Living Down the Past

Living Down the Past – Part I

Living Down the Past - Philippians 3:7-16 - Recently, I listened to a Christian radio talk show as I drove to a meeting.  A woman called in who felt she and her husband had made a seemingly irreversible mistake.  They had bought a big house with lots of property.  Before they caught themselves, they had put more than $250,000 into the property.  Upon appraisal, the property was deemed to be worth only half of what they had invested into it.  Now, they were seriously in debt without any apparent means to dissolve it.  She greatly bemoaned their choices and predicament.  Moreover, she remained flabbergasted about how they allowed themselves to fall prey to such an unfortunate set of choices.  Graciously, the host responded by assuring her that they could live this down.  He quoted a portion of Philippians 3:13, “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead.”  His pastoral words encourage us that we can live down the past!

Periodically, the past blindsides us.  In the midst of countless mundane tasks, a flash remembrance of a former way of life passes across our minds.  Unconfessed sin lingers within our conscience like bubbling volcanic lava.  Unresolved emotional pains (guilt, regret, humiliation and harmful childhood experiences) lurk within the crevices of our minds.  Without a concerted and proactive determination to transform these memories into something personally beneficial, they paralyze us.

Two real examples from former professors make this point.  The first one was once told he was “competent but not distinguished.”  Regrettably, that professor internalized that evaluation of his work.  He actually never obtained a tenured teaching position during his career partially due to the fact that he uncritically accepted this hurtful and demeaning characterization of his work.  As if he were the protagonist, Heather Primstone, of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s immortal novel, The Scarlet Letter, this professor went about with that phrase emblazoned on his forehead.  The second one did not receive the favorable vote of a colleague in a tenure review.  His failure to gain the endorsement of fellow teacher who was well respected in the discipline deeply wounded him.  Until the day he died, that professor harbored an entrenched resentment and regret about that vote.  His inability to live down that experience relegated him to becoming an egomaniac with an inferiority problem.

Similar to the two preceding men, many of us are imprisoned by our past.  We still carry burdens of mistakes, failures, and embarrassment.  We cannot believe that we made such bad choices.  We would like to reach back into the sands of time and erase our footprints from some of the paths on which we traveled.  Like Michael J. Fox’s character in the movie trilogy, Back to the Future, we long for a time machine which will enable us to reverse our past errors.  Yet, our inability to live down the past is the very thing that empowers it to arrest our imagination, discipline, creative abilities, and willingness to work toward a brighter future.  We cannot define ourselves today by who we were yesterday.  In the teachings of the apostle Paul, we forget what lies behind us and strain toward what lies ahead.

The author of fourteen of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, the apostle Paul was a murderer.  In the opening verses of this passage, he details his impeccable educational, legal, cultural, tribal and personal credentials.  A man of formidable ego, Paul anointed himself for the task of ridding Israel of the emerging heresy of the early Christians.  This rag-tag, poor, illiterate bunch from the meager and humble origins of Galilee, in the name of an uneducated carpenter, were going about telling people that the Messiah had come.  They claimed that he was Jesus of Nazareth who had been crucified recently.  In Paul’s thinking, had they read and followed the law, they would have known, according to Deuteronomy 21:22-23, anyone hung on a tree were under God’s curse.  So, Paul utilizes his influence with the Pharisees and obtains warrants to arrest and imprison these people.  More starkly, he sanctions their deaths as he smiles upon the stoning of Stephen in Acts 7:54-60.  Paul equates their deaths with ridding the body of cancer. 

After his conversion in Acts 9, Paul has the challenge of living down his past as a persecutor of the Church.  I posit that the memory of Stephen’s stoning and the torture and deaths of other early believers were the thorn in Paul’s side that he discourses upon in 2 Corinthians 12:1-10.  Perhaps, Paul prays and asks Almighty God to obliterate the least inkling of those treacherous deeds.  Instead, God reassures Paul of His daily grace, which enables Paul to live down the past.  In response to this incalculable gift of divine mercy and unmerited favor, Paul travels the world of the Ancient Near East seeking converts to Christ with the same fervor with which he once persecuted the Church.  It is as if he will eradicate the past by painstakingly and diligently building a new future.