The Power of Disregard

Forgive yourself and move on!

One of the reasons I love teaching the epistles of Paul is because Paul understood what it means to Live in Truth, and he teaches me so much about it. For example in his letter to the Philippians he says, “Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth into those things which are before” (Philippians 3:13).  In my own words, Paul says that he hasn’t learned much, but he does know one thing and that is that the past is past and we should disregard it and move forward. That doesn’t mean we don’t remember the past and learn from it, but we don’t dwell on the past and let it ruin our future.

When you stop to think about it, Paul had a lot of baggage from his past. Once he came to know that Jesus Christ was the promised Messiah how his conscience must have pricked him knowing that he had assented to the death of Stephen, and that he had brought great harm on families by taking parents who believed away to prison. Imagine how haunted he would have been by the remembered cries of those children after he came to be a believer himself. Paul could have had a great pity party, wallowed in his horrendous mistakes until they debilitated him, and never done any good.

But he didn’t! Paul disregarded those things from his past and reached forth into the future and did so much good. That’s Living in Truth!