Read 1 Corinthians 6:9–11

Few young people I know have watched a film spun off an 8mm projector. Nowadays, if you were born any year after 1980, you’d have to Google that to catch a glimpse of the bygone contraption. But as a boy, I recall watching home movies of family outings, captured on film with an 8mm camera. If we could look back on our lives before Christ, I wonder if we’d laugh or cringe? Some episodes would make us laugh out loud. Like seeing our hairdos and bell-bottom pants. Still other scenes might cause us shame, embarrassment, or conjure some regrets.

Our past at times can haunt us and keep us from experiencing God’s best for our future.

Thankfully, God offers something we don’t deserve: grace.

Remember now, God is the One who builds trophies from the trash, who draws His clay from under the bridge, makes clean instruments of beauty from the messy failures of yesteryear.

To underscore this truth, consider Paul’s refreshing words offered to a sin-soaked group of Christians hoping to shed the shackles of the past:

Don’t you realize that those who do wrong will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Don’t fool yourselves. Those who indulge in sexual sin, or who worship idols, or commit adultery, or are male prostitutes, or practice homosexuality, or are thieves, or greedy people, or drunkards, or are abusive, or cheat people—none of these will inherit the Kingdom of God. Some of you were once like that. But you were cleansed; you were made holy; you were made right with God by calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6: 9–11)

Our past does not have to dictate our future.

Our Father, in great grace, loved us when we lived in outright rebellion to Him. Looking for sinners, He found us in desperate straits. Lifting us to the level of His much-loved Son, He brought us in, washed our wounds, and changed our direction. All our church-going and praise and worship and committee-sitting and religious-talking will never ease the fact that we were dug from a deep, dark, deadly pit. Only He could turn our trash into His treasure.

Devotional content taken from Good Morning, Lord...Can We Talk? by Charles R. Swindoll. Copyright © 2018. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries. All rights reserved.

The full devotional can be purchased at https://www.tyndale.com/p/good-morning-lord-can-we-talk/9781414380681.