No matter what a person has done, do not hold them in their past. Perhaps use occasional lessons from their past to encourage them into their future…but don’t dwell, focus too much on where they have been. Life is about today and beyond. Yesterday is gone. Each day is a new day.
None of us is “who we were”, and none of us will stay “as we are” – we will all move on. Hopefully we will all improve, we must give that same grace, sense of optimism to as many of those around us as we can. We must let, help others to “become” something NEW…
One of the biggest challenges in the work of discipleship amongst the poor, is that they have been poor for ever. Their neighbors are poor, their parents were poor, the parents of their parents were poor, everyone has been poor for so long, there has been nothing but poverty, there has never been enough of anything in their lives, there has always been lack, difficulty and hardship – these were the only things that have ever increased in their lives. BUT NOW, in Christ, they are rich, but getting them out of the “past poverty” and into the “present riches of Christ”, is often very, very tricky.
It’s like the past poverty buries into peoples beings and becomes a weight, a stumbling block instead of a stepping stone into their future. Everything becomes referenced by past experiences.
The past was hard, harsh, unforgiving, unrelenting and so it can scar and mark the present and even the future, as past experiences become future expectations.
Ephesians 4:17-24 (v23) – the new man is to be renewed in the Spirit of his mind, and is then to be “put on”, practiced, lived, in a new life. It is a divine restoration or renovation, the entire being of a person, changed in Christ.
It’s an ongoing process, not a one off event. We must all be renewed constantly – our pasts cannot be allowed to define our present or our future.