Body and Soul series Instalment #6:Preserving the past// part 1 of 2

Recently I read a quote attributed to that great Scottish missionary of the early twentieth century, Oswald Chambers and I quote it to you “Never make the blunder of trying to forecast the way God is going to answer your prayers.” End of quote. This is probably true of most of us, is it not?
It is because of this very reason that many times we miss seeing the answer to our prayers because when the answer does come we find ourselves looking for God to answer in our way and He being sovereign answers His way and in His time. And so we miss the answer and wonder why He does not answer when in actual fact, the answer did come but we didn’t recognize it.
And so it goes, we struggle and struggle to find that which will satisfy us and we cannot seem to discover it when God has the answer all the time. For instance we like to preserve the past, we like to hold on to things and perhaps a way of life that we knew in happier, less stressful times. Some of you, like I, were blessed to be brought up in a happy home where love was abundant and we were thankful for much less in material ways than we enjoy today but life had a great quality to it. And so we like to preserve these memories.
We find ourselves at this writing with two of our very dear friends accompanying us in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts and surrounded by beauty that only God could create. My friend Pat is an outdoors man and he is so enthusiastic about this place that we all seem to catch his excitement. And how often he has said how he would have liked to have lived in an earlier time when there wasn’t the conveniences we have today but life was simpler and he would have liked to seen that way of the past preserved. And we have seen that older more laid back lifestyle here in the Berkshires.
But we cannot go back to what George Bush senior declared to be a kinder, gentler time; we can’t turn back the clock. So we have to realize that all we have is the present…the now. God is the God of the now, a phrase coined by Oral Roberts some years ago and his advice was to forget about the past and it’s failures and not to worry about the future and it’s fears but rather to concentrate on the now. Good advice ...if we have prepared for the future. We don’t have to worry over it if we are walking with our great God and our SAVIOR, Jesus Christ. He will keep us in the present and will be with us in the future as well. We can rest in the assurance that He is in control and that our future will be so great that we won’t even remember the past. We can’t change what has happened no more than we can hold on to the past
We can however change what we are today and what we do today. If you are having a problem with letting go of the past, i.e. past sins, just remember the prayer of king Hezekiah in the book of Isaiah chapter 38 and verse 17 where he declared “you have cast all my sins behind Your back”. There’s an old song that says “when Jesus forgives He forgets.” We need to do the same; some parts of our past does not need to be preserved. Let’s bury them.
When I started this post I said that we were in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, and now at this point we have arrived back home, actually it's been a few days now. On the way back we decided to take a little side trip so we drove to Boston and followed the coastline north to the fishing town of Gloucester where the statue of the "old man of the sea" stands. On the way to Gloucester is the picturesque little resort town of Manchester By the Sea and as we were driving towards this town we passed a farm which my wife and I recognized immediately. Memory took us back to a time forty two years ago when my aunt Dot was living there and Judy and I stayed there along with my parents for a night or two. It really was an amazing experience for us to see the farm as it was seemingly preserved just like it was back in the sixties. But nothing stays the same in this life. Much has happened ...my parents are gone for one thing and of course I could relate so much more but I shall spare you.


There is only One that we can count on and He never changes. The Bible puts it so clearly in Hebrews 13:8, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever."And along with that promise , is the promise throughout the Psalms that His mercy endures forever. Now that..., you can depend upon.