God Puts Our Past To Good Use

Excuse me while I wipe the tears from my eyes. You too will become emotional with a real understanding of God’s kindness in the account of Jesus’ genealogy. It is a stunning revelation of God’s kindness. God handpicked some dregs of society and inserted them in His Son’s earthly lineage. By that singular act, it becomes evident that God puts our past to good use.

Prevailing wisdom says you should do your level best to go past your past and move forward. Some proponents of the concept even suggest that you have to get past your past to move forward. In other words, you cannot move forward unless you jettison your past. It sounds extremely logical but it is not the way of God. Instead, God puts our past to good use. He takes it and makes something beautiful out of it.

Which is the reason for the tears at the start of this post. Because if you are like me, there are things in your past with the power to cause a blush, still. Many of us; no, most of us have murky pasts, even the Royals. With human wisdom, the pressure is on you to try and rewrite history. Or else, you have to relocate or go into a witness-protection program.

According to the experts, you have no chance of moving forward until you take those drastic steps. Consequently, a divorced woman gets a replacement wedding ring for her fourth finger. Why? She wants to cancel out her divorce and move forward. Ditto for the divorced man. We all try to rewrite our past in order to move forward.

Meanwhile, God Puts Our Past To Good Use

Meanwhile, if we give God a lemon and He makes lemonade. What A great compassionate God! You can come to Him just as you are, warts and all. The pressure of rewriting our history is off of us. With Him, you do not need to overcome your past mistakes. I say mistakes not because our entire past consists of mistakes. Nevertheless, you don’t hear of anyone trying to rewrite their past glories.

Well, you don’t usually hear of a rewrite of a glorious past unless you make friends with people like the Apostle Paul. He was content to count his scintillating achievements as dung for the excellency of knowing Christ. The majority of us are interested only in whiting out the unsavory sections of our resume.  And we don’t mind going through hoops to achieve that.

The hoops we jump through are truly high when it comes to financial distress. A man used to be wealthy but is no longer. Rather than let go of his house servants, he hires more. God forbid that his friends should ever suspect that he is no longer flush with funds.

His doctor starts treating him for hypertension and PTSD. He loses sleep at night with the thought that his friends might have cause to think less of him. Such a man is earthly seeing as his worth is bound up in his stuff, poor man. God does not feature in his thinking. He therefore does not know that God puts our past to good use.

The Genealogy Of Jesus

If you belong to God, you have no need to rewrite that past, try to ignore it or sweep it under the rug. Simply give it to the God who puts our past to good use for His glory. And then, sit back and watch Him turn your past shame into glory.

Naturally, you are starting to wonder what in the Savior’s genealogy made such an impact on me. The passage in the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in an eye-opener to the kindness of God. It helps if you know the past of these people whom God brought into His family line. By their past alone, we would have condemned them as societal dregs.

Most of us would want nothing to do with them, particularly we religious sorts. You must remember that the religious leaders wanted nothing to do with the tax collectors. They went as far as criticizing Jesus for hobnobbing with one of them. Yes, we would definitely be quick to consign these people in Jesus’ lineage to hellfire. But not Jesus. He famously responded that those who are not ill have no need of a doctor. The very reason He came was for the sinners.

And little wonder when His Father had taken care to include serious sinners in his ancestry. Take Perez for instance. He was the result of Tamar and Judah’s foray into fake prostitution. God does not stop there. He takes Rahab, a professional prostitute and drops her into the ancestry. Next, He introduces Ruth, whose only ‘sin’ was that she was not pure Israel and drops her into the mix.

Don’t Stay Away From This God Who Puts Out Past To Good Use

Between that and the birth of Solomon, you have seduction, adultery, betrayal, and murder. Compare your past sin scorecard with that and you might start to feel self-righteous! But with a God who puts our past to good use, it was all par for the course. Just as your past, no matter how murky, is par for the course in the hands of this great God.

When you have time, read the entire chapter. You are likely to become quite emotional when you see sinners firmly established in His bloodline. That way, no one can debar you from entering into God’s Kingdom. No one except you, that is.

Through His Son’s genealogy, God already put in place an inclusive plan. But it is only a plan. Until you make a move, there is no implementation. Like a few of the people who resist God’s love, you may be waiting to be clean before you come. That is futile. By ourselves, we cannot be clean enough for such a Holy God.

Take that step and come just as you are. He has enough cleansers to wash you clean. We know His cleanser as the blood of Jesus. Simply come. God puts our past to good use. Try Him. It is the only way you can rework, not rewrite, your past. If you doubt me, ask Rahab, the professional prostitute who ended up in Jesus’ genealogy.

Maranatha!