Each year, as New Year’s Day arrives, believers wrestle quietly with one of the Apostle Paul’s most puzzling assertions: “One thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal” (Phil 3:13-14).
How—exactly—is it possible to “forget what lies behind”?
The year just lived was full of slights and insults: they fester unforgettably each time that face or name appears.
The year just past brought wounds—both planned and unintentional. Can willing it remove the evidence of scars?
The year gone by saw failures—ours and others—whose effects cannot be trimmed by noting January 1. Will the famed power of positive thinking erase the pain of choices we or others made?
We only can forget what we’ve forgiven—done by us, or done by others. And we only can forgive when we’re forgiven—by a power outside ourselves who cannot lie. God “never changes or casts a shifting shadow” (James 1:17).
“God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them” (2 Cor 5:19).
What God forgets, we safely can forget. When God forgives, we find His grace to add our own, releasing others and ourselves from all of last year’s failures.
Grace doesn’t simply turn the page. It sees, acknowledges, forgives—and gradually forgets. The year ahead will help us practice our forgetting.
So stay in grace. -Bill Knott
Bill Knott's GraceNotes: Cross Purposes (October 25, 2019)
Bill Knott's GraceNotes: Staying In The Race (October 18, 2019)
Bill Knott's GraceNotes: A Circle of Forgiveness (October 11, 2019)
Bill Knott's GraceNotes: Is It Too Good To Be True? (October 4, 2019)
Marvene Thorpe-Baptiste: Light A Candle (October 2019)
Bill Knott's GraceNotes: When Everything Changes (September 27, 2019)
Bill Knott's GraceNotes: Sustainability (September 20,2019)
Bill Knott's GraceNotes: When Politics Misleads Us (September 13, 2019)
Willie Oliver: Men? Victims of Domestic Violence? (Sept 2019)
GraceNotes: Environmental Truths (Sept 6, 2019)
Cliff's Edge: Invisible Spiders From Mars (Sept 2019)
GraceNotes: Drenched But Delighted (August 30, 2019)
Lael Caesar: Spiritual Abuse (September 2019)
Lael Caesar: Sacred Safe (September 2019)
David Fournier: Kidsafe Church (September 2019)
Stephen Chavez: See All The People (September 2019)
Wilona Karimabadi: Courage and Betrayal (September 2019)
Journeys With Jesus: The Audience of One (September 2019)
Searching The Obvious: The Taste of Gratitude (September 2019)
GraceNotes: Upending Our Economy (August 23, 2019)
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