Good Tuesday morning! Do you look back upon your life and realize that everything has worked together for your own good? At times the regrets from the past rise up like weeds to choke out our light, but the Bible tells us that all things work together in God's plan and are designed for our own good. Trusting in Christ may bring us to a point where we come face to face with an old memory that just makes a person cringe. "Now why did I do that?" may be one of the milder questions or critiques that we give ourselves when faced with some memories of our life without Christ. We are not to be stopped or made fearful by those memories, but to learn from them. One way to become a better Christian is to forgive your own self. Each of us has made some frightful mistakes in the past. I don't think that I'm going too far out on a limb in stating that! The Accuser will parade those incidents in front of us in the hope of paralyzing our witness for Christ. "Hypocrite! How can you condemn this when you have done that!" is a thought that has probably occurred to each of us at some point. The forgiveness of Christ, the gift of grace that we are given, covers all of those painful and embarrassing memories and washes them clean in the blood of Christ.
I often marvel at someone setting out to write an autobiography. These days most memoirs are written to embarrass someone else, but what if that writer stuck the truth of his or her own life out there for all to see. Yowch! I don't think that many folks could do that without some selective editing of certain events in our memories. The Holy Spirit knows my innermost secrets and memories, even the painful ones. I am content with that and will not drag out a bunch of 'dirty laundry' into public view. The world might be just a bit better if a few memoir writers thought the same.
A photographer, Ken Duncan, from Australia spoke on the Hour of Power this weekend. One of his suggestions? Turn off the news; it's full of bad news and we don't need that in our lives. As I thought about that, I changed my Internet start page so that all that bad news doesn't pop up each time I start my browser. One of those "that's not a bad idea!" moments. If you think about it, my finances are not where I would like them to be, and a dose of the current financial difficulties each time I bring up my web browser is probably not good for me. Trusting in God to provide is much easier if I don't inflict bad news upon my brain throughout the day. God is in charge of my life, not the economy or bad news about what it is doing today.
We should not hide our heads in the sand, figuratively speaking, but one news source each day should be enough. I am aware of what is going on in the world. However, in changing the amount of news that I see each day, I can stop feeding the despair that can attack us through repeated exposure to bad news. Another thought, if our exposure to bad news in the media is greater than our exposure to God's Word each day, might that not be feeding at the wrong trough so to speak? We need more Good News!
Praise God for His Good News, and have a Merry Christmas too!
Bucky
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