December 13 – Disciplines of the Mind: Regret (Joel 2:21-27)

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.”
(Joel 2:25)

IN WORD:
The attitude that is perhaps most subtle in corrupting our perspective is the sense of regret we feel over missed opportunities and past failures. We play a devastating mind game that wonders what life would have been like “if” — if we hadn’t fallen, if so-and-so hadn’t hurt us, if we had turned right instead of left, if, if, if. That game will destroy us, always turning our gaze backward, never forward, and never upward. Though the locusts have consumed our past, we extend an open invitation for them to consume our present and eventually our future. We live in our regrets far too easily.
What is the point of that? Are we trying to change the past? Are we telling the Sovereign God that He missed a chance to make things better for us? We are as nearsighted looking backward as we are looking forward. We forget that the God who exalted Joseph to the political top of Egypt, first allowed his brothers to betray him and a prison to hold him captive. We forget that the God who put David on the throne let him hide out in caves for years. We forget that the God who raised Jesus from the dead sent Him to die in the first place.The deliverer Moses was first an exiled stutterer. The apostle Paul was first a rebel Saul. The powerful-preaching Peter was first a spineless self-preservationist. All of these could have lived with an obsession about the locusts. None of them did, and God did amazing things through them.

IN DEED:
Do you have regrets? Do not be gentle with them. Get over them. You have trained yourself in paralysis. You are committing a slow, painful suicide, dying past deaths over and over again until you’ve run out of life. You’re living in a dismal fantasy.
How is that a fantasy? Think about it: God has removed your past from you, separating you fro your sins as far as the east is from the west and comforting you more deeply than anyone has grieved you. That’s truth, and to the extent you dwell on those past events, you’re out of touch with reality. Base your life on truth. It’s calling you forward.

“In Christ we can move out of our past into a meaningful present and a breathtaking future.” -Erwin Lutzer-