices we or others made?
We only can forget what we’ve forgiven—done by us, or done by others. And we only can forgive when we’re forgiven—by a power outside ourselves who cannot lie. God “never changes or casts a shifting shadow” (James 1:17).
“God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them” (2 Cor 5:19).
What God forgets, we safely can forget. When God forgives, we find His grace to add our own, releasing others and ourselves from all of last year’s failures.
Grace doesn’t simply turn the page. It sees, acknowledges, forgives—and gradually forgets. The year ahead will help us practice our forgetting.
So stay in grace. -Bill Knott
GLAD TO PRAY (March 20, 2020)
GROWING GREEN (March 13, 2020)
THE SCHOOL OF GRACE (March 6, 2020)
INCREASING YOUR NET WORTH (February 28, 2020)
FIRST LIGHT (February 21, 2020)
THE STRUGGLE TO FORGIVE (February 14, 2020)
THE PACE OF GRACE (February 7, 2020)
A PLACE AT THE TABLE (January 31, 2020)
THE BEST NEWS (January 24, 2020)
LEARNING TO WALK AGAIN (January 17, 2020)
A PSALM OF GRACE (January 10, 2020)
A COVENANT FOR WANDERERS (January 3, 2020)
WALKING ACROSS THE LINE (December 27, 2019)
DELIVERED INTO LIGHT (December 20, 2019)
NOT JUST DECEMBER 25 (December 13, 2019)
NO STRINGS ATTACHED (December 6, 2019)
FULLY IDENTIFIED (November 29,2019)
GRACE AT THE GATES (November 22, 2019)
THE END OF MAGIC (November 15, 2019)
CAN YOU HANDLE THE TRUTH? (November 8, 2019)
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