So its Friday night, at the end of a pleasant summer’s day in August and the sun has just gone down over the horizon, though it is still light and pleasantly warm. It is definitely the end of the day though, and as I watch the sky slowly losing its brightness I am reminded of a phrase I read the other day –
“Yesterday ended last night. Today is a new day”
It doesn’t matter what time of day it is when you read this, the truth is that yesterday has gone along with all its mistakes and missed opportunities. It will never return just as surely as the sun will never go into reverse and pop back up over the horizon. That can leave us feeling that since we can’t go back and retrieve the past and alter it, we are somehow stuck with it as one more burden to carry round which disqualifies us for the future.
That sense of being disqualified is often expressed with thoughts such as ‘I’m not good enough’, ‘I’ve failed again’, ‘God won’t want much to do with me, and if I pray He probably won’t be inclined to listen’; and these thoughts connect back to the memories of yesterdays mistakes and missed opportunities. Sometimes these memories play like a video on a loop system, triggered by the slightest thought or incident.
The truth is that God never intended us to live like this. Jesus came to set us free, and in John 8 v 36, Jesus tells us that if He sets us free we will be free indeed. The Greek original reads as ‘free really’ or ‘free actually’. In other words not just ‘free in theory’. The truth is we are free from the tyranny of yesterday. How? Why?
When Jesus died on the cross it was for [all] the sins of the whole world (1 John 2 v 2). In 2 Corinthians 5 v 19 we are clearly told that because of what Jesus did for all of us, He is no longer counting people’s sins against them. If He isn’t counting our sins against us, then why on earth are we? Colosssians tells us that we are holy and blameless as we stand before Him without a single fault (1 v 22) and then tells us that we must continue to believe this truth.
Graham Cooke, (absolutely brilliant guy, watch him on YouTube), tells of a dream he had in which Jesus was very angry with him and was saying to Graham, “give me back my stuff”. The ‘stuff’ that Jesus wanted back, was Graham’s sins and failures, worries and fears. Jesus paid for them at Calvary. He paid for ours too. If He paid for them, then they belong to Him, not to us. If they don’t belong to us then we can’t own them and allow them to define who we are. They belong in the realm of yesterday and in the ownership of Jesus. Yesterday ended last night. Today is a new day.
Why has God done all this for us?
- Because He loves us.
- Because He has set His affection on us, and He’s not planning to remove it.
- Because He has chosen us to defeat the enemy Satan, and in the process to show that the foolish and weak things of this world (us) will put to shame the wisdom of the world which ultimately has its source in Satan.
- Satan is an accuser (Jesus said so). So God has removed any grounds for Satan to accuse us – ever. Satan, we are holy and blameless, without a single fault, so shut up and stop accusing. Yesterday has gone.
Romans 8 v 38 tells us that nothing can separate us from Gods love – death, life, angels, demons, fears about today, worries about tomorrow the powers of hell etc. It only mentions Today and Tomorrow. Not Yesterday. Because we have no right to go back to Yesterday. It no longer belongs to us. Jesus bought it. It’s not ours any longer. No guilt. No shame. No separation from God.
Yesterday ended last night. Today is a new day.
[Watch Graham Cooke – ‘Give me back my stuff’ here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-dBioGxk0E&t=329s]
Church is out there 