Back To The Future

One of the my favorite movies is BACK TO THE FUTURE. I can practically quote the entire film. It's an ongoing gag that whenever I see my brother, we always start barking out lines from Marty McFly or Doc Brown. We crack up every time.Recently, I watched the movie with my daughter and she began to ask a few questions."Imagine if we could go back and change our past? All the bad things we've done? How cool would that be?"Why does Marty make out with his own mom?"

The latter question was something I'll deal with another day. But the first question was a good one. Imagine if we could go back and change our past. Would we?If we look back and document every little thing we've done in our lives, my guess is there are moments that all of us are not proud of.I can think of dozens and dozens in my life that I wish I could take back.But I can't.And if we're not careful, our past can haunt us. It can consume us. It can keep us from truly moving forward and hold us back like we're trapped in a spider web and can't escape it. But it doesn't have to be that way.

There is a way out of our past. God sent his son to die on the cross for our sins. It's the most powerful act of love anyone can ever display. And what that act did was cast our sins into a place where God will remember them no more. Psalm 103:12 says "As far as the east is to the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us."The apostle Paul in Philippians 3 says "But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead."

Paul doesn't say moving forward with our lives is going to be easy. He uses the word "straining" to describe the process. It's going to be a struggle but man are we better for it in the long run.That verse sums it up in 2 Corinthians 5:17 - "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold, the new has come."THE OLD HAS PASSED AWAY, THE NEW HAS COME.

No we cannot go back in a DeLorean and change the past.No we cannot set up a chain of currents connected to 1.21 gigawatts of electricity and wait for the clock tower to be struck by lightning.But we can move on from our past because Christ came and died and said he took the punishment of every sin we've ever committed. What a glorious gift.If you're struggling with regret and the past is haunting you, I encourage you to turn to Jesus.

Read what He said, what He did and what His sacrifice was truly about.In the meantime, I'm going to try and figure out how to explain to my daughter why Marty McFly's mom had the hots for her son.