HOW BIG IS THIS SALVATION?

"Son," he said, "ye cannot in your present state understand eternity...That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even the agony in to a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say, 'Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences,' little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin.

"Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven; the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness.

"And that is why...the Blessed will say, 'We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,' and the Lost, 'We were always in Hell.' And both will speak truly." - C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

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If I believe that Jesus redeems me and saves me for the eternity which yawns on the other side of this life - and He does - that is a glorious promise and a great assurance.

But I need more.

If I believe that Jesus redeems me and saves me today, when I have today injured another image-bearer, fallen yet again into that old sin, doubted the great promise that God truly forgives and truly loves the repentant sinner - and He does - that gives me comfort and healing and hope. Even as I fall broken at the foot of the cross for the umpteenth time, it gives me strength to stand and face a new day with the confidence that "Yes, Lord, I am yours, beloved and secure. Help me today to think and speak and live as befits a daughter of the King."

But I need more.

What about yesterday? What about last month? last year?

What about the decades of sin, my own and those committed against me? What about the hurt and the hard layers of scar tissue, running deep in my soul? What about sin-twisted coping mechanisms, learned over a lifetime, so well practiced now that they are reflex and I have little, if any, conscious awareness of them?

When I look back, I am deeply grieved by my own brokenness and by how my brokenness has shattered others.

What about the PAST, Lord: Is it too late to save what has already been? The pages are turned; the story is told - how can what has already been written be saved and sanctified for your glory and for my good and the good of the people I love?

Does the Gospel have power to redeem the past?

My story - The Story of Camille - began 54 years ago in a small hospital in rural Northwest Tennessee. Actually it began before that, with a young country lawyer and a pretty preacher's daughter. No...go back further, to that preacher and the strong-willed, strong-boned woman he married, and hundreds of miles away, to the hog farmer and his schoolteacher wife.

No, further still...

To German and Scots-Irish immigrants who, desperate for religious freedom and a future, braved an unknown continent on the far side of the sea...

Further...

Go WAY back, as far back as, well, as forever...

Ephesians 1:4 tells me that God was writing My Story "before the foundation of the world."

Long before my story became My Story some 54 years ago, as far back as the dawn of time and then further, it was God's Story, the one He began writing before my first ancestor walked this earth. That means...

Before the first page of My Story was written, there was the mercy of God, wrapped up in the Gospel, the One Great Story, of which My Story is simply a re-telling.

All of my past - the good and the bad, the bright and the broken, the joyful and that which causes me deep, deep sorrow - God has been writing all of it all along, and through ALL of it, He has been weaving the beautiful, unifying, redeeming theme of his glorious Gospel.

So, back to my question: Can the Gospel redeem and sanctify my past?

YES.

Because God's Story, the Gospel, is older than My Story, and its life-giving blood pulses through ALL of My Story, past-present-future, beginning to end.

I needed to take a few minutes to remember that today.

* * *

I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. - Jeremiah 31:3