“Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
(rf. Php. 3:13–14 NASB)
I find it interesting that the Good Lord put into the very fabric of our being and existence the need and reality for change. One year morphs into another as the past gives way to the future. This is change. We can easily perceive and somewhat clearly see what has transpired through the year previous, but we have no idea what awaits us in the twelve months (or more) ahead. We will experience change one way or another. There’s no avenue around it. God has engineered time to keep us from staying in the present, encouraging us not to live in the past, but to embrace the future.
Knowing that such change is ordained by God Himself, it is then up to us to gauge our attitudes on how we respond to this change. Will we look forward in anticipation to what God has in store for us individually, as a church, as The Church? Or will we spend our time in mourning over a past that we were comfortable with but one that weighs us down like an anchor, preventing us from the joys God has planned for us?
I believe that we need to have the same attitude toward change as did the Apostle Paul in the text above. In “forgetting what lies behind”, we are not letting go of the great lessons we have learned from the past; rather, we are putting the past behind us and choosing not to look that direction any longer. We are “reaching forward to what lies ahead”, following the Lord’s lead into a future He alone knows and over which He has complete and total control. In this way alone can we ever hope to “press on toward the goal of the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus”.
Let us then set our sails, individually and corporately as a church family, to catch the wind ahead of us and go into the future that God Himself has planned for His people.
