Have you ever had this happen to you – you wake up in the morning and within minutes a memory of an event in your life flashes across your mind. The event is not a positive one. You linger on the memory for a moment and the video begins to play. In a millisecond you are re-living that awkward or embarrassing moment. Those feelings of shame or anger, hurt or pain are suddenly very real to you all over again. Stay watching the video re-play in your mind’s-eye and you will soon be feeling emotions like regret, guilt or sorrow. Your day is tarnished before it even began.
You have been invited to step back into the past, without any ability to change things. You have been made to feel powerless, undermined and ineffective. Who just did that to you?
The answer is Satan – this is one of his tricks. Even as you may start to say to yourself “but that’s all past stuff” the voice whispers insidiously to you to keep the deception going. And here’s the sneaky bit. Satan puts his thoughts into your mind as if they were your thoughts by putting them in the First Person. So instead of whispering to you “That was you doing those things that you are remembering now” he whispers the phrase “that was me doing those things I am remembering now”. You think this is your thought, not the enemy’s. The thought that follows is something like “I have no excuse, it was my fault, I am guilty, and there’s nothing I can do”.
All this can happen in seconds, and if we are not careful we are crushed before we even get to our Cornflakes.
This sort of event can happen any time really. As far as Satan is concerned, the best times are before you embark on anything which could disadvantage him. He’ll try to pick you off first thing in the day just because he doesn’t know the future; he doesn’t know how your day will go so it’s worth trying to disable you at the start. When there’s stuff coming up that he does know about he will pull this kind of stunt to disable you beforehand. His purpose is to leave you feeling powerless in order to disable you – but it’s all lies and deception.
Here’s the deception. He wants you to feel the past has a hold on you and blocks your future success and achievement. Here’s the Truth. The past is gone and you have no need or right to live there. We have power over our present and our future. The past is gone. It actually belongs to someone else, not us. It belongs to Jesus.
Romans 8 v 38 says this: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord”.
Why does Paul not mention the Past as well as the Present and the Future? Because the past has been bought and paid for. Your past has been bought and paid for by Jesus. It no longer belongs to you. You have no right to go there, it is no longer your property. You can’t change it and you can’t redeem it. But there is a Redeemer, and He has taken ownership of your past.
Satan would like to take you back into the past to make you feel powerless and to fill you with negative emotions. Actually your past does not make you powerless. It belongs to the One who makes all things new. The Truth is you have a Present and a Future to step into with Jesus, and that makes you Powerful. That’s exactly why the enemy wants to make you feel powerless. But it’s a deception.
A friend gave me a card with this written on it: “You are very powerful, provided you know how powerful you are”
Satan doesn’t want you to know how powerful you are.
So what’s the remedy? How de we stop him in his tracks? Simple. The moment he even starts to drag up the past, stop him right there. Refuse to watch the video of past events that he wants to play you. Remind him, out loud, that your past is all dealt with. If he is dragging up stuff from before you were saved you can also tell him that the person that did those things is dead, no longer lives. You are somebody else, a new creation.
Either way, Jesus bought and paid for your past. Being tempted to dwell there will make you feel powerless. The liberating Truth is that you have the Present to live in with Jesus, and a Future to step into with Him. That makes you Powerful.
Church is out there 