Casting Crowns - The Very Next ThingSample

ONE STEP AWAY

A New Beginning

Sometimes Christians feel frozen because they believe that to follow God best, they need to get back to an earlier, more spiritual version of themselves. But we can follow God from right where we are.

Many of us remember a time when we walked more closely with the Lord. We can even find ourselves comfortably numb in a state of inertia, seemingly unable to move forward because we’re allowing something in our past to hold us back. Maybe we committed blatant sin. Maybe we’re struggling to forgive someone who hurt us. Maybe we’re angry with someone or something. Too often, consciously or subconsciously, we resign ourselves to the thought that our lives are probably not what they were supposed to be and it’s all Plan B from here. How do you have hope in Plan B?

A better question is: How do you follow God when life doesn’t work out exactly as you had planned? What do you do after a failure that was your own doing or a surprise that was out of your control?

Maybe something happened and you can’t detach from it and you’re always thinking about it. The thought is always there, lurking just under the surface, forever grabbing some of your hard drive space and sapping you of hope and confidence. The thought goes something like this: “There was a time when my faith was really strong and I walked with God, but I’m just not there anymore. I could never get back there. I’ve tried to get back to that point but I just can’t.”

You don’t have to. Jesus is willing to start all over with you from where you are right now. You’re one step away from surrender, one step away from coming home.

If we were good enough to please God on our own, we would’ve never needed a Savior in the first place.

Allow God to do what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to tell you to let your past rest in his sea of forgetfulness. Don’t allow lies and guilt over “these things I’ve done, these places I’ve gone, and these things I’ve seen” to derail the most important relationship you could ever have. Jesus is so much bigger than your failure.