Thinking about past mistakes can weigh heavily on us, creating doubts and fears that can affect our decision-making and overall confidence. However, it's important to recognize that they don't have to dictate our future.

Acknowledging our mistakes and understanding what led to them can be a powerful tool for Godly growth and resilience. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn and improve. By embracing them and moving forward with a positive mindset, we can transform past errors into stepping stones for a better future.

Hebrews 12:11 provides us with hope concerning our past failures and how God uses them to change us and make us more righteous:

all discipline (God bringing us to recognition of mistakes, usually sinful) for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful, but to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

We need to recognize two things here:

  1. Our past is checkered with mistakes and sinful decisions.

  2. We either can allow our guilt and sorrow to create doubt and fear to stymie our future joy and usefulness for God, or we can learn from these “mistakes” and progress positively under the guidance and power of the Spirit through God's word.

Today's My Utmost for His Highest speaks to this:

At the end of the year, we turn with eagerness to all that God has planned for our future. And yet anxiety is likely to arise from remembering our past. Our present enjoyment of God's grace is likely to be tempered by the memory of yesterday's sins and blunders. But God is the God of our yesterdays. He allows the memory of them in order to turn the past into a ministry for the future. He reminds us of the past so that we won't put our trust in the shallow security of the present.

Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities that will never return. But God can transform destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep in Christ. Leave the irreparable past in His hands and step into the irresistible future with Him.

What a great New Year's thought...not to let past blunders paralyze us for this new year, but instead, use them as reminders, teaching tools to bring us to a closer walk with Christ and personal righteousness.  Never forget, God is sovereign over our past (blunders and all).  He will never leave us or forsake us.  Learn and go forward this year in His grace.

Hebrews 12:12-13 is our marching orders:

12 Therefore, strengthen the hands that are weak and the knees that are feeble, 13 and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed.

Walk with the King this year and be a blessing!