Smooth Seas Don’t Produce Skillful Sailors

 

One of my favorite sayings is, “Don’t look back you’re not going that way.”  In other words, focus on what is ahead and free yourself from the past, don’t even look back.  If we are to live from glory to glory in the ever expanding and increasing Kingdom of Heaven here on earth, we cannot afford to be fixated on the past allowing it to define how we will be in the future.

 

Jesus encounters some followers who want to come follow Him in Luke 9:62 and he says to them, “No one after putting his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God.”  What is he saying?  I think there are a lot things that can be pulled from this encounter with Jesus, but I would like to focus on just a couple:

 

You cannot plow a straight line if you are continually looking back – it makes you get off track.  In a Kingdom that is all about expansion and increase if you are looking backward you will not move forward the way you have been intended to move.  P.K. Bernard says, “A man without a vision is a man without a future.  A man without a future will always return to his past.”

 

People who continually look back while tilling their field of dreams will never be fulfilled, because they have sacrificed their future by memorializing their past.  When we keep our eyes on the task before us and what is possible, hope and faith rise in our hearts.  Hope and faith feel and see the deep sense of destiny we were designed to walk in which ultimately fuels perseverance in our inner man to partner with it.  To live successfully in greater abundance around us and experience our God given destiny, we must increase our capacity for greater glory within ourselves.  Destiny is an inside job!

 

How we view the past on the inside, drives the future on the outside.  I have heard it said before, that the kingdom within you becomes the kingdom around.  While your past cannot predict the future, what you believe about the past shapes how you respond to future circumstances and either propels you into your destiny or keeps you from it.

 

So just as a skillful sailor uses the experience from the past storms to operate as a greater sailor in the future, we must gain freedom from the past, quit memorializing our failures, and partner with the free gift Jesus has to give us.  Every new voyage is an adventure and will never be exactly the same as the last one, so why do we act like that is even a possibility?  Nowhere in scripture does it ever say our past is off limits from the restoration power of salvation.  When we said yes to Jesus, and supernaturally became a new creation, guess what, our past is restored right along with us.  Continually walking in our past prohibits us from God’s design for our future and experiencing the destiny we were all designed to walk in.  Storms are just storms and do not define what is next, but they prepare you for greatness if you stand on them as a platform to move forward.

 

Blake Schellenberg – Co-Labor Ministries