There is a funny family story about a young girl learning how to drive with her Daddy. He took her out to practice, and at one point, she put the car in reverse and started backing up. Seeing that she was heading straight toward trouble, her Dad yelled out, “Watch out for those trees!”
Without missing a beat, she called back, “Well, I wasn’t looking back there!”
It is a hilarious driving lesson, but it highlights a profound truth about how we live our lives. When you are putting a car in reverse, that is the one specific time you must look behind you to avoid a crash. But too often, we live our spiritual lives in total opposition to this rule: we try to drive full-speed into our future while staring directly out the rearview mirror.
We obsess over yesterday’s failures, replay old regrets, and second-guess past mistakes. We keep our eyes locked on what is behind us, and then we wonder why our forward progress stalls out, or why we keep running into obstacles in our present.
When Apostle Paul wrote about “forgetting those things which are behind,” he wasn’t speaking as a man who had lived a perfect life. He had a heavy history filled with things he could have chosen to regret every single day. But Paul understood the mechanics of forward motion. You cannot run a race efficiently if you are constantly turning your head to see the track you’ve already passed.
When you repent, God’s grace completely handles your past. Through Christ, your old mistakes have been forgiven, paid for, and wiped clean from the ledger. If God has cleared the road behind you, you no longer have any reason to keep staring at it.
If you want to move forward into the purpose, peace, and joy that God has prepared for you today, you have to take your foot off the brake of past regret. Shift your focus, look out the front windshield, and trust the One who is steering your future.
Philippians 3:13-14 (KJV) Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
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