By looking forward i mean not living hypnotized by the past, a life-style of always looking back. God had some hard things to say to Israel for pining about their past, whining about “what was” so much that it dictated their “what is”, and they lost sight of their “what will be”. God called it, “Hearkening back to a former time.” Let’s understand, i don’t mean never looking back, but i mean to let the past be past and not give the past anymore power over our lives than it already has. Looking forward, ask yourself: where is my life in the now? Where is life happening for you? Is God driving with His God-directions and God-purposes, or, maybe, like many of us, we really have no clue, or we answer “Yes”, but really mean “i wish”? You know, if we’re always looking back it’ll give us a terrible neck ache. We can’t drive forward if we’re always looking in the rear view mirror. Going forward is nearly impossible if we’re watching behind us.

Almost, pretty much, just about, for the most part, if, maybe, might have been…yea but, yea but if… …if… if only… Might have been… Might have been if only.

In the things we sow and reap, There are the sowings of things that, never in this life, would we wish to grow at our feet. But yet, more and more often, i see the seeds of regret that grow around our feet like vines that tangle us and cause our attention to shift from important matters to spending more and more time untangling ourselves from these “vines”, strangling vines, ropes impeding forward momentum, vines of distraction and the more we are distracted the more we are distracted. Many people like to wander in the cemetery of past errors and old wrongs, rereading old headstones and epitaphs of the things we think we have “reckoned dead”, moaning over old wrongs saying over and over, “Oh, i so wish i hadn’t done that,” but never really dealing with what’s in their heart and letting it all go. Regret often paralyzes hope, corrodes the connection between vision and purpose, and becomes a dead weight to our forward momentum. This is not healthy; it is what i call a chronic gastrointestinal turbulence of the soul.

In the silence of late night, the gray place between awake and asleep, we play the video of what “might have been”, but when it plays in a constant loop it makes us weak because it over-emphasizes the past at the expense of the present. How expensive is your present? Would you trade “now” to go back to “then”? Do you really think “then” would be all you remember it to be, or is it just a group of selective memories?

A man said to me once, many years ago while weeping over his life, “Sometimes, i seem to spend the bulk of my time wishing God would do something other than what He is doing.” For me, his words were such a profound idea to ponder.

Years later, i think of Israel, in the desert, the wilderness, a place of amazing miracles, a season of walking with God, and over and over they hearkened back to a former time, seemingly spending the bulk of their time wishing God would do something other than what He was doing. Israel was in what i call the “Season of The Golden Calf”, and i wonder if maybe we, in America aren’t living out a giant repeat of the story of Israel in some odd fashion. Looking back, always wishing we were anywhere but here, unbelieving of God’s promise of tomorrow, bitter about today.

OH, and the colors….the colors of “might have been” are always so brilliant! The reds, and blues, the crimson and purples, the yellows & pales…the white sails of distant ships are always full and whiter than our own, and the green of far away hills are always greener. Might have been always looks SOOO good from a distance.

We need to refocus. But what, or who will we refocus on? i think what Paul said in Philippians 3 is the supreme focus, “… forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. I press on toward the goal to win the (supreme and heavenly) prize to which God in Christ Jesus is calling us upward.”

Let us go OUT of the graveyard of “might have been” and “if only” to go forward. We are not people of our history, but people of our destiny. As best we can let us take seriously what we sow; let us leave the graveyard of old things where regret grows around our feet … let it go; let the dead be dead and let us catch our breath in a new direction. Don’t just turn in a new direction, more better, come home! Refocus to be forward thinking, forward moving with forward momentum. Love the Lord you God with all your breathing, all your thinking, all your feeling, and all your forward momentum. And at that, i say: Selah, my friends, think on it.

In Matthew 25 there is a parable about talents (or gifts) and what three servants did with their talents.

Rev. R. R. Belter wrote, “The man in Matthew 25:26 said, “I went and hid my talent in the ground,”, and he is not the only one on whose tombstone, in the “Cemetery of Neglect” such words were written.”

Arthur Brisbane, whose’ syndicated column were read with relish years ago, once wrote these words: “The greatest loss to the human race has not been caused by floods or by fire, not by epidemics which have spread disease over vast areas and with the sickle of death mowed down millions, nor by earthquakes and topical storms; neither by record-breaking crashes of Wall Street … the greatest loss … has been in the buried talent of God’s people.”

Reverend Belter continued saying, “Is there anything more pathetic than a trained teacher who will not teach, a beautiful voice which will not sing, a pastoral gifting that will not shepherd, an apostolic anointing not allowed to plant, an efficient businessman who will not give to God the benefit of his knowledge, or a lawyer who will not serve in Church councils so that his Lord can have the benefit of talent which God alone gave him? We have men and women in all walks of life, who have been given blessings, but refuse to be a blessing.”

Our giftings don’t have to just be under the heading of the “big five” as seen in Ephesians 4. Some have pockets full of hope, others have a gift of just meeting people….people just like talking to them. Some have a gift of just knowing how to help before other folks seem to know they even need help, they just show up right on time, it’s more than a knack, it’s a gift and leading of the Lord. There are gifts of writing and communicating….some people in the Body of Christ are naturally wonderful, vision imparting communicators. There are people with organizational gifts, administrative gifts, gifts of compassion and grace, gifts of imagination and dreaming, the gift of spoken languages, gifts of mathematics and the practical application; there are people who just ooze kindness….those are all gifts from God and we are the stewards of those beautiful things the Lord gave us. What will you do with what God gave you? Are we going to bury our giftings, or use them for the furtherment of the Kingdom of God?

Like any Father, the Lord carries real concerns for our welfare, but He does not come at us with a hurricane, storm-cloud posture of tooth gritting rage, and ground shaking judgment. His heart is for us to stop hiding, to humble ourselves, be honest, and reconcile with Him. Yahweh is for us.

He is more than willing to balance our books, in fact, He’s already done the work, it is finished, we just have to believe on the name of Jesus, and allow Him to perfect in each of us what He started. Philippians 1:6, “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”

Come out, come out, where ever you are. It’s not like God, who’s eye nothing escapes from, does not see us. You know those things you do in the dark when you think no one sees? Well…..let’s not kid ourselves…God sees…we might as well be honest with Him. You know one day, every knee shall bow, every tongue shall confess that Jesus is Lord. At that point, it won’t be a request, it will be a requirement.

God is not hidden. We are. We were hiding in the garden of Eden, and we are still hiding today. The Lord is bidding us to come out of hiding, to humble ourselves and be honest, to throw open the doors of our heart and tear down our fences. Christ is visible and willing to forgive us all our darkest secrets, we’ve simply go to be willing to come out of our hiding places. Come out, come out, where ever you are. You may say, “One day i’ll do just that!” How about today being your “One day”. God is good for His promises, come out from hiding.

A friend of mine won the West coast 500 Pro Class Motocross many years ago so he seemed like a good candidate for a deeper discussion of faith and risk. In our discussion of the topic at hand, along with all the other racing strategies, the one which intrigued me the most was his use of the term, “controlled crash”. He won by pushing everything to the absolute edge – once he was on the track, everything – every curve, every shift, every jump, every slide – from start to finish, it was all a controlled crash, always on the edge of winning it all or losing it all. He was never damped by the possibility of failure, he said that an over focus on the “failure potential” skews our risk assessment. Even though quite a few years have gone by, he still lives life in a controlled crash, the only difference is that his maturity and experience have highly influenced his risk assessment, therefore he has a greater degree of success in all he does. That was important i think, here it is again: maturity and experience highly influence our risk assessment….or at least it should.

Now i suppose it would be easy to think the phrase, “controlled crash” was an oxymoron – or that it is a self-contradictory phrase, like saying something was a “cruel kindness”, but here’s what is meant by “controlled crash”: when something slips out of our initial plan, it speaks of the action taken to minimize the damage. Like when riding a horse at a full gallop and somehow your feet come out of the stirrups. You knew it was possible that this could occur, but in order to have a little control over the potential catastrophe which could easily follow, you already thought about what to do next. We see bull riders who do it all the time. They know the risk is high that they will get thrown off, but in the moment they are becoming dislodged, they are keeping their cool and thinking, not about the failure to make the ride to the buzzer, but about how to best dismount with as little damage as possible.

Acts 27:15 says, “And when the ship was caught, and could not bear up into the wind, we let her drive.” It was a “controlled crash” meaning they couldn’t get out of the storm, it was all out of control, so they picked a course of action that might minimize any potential damage, so they went with the wind, and “let her drive.” A “controlled crash” takes into account that it’s possible things will not go as planned and takes some control over what to do next.

Gambling addicts bet the house, but rarely have a back up plan in case they lose it all, whereas a good stock investor may risk a great deal on an investment, but almost always has an exit plan. Becoming part of a limited liability corporation is a risk, but the smart business man always has a larger, more detailed exit plan than the entry plan. Is your life just a crash waiting to happen with no strategy in the event things don’t go as initially planned, or is it a controlled crash where you’ve made a contingency plan built of “if this, then that”? Excerpt from “Outposts 100”.

Faith is the opposite of fear. Hope is the forerunner of faith. When we find faith we can believe hope was there first. Hope generates a vision of transformation.

Hope is the expectation of becoming and overcoming, and every believer in Christ has an expectation, in one fashion or another, of being a “becomer” and an “overcomer”! Hope must have an object to act on, and the object of Hope is Expectation.

Hope is a character trait of the righteous, they have an attitude of anticipation with an expectation that something will happen to further fulfill the vision of transformation. Among many causes, our hope is based on God’s faithfulness, and He is always, eternally faithful. Our hope is a result of trusting God. Our hope is from remembering what God has done. Hope lifts our face, and in opposition, despair causes our face to drop.

We are silent when the enemy threatens to expose our past. We are silent for fear of rejection. We are silent in the face of persecution, being marginalized or minimized. We are silent many times to justify our own behavior while citing someone else’s. We are silent when words are about to be spoken and should not. Being silent without making a move towards resolve, like giving someone “the silent treatment”, is a power struggle in pain tolerance … the “silent treatment” means whoever wins shows they could care less the most.

Can we silence our conscience? We can be silent to others, and possibly silence our state of mind, but we cannot so easily silence our conscience … the only conscience which is silent is a reprobate conscience. Without a conscience, conviction has no foothold, and condemnation has full run of the field! Paul speaks many times, for a good reason, about the value of owning a conscience that is not silent.

Being silent for the right reasons is righteous, but i believe, by far and large, most of us are often silent for all the wrong reasons. Silence is truly golden, but it is not always the best choice. Let us believe God, take Him at His word, and put our foot on the neck of fear which drives us to silence so often.

Jonathan Edwards wrote of Heaven:
“No inhabitants of that blessed world will ever be grieved with the thought that they are slighted by those whom they love, or that their love is not fully and fondly returned …. There shall be no such thing as flattery or insincerity in Heaven, but there perfect sincerity shall reign through all in all. Everyone will be just what they seem to be, and they’ll really have all the love that they seem to have. It will not be as in this world, where comparatively few things are what they seem to be, and where professions are often made lightly and without meaning. But there, every expression of love shall come from the bottom of the heart, and all that is professed shall be real and truly felt.”

Once at home in Heaven, the hungry will fill up, those who weep will laugh, and those who suffer tragedy will be compensated the victory.

i realize this is a lot of very positive and wonderful stuff about something that isn’t in the here and now. And i realize most of us might be far more interested in things we can do in the now to help our present circumstances or situations….. BUT, in putting the idea of home on the table and talking about being at home with Jesus, eating and talking with God, family, friends, and all the participants of the entire salvation message from beginning to end, it generates hope, the anticipation of becoming and overcoming….. and i believe hope is in very short supply in our world.

Revelation 21:3-5
“3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.””

Those are the words of Jesus and we can take it to the bank. Live everyday in light of them. Let me encourage you to make every choice in light of God’s promises. C.S. Lewis wrote, “A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. A man who gives sustained thought to God and his future Home in Heaven, does not remain the same. He smells the banquet being prepared for him and he’ll never be the same, in Jesus Name.”

Randy Alcorn wrote in his book titled “Heaven”, “We were all made for a person and a place. Jesus is that person. Heaven is that place. If you know Jesus, i’ll be with you in that resurrected world. With the Lord we love and with the friends we cherish, we’ll embark together on the ultimate adventure, in a spectacular new universe awaiting our exploration and dominion. Jesus will be the center of all things, and joy will be the air we breathe. And right when we think it all couldn’t get any better …. it will!”

There are many, many stories and characters in the Bible at crossroads – places of decision. Joel 3:14 speaks of the sea of mankind who are in a difficult place, desperately in need of a decision, “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision! For the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision.”

We don’t have to be alone in coming to resolve over any issue. The Lord assures us that if we will prefer Him, if we will let Jesus teach us how to live, honesty and truth will be our preference. The Lord wants us to grow up and make godly decisions based on our living relationship with Christ, not “Jesus at a distance”, but “Jesus up close and personal”. We don’t have to be alone at the crossroads.

Don’t you know Jesus is also Lord of the crossroads too? He sits patiently at all your crossroads, waiting for you. Yes, that’s right, He’s already at your future place where two roads meet, poised to assist you in wise counsel.

Without the Lord sitting in the command position in the decision making machine within us, we are subject to every whim and wind of this chaotic world, easily swept to sea on a rip tide of chance.