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
BETTER THAN WE KNOW (June 14, 2019)
GRACE KNEELS (June 7, 2019)
SWEET WORD OF GRACE (May 31, 2019)
BY GRACE THROUGH FAITH (May 24, 2019)
GRACE AND SAFETY (May 17, 2019)
PRACTICING GRACE (May 10, 2019)
WHEN GRACE FINDS YOU (May 3, 2019)
BAPTIZE US ANEW (April 26, 2019)
THE RISING SONG (April 19, 2019)
RELEASED FROM FEAR (April 12, 2019)
TRUSTING GRACE (April 5, 2019)
MORNING HAS BROKEN (March 29, 2019)
OUTSIDE AND ABOVE (March 22, 2019)
GRACE BECOMES US (March 15, 2019)
ALWAYS AMAZING (March 8, 2019)
ALL ARE GIFTED (March 1, 2019)
GRACE HAS A FACE (Feb 22, 2019)
FREELY RECEIVED AND GLADLY GIVEN (Feb 15, 2019)
NEW AND BETTER STORIES (Feb 8, 2019)
HEALED—AND HEALED AGAIN (Feb 1, 2019)
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