When You Don't Like Your Story - 5 Day DevotionalSample

  Whether it is the mistakes made through us or the mistreatment done to us, those events are etched in our minds forever. And yet, the apostle Paul made it clear that it is possible to put the past in the past. He wrote, “One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13–14). The key to being able to leave the past behind is in understanding the word forget.

A good place to start is with the statements God himself has made about forgetting. God said, “I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more” (Jeremiah 31:34). But how does an omniscient God who knows all things all the time “forget” anything? Let’s consider the opposite of forgetting—remembering—to see if the antonym sheds any light. With remembering, we have the same dilemma. How does an omniscient God who already knows all things at all times “remember” something?

There are many events in the Bible that begin with the words “God remembered.” Here are just a few:

• “God remembered Noah” (Genesis 8:1).

• “[God] remembered Abraham” (Genesis 19:29).

• “God remembered Rachel” (Genesis 30:22).

• “God heard their groaning and remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob” (Exodus 2:24).

In each incident, God remembering someone meant he was about to do something—he was about to act on their behalf.

If God remembering means he is about to act, then God forgetting means that he is not going to act. When he forgets our sins, he chooses not to act on them by punishing us. As humans, we tend to remember what we need to forget and forget what we need to remember. God, on the other hand, forgets what he promises to forget and remembers what he promises to remember. He is able to blot out our sins so completely that even the tiniest hint of stain is gone.