“I don’t need to know the details of who you were, tell me about who you want to be.”
- Annonymous
There is a fundamental problem with the way that we view the world and people in this day and age. We view everything retroactively - always looking at the past, basing everything that we do off of who we have been, or what we have done. This is not to say that we should not learn from the past, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," George Santayana famously stated.
I could not agree more. But just because we need to learn from the past does not and should not mean we are defined by the past or confined to the past, especially if we have learned from it. How much better would the world be if we adopted this view of it, if we adopted this Kingdom principle for living.
This is the precedent that Jesus set, and the standard that we should aim to live by. Romans 5:8 makes it very clear that we were not saved from death because of our past but because of the capacity to be something different as a result. Romans 6:1-14 is a perfect picture of how we are to live, no longer bound as a slave to sin, but set free to live righteously for God.
You have a choice, you can be bound by your past, enslaved to sin and wickedness and the like, or you can clothe yourself with Christ, embrace the freedom you have in him and aspire to live in a way that displays who you want to be.
One way or another our true-self always presents itself. So what are you going to tell people about yourself, what is your story going to look like? Will it be the tragedy of a slave, trapped in who you were? Or will it be a redemptive exclamation of a life set free to; "be perfect as our father in heaven is perfect,"?
"You are not; what you are born to be, but what you have it in you to be."
1 comments:
Thanks for the shout out! I will have to tell you about how I got that quote sometime! Great insights man! I'm really glad you are writing!
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