Haunted By The Past...

It would likely surprise us if we knew the number of people living and interacting in our lives every day that are in some way haunted by their pasts. It may be that one of those people may be a close friend or loved one, or even you and/or me. If we know Christ as Savior, the Word of God is literally filled with good news concerning us, and Galatians 2:20 is among the best of that good news! There, Paul teaches that we are crucified with Christ, not that we are seeking or hoping to be, or even working on being crucified with Him, but that we are crucified with Him! Yet Paul doesn’t stop there! He goes on with more and more good news concerning the believer in Christ. He says that since we are crucified with Him, and it is no longer the old man that lived in our skin that now lives, it is rather Christ in us that lives through us!

Perhaps at this point you are thinking that we do know Christ and we know the Bible’s teaching concerning His Spirit lives in us, but there are certainly times in which we do not sense the reality of it. It is at this point that God, knowing our need, completed this tremendous verse by saying through Paul: “...and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.” There is the key to it all! The life we live right now down here in this spiritually dark and darkening world, we live not by our own faith or faithfulness, we live by the faith and the faithfulness of the Son of God, Jesus Christ!

We may wonder how a flesh that has been crucified can often have such power over us in our daily lives and decisions. Here is where our past comes in as an apt illustration. It may be that we have had people in our past, that are now dead, yet they still have great influence over us, what they would think and expect of us, whether right or wrong, that still haunts us today. Paul would teach us that the One that loves us to the absolute fullness of God Himself and died for us also lives in us, and we can count on His faithfulness rather than our own often fleeting faithfulness!  Paul himself could have allowed his past to haunt him, as he actually persecuted and killed believers, but he could say because of Christ, he could forget that which was behind and reach forward for all that Christ had for him, and so can we!