A Trip Down Memory Lane - Pt 5

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. (Philippians 3:12-16 ESV).

What we’ve been doing the last few days is to give a mini theology of the past. The past is a great reservoir of knowledge and wisdom. Where else can we learn anything except from the past? The future has not happened yet. We can’t learn anything from what hasn’t happened yet. The present is ephemeral. I mean try to learn something from the present. I mean try to focus on the present. As soon as you have got the present focused it is the past. I mean it is every millisecond is flowing over the waterfall of the present turning into a past reservoir just as soon as you see it go over the waterfall. As soon as you focus on a moment, it has become a past moment. The only thing we can focus on that has any stability at all is the products of the past. Think of it. All books are from the past. All video or audio recordings are, by their nature, from the past. However, if we were having a conversation, and I said anything at all, that sentence would be a part of the present. It would shortly fade into the past though. Time simply will not stand still. This means that all the means of stored knowledge and wisdom are from the past. It is the only place we have to go to learn anything or to grow in knowledge or in wisdom. So for the Christian that means even the Bible, which was, like all other books written in the past. Therefore we may come to the conclusion that the best is always yet to come. And I really mean it. I mean for eternity starting right now the best is always yet to come for the Christian. So the future is massively important. We are people of hope and therefore we do not live in the past. We draw thankfulness from the past. We draw life giving repentance from the past. We feed our faith and hope on the faithfulness of God in the past and we learn everything we know and get all the wisdom we have from the past. But all of it is for the sake of this afternoon’s joy and this afternoon’s faith and this afternoon’s obedience and the joy of all eternity.