8th St. Community Church

Matthew 22: 1-14 | Are you invited? | John Clifford | August 8, 2021 At Greenhouse Project, we exist to plant missional communities that cultivate lifelong disciples, leaders and advocates that will reach the lost and transfor...

There are a couple of sayings that go around as we mark the end of one year and begin the next. One is that the new year brings us a blank slate, a completely new start. The other is a saying from the past; “This is the first day of the rest of your life.” The idea is that we come to a place where at the end of one year we can turn with eagerness to all that a new year has for us.
But our yesterday, our last year, holds broken and irreversible things for us. We have memories of lost opportunities, blunders, and failed expectations that will never return, that we can’t do over.
For those of us who are believers it is all too often easy to forget that God is the God of our yesterdays. Our present enjoyment of God’s grace tends to be lessened, maybe even squashed, by the memory of yesterday’s sins and failures. Anxiety is apt to arise whenever we are reminded of our yesterdays. It can often be quite hard to accept that He allows the memory of them so that we can turn them into a ministry of spiritual growth for our future. God reminds us of the past so as to protect us from a very shallow security in the present and so that we may not be tripped up again by the same failures in the future. God is in the business of transforming any destructive anxiety we have concerning our past into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. The cross settled all the claims the past may have on our conscience so as we mark the time of a new year may we lay our past rest. Leave the broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the future with Him