To read the first 2 posts in this series, click HERE.
I was having lunch with a friend last month and we were talking about her story and the pain she’s had to go through to get where she’s at today. While we were talking she asked me a really interesting question – “How do I move past those parts of my story, knowing it’s a part of me, but not living from those places and having that be my identity?”
Her question was so interesting to me because as we’ve been talking about the last couple of weeks, so many of us live out of the painful places in our story, holding onto them tightly because we’re afraid of what others would think, or we feel like healing from the past is for everyone but us, etc. The enemy tells us we won’t ever be able to move past those parts of us so we hide them and live in shame.
In search for an answer for my friend I asked the Lord to talk to me specifically about this topic. I asked Him, “How do we move past the hard parts of our story, knowing they’re part of who we are, but not letting them define us?”
Honestly His answer kind of took me by surprise. He gave me a picture of Christ on the cross, Christ died on the cross bearing the weight of all our sins, but then He rose again. If Christ hadn’t focused on the power of the resurrection, and instead allowed Himself to be defined by the fact that He died on a cross, everything would be different.
It’s a fact, He was beaten, He was tortured and He died. But it’s also a fact that He rose from the dead and changed the world forever.
Christ is defined by the resurrection, rather than the death, and we need to do the same.
It might be a fact that you were molested as a child, or that you didn’t have loving parents, or that you chose to party and sleep around in college, or that you used to be an atheist, those might be facts but they do not define who you are, or who you were created to be.
They might be part of your story but they are not the whole story!
The enemy will tell you that those facts about your life are too great to move past; that you’ll never get healing from them, that you should be ashamed of them, that you should lock them in a closet and throw away the key, but that’s not truth. The truth is that those things are a part of you but they do not define you. They are part of the whole picture.
If you look directly at them, then you’ll experience the pain, you’ll live from the “death” but if you focus on the resurrection and the power of the cross, then you’ll see that there’s so much more. YOU are worth so much more, you deserve to live from a place of life and the identity you gained when Christ rose from the dead!
For it is Christ that means everything as He lives in every one of us! Let your heart be always guided by the peace of the Anointed One, who called you to peace as part of His one body.” Colossians 3:11b, 15 (tPt)
When we focus on the resurrection, we see that we don’t need to live in shame or fear of our stories because Christ rose so we could live in peace!
There is nothing you could have ever experienced, or done in your life, that’s too great for the power of the resurrection to not be able to cover it.
And through the divine authority of His cross, He canceled out every legal violation we had on our record and the old arrest warrant that stood to indict us. He erased it all – our sins, our stained soul, and our shameful failure to keep His laws – he deleted it all and they cannot be retrieved!” Colossians 2:14 (tPt)
Those “shameful” and painful parts of our story, they only keep coming back to haunt us because we allow it. We allow the enemy to keep bringing them back up because we don’t know that we deserve better.
When the Lord looks at you He doesn’t see them, so why do you keep looking at them?
What the Lord wants for us is to stop looking at the dead parts of our past and allow ourselves to be complete in Him. We are royalty because our completeness is found in Him (Colossians 2:10).
We are completely filled with God as Christ’s fullness overflows within us. He is the head of every kingdom and authority in the universe! All of the guilt and power of sin has been cut away and is now extinct. And it wasn’t because of something good that we have done, but because of what Christ, the Anointed One, has accomplished for us.” Colossians 2:10-11 (tPt)
You deserve better. You deserve to experience the fullness of Christ. Don’t let Christ’s resurrection be in vain because you believe the lie that you need to carry the pain from you story. The fact remains – it’s a part of you, and it always will be. But the more important fact, the whole story, is that it doesn’t need to define you. Sin happens because we live in a fallen world but let’s allow ourselves to live from the resurrection and the fullness of the sacrifice Christ made for us to experience life!
