Weekly Articles

                                                                                                                          Looking Ahead

As we come to the close of another year God took the opportunity to speak to me out of Genesis 19. In this story we find Lot, who was the nephew of our father of faith Abraham, fleeing from the city of Sodom right before the Lord destroyed it by fire because of the wickedness of its inhabitants. Sodom was the place Lot had coveted (Genesis 13:10, 11) when he and his uncle Abraham had to part ways because the land in which they resided was too small for the increase they both had experienced due to the blessing God poured out on Abraham (Genesis 13:1-6). As lot and his family was fleeing from the city they had been instructed by the angel to “look not behind thee” (Genesis 19:17) as you leave this place. The implication was to get out of your mess and move forward, only Looking Ahead to where you are going. This is the message God is sending to His people this upcoming year; keep Looking Ahead. This past year has been filled will challenges in which you overcame, troubles you walked through, adversities which were resolved, and pains which eventually were healed. Regardless of what you had to face throughout the past year, the Lord has brought you through and now your focus as you enter into a new year is to keep Looking Ahead. Our past never determines our future, but it does shape and develop us so that we are more effective in our future if we come out of our adversities with a victorious mindset rather than one of being a victim. Lots’ wife forfeited here future because she wouldn’t move forward and leave here past behind. She didn’t have a change of heart, so she looked back to where her heart’s interest where, and the results were fatal. Matthew 6:21 says that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” At salvation God gives us a new heart and puts His Spirit within us so that He can cause us to walk in His commands, and turn from our past to follow this new way He has laid before us. Isaiah 43:18, 19 says “remember you not the former things, neither consider the things of old.” That word “consider”, in its original Hebrew means not to deliberate on, don’t examine, or think about them. We must always be Looking Ahead because verse 19 continues by saying “behold, I will do a new thing”, or as the Amplified version states; “Behold I am doing a new thing!” God is doing a new thing in your life and you cannot take that old baggage with you. You must understand that you can only move forward and progress if you keep Looking Ahead and forget about what is behind. Lot’s wife could not let go of the old familiar. She was instructed by God to keep her focus on where she was going, but she didn’t want to let go of that old way of life she had become comfortable with. We tend to allow fear to keep us trapped in a past in which we have longed wanted to be free of, but at the same time had become comfortable with it and accepted it as a norm for us when God has been trying to push us out of that old complacency into the a new and refreshing way of life with Him. It’s that spirit of fear (2 Timothy 1:9) which the enemy uses to keep us in that wrong way of life even though it in itself is filled with misery and pain. If we don’t lose focus of the past and keep Looking Ahead to the life God is calling us to, we will find ourselves trapped in a world of darkness, which is empty and lonely. But as the apostle Paul stated in Philippians 3:13; “but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth to those things which are before.’ We must develop this mindset and pursue what lies before us in this upcoming year. God has a good and perfect plan for our life (Jeremiah 29:11) and we must forget the old familiar, and keep Looking Ahead to the life He has prepared for us.