Our sorrow for past sins must be godly sorrow rather than the sorrow of the world. And a little defiance of the devil will help us. Our adversary wants us to be consumed and destroyed by our painful memories. He must not be allowed to get his way.
We can’t have the greater blessings without trading in some lesser things for them, and we should be willing to do that. As we grow, we should have a clearer vision of what we would relinquish in order to gain what we don’t yet have.
The crucial question is never “What have I done?” but “What does God have in mind for me in the future?” And more important, “Am I cooperating with what He has in mind for me?” That way of thinking about things can make all the difference.
It’s not wrong to indulge in nostalgia, but we must be careful not to overindulge. “Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For you do not inquire wisely concerning this” (Ecclesiastes 7:10). Life in Christ is about progress.
One of the worst aspects of hell will be the helplessness of the whole situation. Not having wanted to see the truth, we never did see it . . . until it was too late. And at that point, nothing can be done but to agonize over the truth. Forever.
We were created to live within God’ will, but we have rebelled against our King and tried to set up our own kingdom. In this “kingdom of self,” the rule is “Not Thy will but mine be done.” Free to choose, we have often chosen our own will over God’s.
If we persist in our rebellion against God, despite His pleas for us to do otherwise, we are setting ourselves up for eternal despair. In hell, there will be no more chance of “reaching forward” — no chance of ever being anything but lost.
Hell will be the final abandonment of those who have rejected God: God will turn away, for eternity, from those who have turned away from Him. And the anguish of hell will be knowing it could have been otherwise, if we had not refused God’s love.
When we long for something and that longing ends up being disappointed, the worst thing we can do is close up our hearts. That type of play-it-safe conservatism is deadly to the human spirit, and no one is pleased with it but our spiritual enemy.
Faith does not ignore questions or minimize their importance, but it does exercise patience. Faith is willing to wait and see what happens. History is, after all, a story, and in a story, the conflicts don’t usually get resolved until the end.
