Do Not Look Back

I would like to maybe write in my blog and then copy it in my Daily Journal.  That way I can share it with a few blog readers, and also keep a copy for my family.  Writing is such a good way to find out what is inside a person, myself, at the moment.  The reason I say this is because we can only write about one thing at a time, and we have to narrow our thoughts in order to put them into words and sentences.  My brain actually is like lots of people that have thoughts going into 5 different directions at the same time, and feel loads of emotions but writing is a good way to figure out which thought is either the most important or at the top of the list. 

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December 27^th, I got a Word from the LORD.  He said, “Do not look back”.  I am wondering exactly what He meant by that.  I did not get anything further, but I am praying about it.  My first thought was Lot’s wife in the Bible that looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt.  In that case, they had been told not to look back because God was bringing judgement down on Sodom and Gomorrah.  Tells me we are not to watch as God brings judgment on others.  Is that why we are not to look back?  The past cannot be changed of course, but we can learn from it.  I had been asked to write about some of my childhood memories by my daughter.  Is that what God doesn’t want me looking back on? 

Last Sunday Don and I went for a drive through our local cemetery called Woodland and it is very large and has many historic people buried there, along with some of our family members and friends.  There is an ugliness about cemeteries this time of year with the winter trees and so much black mold or black marks all over so many of the monuments or grave markers…tombstones as Don likes to call them.  It all has the feeling of death.  No life found in the cemetery in the winter time.  No birds chirping or squirrels running around.  Maybe looking back is a little like looking back into time where death reigns.  I’m not sure. 

I’m praying about what the LORD means by “Do not look back”.  Now I’m not sure whether I should tell my stories, or how to tell the stories.  Maybe I am only to live in the here and now.  We also need to look forward, even if it is thinking about God and hoping in the best outcomes for people and situations and even ourselves.  To look back is to still give our own interpretation of what happened, and why things happened, and how we understood what happened.  Isn’t the Bible full of looking back so we can learn from their lives and what God did? 

Wow, I just looked at Facebook, and TobyMac had posted this in the last 4 minutes:

Forget about what’s happened;  don’t keep going over old history.  Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new.  It’s bursting out!  Don’t you see it?  There it is!  I’m making a road through the desert, rivers in the badlands.      Isaiah 43:18-19



Thank you LORD for these verses!  How wonderful to have TobyMac or his team post this just when I was writing about “Do not look back”!  “Forget about what’s happened;  don’t keep going over old history.  Be alert, be present.”

  I’ll be getting back to this subject again soon.

Oswald Chambers Devotion

My friends, fill your minds with those things that are good and that deserve praise: things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and honorable.—Philippians 4:8

From that time many of His disciples went back, and walked no more with Him. — John 6:66

When God gives a vision by His Spirit through His word of what He wants, and your mind and soul thrill to it, if you do not walk in the light of that vision, you will sink into servitude to a point of view which Our Lord never had. Disobedience in mind to the heavenly vision will make you a slave to points of view that are alien to Jesus Christ. Do not look at someone else and say — “Well, if he can have those views and prosper, why cannot I?” You have to walk in the light of the vision that has been given to you and not compare yourself with others or judge them, that is between them and God. When you find that a point of view in which you have been delighting clashes with the heavenly vision and you debate, certain things will begin to develop in you — a sense of property and a sense of personal right, things of which Jesus Christ made nothing. He was always against these things as being the root of everything alien to Himself. “A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he possesseth.” If we do not recognize this, it is because we are ignoring the undercurrent of Our Lord’s teaching.

We are apt to lie back and bask in the memory of the wonderful experience we have had. If there is one standard in the New Testament revealed by the light of God and you do not come up to it, and do not feel inclined to come up to it, that is the beginning of backsliding, because it means your conscience does not answer to the truth. You can never be the same after the unveiling of a truth. That moment marks you for going on as a more true disciple of Jesus Christ, or for going back as a deserter.

Wisdom From Oswald Chambers

To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony, 1166 R

Bible in a Year: Zechariah 9-12; Revelation 20