The Initiative Against Despair --Oswald Chambers
(Sometimes, “It is what it is”, I say, as a way of accepting the things I cannot change. It doesn’t dismiss what happened or my current circumstances, but it does accept them and give them to Jesus to sort out. Have you ever thought, however, that since God is timeless He can even undo, make do, or make better things done in the past? I’m certain He has done this in my life, in response to prayerfully laying out my wrong deeds, asking for forgiveness and then learning from them so that I don’t repeat the same sin in the future. Sadly, it is a common scenario when I go before God and consider and confess my last year, month, week, day, or hour…I have found God to be direct and compassionate to speak truth into my heart while at the same time heal it from my own wrongdoing. His tender mercy to me helps me show more kindness, tenderness and mercy to others. Fretting over past sin is wrong, in my opinion it is actually putting your sin above God which makes it an idle of self. I remind myself of that when I have done something so egregious that I wonder how God could forgive me, yet, when I examine and truly repent, turn away from my sin and back to God, He is always there with open arms saying “I’ve been here all along, here I AM”. I say that as we repent of our sin, we also learn from it so that one day we can boast about the wretchedness we left behind, not on our own strength, but in His strength! Bemoaning, fretting or despairing over our past cannot and will not help, we must surrender it to Jesus so that He can use it to shape us and mold us for a better future. Our past does not equal our future, that is a truth from the Word of God, we are new creations, the old has gone and the new has come, already, but not yet…MH)
Taking the Initiative Against Despair
Rise, let us be going. Matthew 26:46
In the Garden of Gethsemane, the disciples went to sleep when they should have stayed awake, and once they realized what they had done it produced despair. The sense of having done something irreversible tends to make us despair. We say, “Well, it’s all over and ruined now; what’s the point in trying anymore.” If we think this kind of despair is an exception, we are mistaken. It is a very ordinary human experience. Whenever we realize we have not taken advantage of a magnificent opportunity, we are apt to sink into despair. But Jesus comes and lovingly says to us, in essence, “Sleep on now. That opportunity is lost forever and you can’t change that. But get up, and let’s go on to the next thing.” In other words, let the past sleep, but let it sleep in the sweet embrace of Christ, and let us go on into the invincible future with Him.
There will be experiences like this in each of our lives. We will have times of despair caused by real events in our lives, and we will be unable to lift ourselves out of them. The disciples, in this instance, had done a downright unthinkable thing— they had gone to sleep instead of watching with Jesus. But our Lord came to them taking the spiritual initiative against their despair and said, in effect, “Get up, and do the next thing.” If we are inspired by God, what is the next thing? It is to trust Him absolutely and to pray on the basis of His redemption.
Never let the sense of past failure defeat your next step.
--Oswald Chambers