Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. Isaiah 43:18-19 NIV

 

Have you ever thought, “With my past, this is what I get?”

Emma had been sexually abused as a child. By the time she became a young teen she craved love and began to let herself be used sexually. “What does it matter,” she thought. “I’m dirty and spoiled.” She liked the attention at first but then felt herself spiraling out of control, from one man to another and had several abortions.

One day a friend at work told her that God loved her despite everything she’d ever done. She learned that she could be completely forgiven and made new…and asked God for just that! As Emma learned to follow Jesus, everyone around her watched the change in her life. Emma married and she and her husband tried to start a family… but no baby came. Emma didn’t blame God—she blamed herself. “With my past, this is what I get,” she thought.

Emma was forgiven but still gripped by her past. As one writer explains, this is “One of the worse parts of being a religious person with a dark past.” “The temptation to view persistent hardship as punishment is almost too much to resist.”[1]

To forgiven people with “pasts,” God says in the Bible book of Isaiah: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland” (Isaiah 43:18-19 NIV).

God did a new thing in Emma’s life and today she’s the mom of two sons, “chosen” through adoption.

[1] Moore, Beth. All My Knotted-up Life: A Memoir. Tyndale Momentum, a Tyndale Nonfiction Imprint, 2023, p. 234.