Regret

Let’s face it. We all have it. We all wish that we hadn’t done some things in the past. I look back on my life and wonder how I could have been so foolish as to make some of the decisions that I made. There are many times I would just love to go back and just change one decision.

What is regret though? Have we ever noticed the timeframe it is featured in. It is about the past. It is not about the future. It is not about the present. (You can be sorry you have done something when you have done it, but repentance means you looked at it afterwards, even if just a second afterwards, and were sorry for it.)

This is a past emotion though. This is something that within the next few blogs I plan to bring out an idea I have on. Despite what some people may say, you cannot change the past. You can regret what you did. Yeah. Repent. Confess. Move on. Oh if only we really did such. Too often, we don’t.

Instead, we want to keep beating ourselves up for our old sins. (I seriously doubt I’m alone in doing such.) We want to see them as a way of bringing ourselves down today. What we did was then. Instead, it should bring us joy. We can have joy that we do realize we did wrong, which isn’t joyful, but that we have come to confess that and realize it.

Have you considered that? What does it mean to say you once were blind but now you see? It means that you have been forgiven. It means that the errors of the past are covered. This is what the Bible means I believe when it tells us that we are to forget the sins of the past.

From what I’ve gathered, forget does not necessarily refer to a divine gift of amnesia. Remember does not always refer to recovering memory on a topic either. It seems to refer to being a focus of concern. God is telling us not to focus on the sins of the past. If only we would do so!

Perchance, the greatest fault of this is the human condition to make the temporary to be the eternal. We make our sins to be eternal when they are really temporary. We make sinfulness to be greater than grace. Grace has to be greater than sin though or else there can be no redemption.

Christians. We need to return to that biblical mindset. We will sing Amazing Grace in church, but do we really believe it? There is no cause for regret for our sins have been forgiven. Truly, we are to go on and sin no more, but let us not feel the need to crucify ourselves when Christ already took that for us.