1 Kings 18:20-40
Philippians 3:1-16
Matthew 3:1-12
Evening: Psalm 142:1-7
I am grateful that God gives us a new day, and a perspective of time. To look back and remember. To live in the present. To hope for the future. If I were stuck in only one dimension of time, I would despair, or at the very least be like a hamster on a wheel. As it is, God has created us with a past, a present and future - God has created us for eternity, and has always been with us. The peace I have about all this is that this eternity is with Jesus, who redeemed me and made things in all time, right with God. My past is cleansed, my present is purposeful, and my future is assured to be with God forever. Life doesn't get much better than that. The psalmist prays in Psalm 51:
8Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice. 9Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. 10Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
And so God has.
Still, we live "in the flesh" in the "not yet." Memories of the old me living within the new me, bring sadness and regret, and humility. Paul revisited his past in his letter to the Philippians, and also in I Timothy:
If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: 5circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. 7Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.
He is more remorseful in his rehearsal of his past in I Timothy, calling himself, formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But he tells us in everything, we stand pardoned in our new humanity, sins forgotten, ready to meet the day as a servant of Christ, awaiting our future reunion with our redeemer.
O Happy Days! Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Thanks be to God.
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