When Our Past Tries To Keep Us From Holiness

I was talking to my daughter the other day and she was expressing her concern to me about her past and how she feels like God won’t forgive her past mistakes.
She’s 10. She has not done anything remotely disgraceful but she does have some demons that won’t let her forget some pretty upsetting things she has lived.

However, this got me thinking about how we really do have a hard time believing that God in all His majesty and holiness can possibly truly forgive us and welcome us into His kingdom with no thought of our past.

It’s hard for a lot of people to completely walk away from their old lives when they step into a relationship with God.

We tend to constantly remember all the bad things we’ve done and we deny the grace Christ extends to us. We make it about us being unworthy of such grace and love.
Sometimes we make it about the impossibility of God actually wiping our slate clean and truly forgetting.

The thing is, we are ALL unworthy. None of us deserves the love and mercy of a Holy and perfect God.
Yes. He is too good for us.
Yes. We do fail every single day.
Yes. The way we lived our lives before does include some pretty unforgivable stuff.

But that’s why Jesus is so important.
Before Jesus, the people had to deal with God directly and Holiness cannot put itself near unholiness, so when we read the Old Testement we see the effects of the dirty coming close to the clean. Death, stoning, exile, etc.

But God felt compassion for His creation.
He saw that we were not getting it right.
He saw that we were struggling with holiness.
He saw that we needed serious help.

So He brought Himself down into the form of His creation to show man that a life insync with Him and away from sin, and unholiness, is possible.

He experinced life with us.
He felt, He hurt, He wept.
He decided to be the bridge that reunites Gods creation to the Creator.

Jesus decided to stand in the middle of humanity and Holiness and pay the price.

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God saw our hopelessness and it moved Him to compassion. It moved Him to help us actually be able to come close to Him.

Because of Jesus we can now simply cry out to the Lord and He hears us.
There are no lambs, there is no specific person that must go into a secret place and pray on your behalf.

Jesus has made things new for us in the unseen world by entering into the seen world.
And by coming into that realization we step into that new with Him.

By saying yes to Jesus and His life, we say yes to what that life has offered us.
Open communication with the One outside of time. The One who sees the entire world from beginning to end.

So when we step into Christ but continue to carry our old selves with us, we are no longer saying that we are not worthy but that Jesus was not worthy enough to give us what He promised to give us. A new life.

Yes our past can be ugly.
Our past is hard to look at.
Our past makes us wince at the thought of it.
But it is our new life now that allows us to look at our past and see just how bad we were, just how lost we were, and just how saved we are.
It is that old life that allows us to see just how real this new life is.

We will NEVER reach perfection here on earth. We will ALWAYS fall short of worthiness.
Holiness is what we strive for daily but effort and humility is what He sees.

Let our old life be a living and breathing testament to the amazing transformative power the love of God brings into our lives.

Christianity should never point to us.
It should always point us and those around us to Christ.
If we look at our lives and see us and not Jesus we are then not truly living for Him.