Books in Our Life

Matthew 20:28  That is what the Son of Man has done: He came to serve, not be served - and then to give away his life in exchange for the many who are held hostage."

Some time ago a speaker at a large church in Chicago came to the front of the room and began talking about the impacts that affect how we live our lives today.  Lined up across the front of the stage were three platforms.  On each platform was a closed book..  As he spoke, he opened the first book and called it “our past”.  He tore out a few pages and tucked those pages in the book on the center platform called, “our present”.

So often we grow up by taking some of the worse or best times of our lives and carrying them on to our present lives.  It can shape us to make decisions that affect those around us.  Little things that drive Lynnette crazy come from events in my past that I have carried into the present.  Most of those I really want to forget, but they just creep back.

Soon the speaker takes pages again out of our past and places them into the third book, called “our future”.  He noted that he completely by-passed the present.

As we mature in age we are sometimes reminded of our failures.  Maybe we were not good athletic in sports.  Therefore when we become adults, we try to live our past though our children and push them to be the best at sports where we were not.   

Yet so often we take pages from our past and bury them into our future.  We try to be what we could not be as a child.  As the speaker noted,  “We make up whatever we need to say or do to “prove” we did not fail as a child." Other times our action are to prove they were right and give us an excuse for our lifestyle and actions.

You see for years as a young man, I was told about my failures as a child.  I can still recall my father saying that I was never going to be successful in life.  I can still recall, “You don’t have enough sense to pound sand down a rat hole”.  Or “Your about as smart as a hill of beans.”  Therefore a part of me pushed to change the past, prove him wrong, and make a better future so the past could be forgotten.  I'm still a work in process and have to analyze my reasoning for a lot of what is taking place in my life.

Jesus was one of the great parts of the past that belongs in our present life books, because He is to only one who can give us a great future book.  Even though I did not learn of His grace for me until later in life, I knew that His life and death is one of hope that takes every failure of our past and throws those pages away. It is me and Satan who reminds myself of failures and not God.

We don’t need to keep the pages of our past or present because we have some great pages in our future book.  

Many times it takes a conscious effort to give the Lord our past, but the new pages of your book includes eternal life and a close relationship with the Savior of the world.  With that in mind you can look at great relationships with family and friends that is free of reminding you of your failures.