Tues Inspiration

Morning Inspiration with Pastor Merritt

I heard about a man who had retired, and he got up one morning and the first thing he did was read the obituary column to find out who had died. Well, on this particular morning he read that column and the newspaper by mistake had put his name in the column and reported that he was dead. He was not only shaken, he was irate. He called the editor of the newspaper and fussed him out. Finally the editor said, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. In the morning we’ll put your name in the birth column and give you a brand new beginning.”

Believe it or not, you can have a new beginning in your life more often than you think because a new beginning requires three simple, but different, looks. First of all, it requires a look back to see where you’ve been; it then requires a look around to see where you are; then it requires a look ahead to see where you need to go. You can’t really get to where you need to go until you know where you are. But you really cannot know where you are until you know where you’ve been.

The nation of Israel was less than a two-week journey from the promise land. They had been wandering in the wilderness for forty years, and they were now poised to cross the Jordan, conquer Canaan, and claim a new beginning. But before they did, Moses gives them “a blast from the past.” He asked them to open the vault of their memory, and remember what the Lord had done for them so that they could rejoice in what He was doing for them, and then receive what He would do for them.

Your memory is a very powerful tool. Your memory is capable of containing 100 bits of information, or 500 times the information contained in a complete set of encyclopedias. Your brain has 100 billion neurons, and 100 trillion connections for those memories, 46 ounces of memories in all, and that’s if you’re average. There is a reason why God has given us this magnificent tool called a memory. The way to know that you can trust what God is doing today, and what God will do tomorrow, is to remember what God has done yesterday. Before you can look to the future, and even live in the present, you must learn from the past.

We need to do what Moses told the nation of Israel to do before they entered into the promise land. Take a look back!