Devotional from Pastor Dave October 18, 2023

“Don’t stumble over something behind you.”

Our new District Superintendent, Rev. Mickey Rainwater, quoted these words from the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca in our clergy meeting this week. He shared with us that he came upon these words as he was doing his daily devotional a few months ago as he was leaving a congregation that had decided to leave our denomination and as he was preparing to enter this new appointment. He said these words spoke to his yearning to start fresh and not let the pain and the difficulty of the past become a stumbling block for his own moving forward in ministry.

How often have you stumbled over something behind you? Something in the past. Something that has already happened and that you can’t go back and change, no matter how much you might want to. I don’t know about you, but I do this kind of backward stumbling more often than I’d like to admit.

How often do we as a church stumble over things that are behind us? Things that happened in the distant or even the more recent past. Things that former pastors or former or current members might have said or done, or failed to say or do. And how does that stumbling over things behind us stymie us or stifle the energy and the effort to move forward more confidently in the mission God has given us?

It's not that we shouldn’t learn from the past. As another philosopher George Santayana famously said, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But it’s one thing to learn from the past; it’s another to live in the past. How can we try not to stumble over the things in the past that are behind us?

I’m not sure what scripture was paired with this quote from Seneca in Mickey’s daily devotional; he didn’t say. But it reminds me of something the Apostle Paul said. Scholars believe Paul as a Roman citizen would have been familiar with the philosophy of the Stoics, and Seneca was in fact a contemporary of Paul.

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul writes this: “Not that I have already obtained this [having been made perfect in Christ] or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus” (Php 3:12-14).

Lord, help us not to stumble over what is behind us, but to press on toward who is before us, and to follow where you would lead us.