FreedomSample

Day 1: Dealing with the Prison of Our Past:
Welcome to the Freedom Plan! My name is Jason Hanash, and I hope that over the next week, you gain a better understanding on how to move on from pain, shame, and guilt and into the freedom that God meant for your life!

To start out our plan, today we will be talking about how we can deal with the prison(s) of our past.

Many of us live like kids hiding in our beds with the blanket pulled up over us. We lie there paralyzed by shame, regret, and fear-driven guilt. Memories become barriers to personal and spiritual growth, keeping us angry, bitter, and distrustful. We try to bury those painful memories, but like emotional zombies, they keep coming back to taunt and haunt us. Jeremiah (see Lamentations) knew all about the ghosts of his past.

Jeremiah, tormented by memories, said, “I remember” (Lamentations 3:19). He remembered obsessively. He knew God was going to come to the rescue because he had been the chosen messenger to share that news with the people. He had written about how the Lord was going to prosper the nation and give them a hopeful future,⁠ despite the current era of judgment and deprivation. But the prophet was stuck in the past. All he could remember was affliction, bitterness, and gall.

Like Jeremiah, many of us have a hard time believing in a hopeful future because we remember too much. We’re haunted by ghosts from our past.

The Ghost of Personal Failure

This is what Jeremiah meant in Lamentations by “my wanderings”—those times when he strayed from the right path. We have all known the pain that comes from bad choices—when someone fails to say “no” to drugs, drinks too much, and then maybe gets behind the wheel. Or how about losing our temper and hurting someone else with our words—or worse? A choice was made, and damage was done—maybe irreparably.

The Ghost of Relational Wounds

This is what Jeremiah was referencing when he remembered the bitterness and the gall. This is a big one because we live in a world populated by imperfect people. People can be hurtful, usually because someone has hurt them. It’s a vicious cycle. Maybe someone has lied about you—or to you. Maybe you’ve been stabbed in the back. These things happen in all sorts of relationships, from marriages to the workplace to the closest of personal friendships.

Too many followers of Jesus live a life consumed by guilt, but that guilt is not from God. I suppose we think that beating ourselves up is some kind of penance. We feel we need to pay for what we’ve done. It’s a tool used by the enemy to neutralize us. He wants us to exhaust ourselves trying to tread water in a shark-infested ocean of guilt. Guilt is his specialty. It is his most effective fiery dart. The very word “devil” means “slanderer.” He loves to hurl accusations against us. It's who he is—just look at Revelation 12:10!

The journey to freedom begins with something Jeremiah wrote. It’s a breath of fresh air from an otherwise depressing lament, a blade of green grass springing up through the ground that has been scorched by an immense fire that consumed everything in its path. I really believe that what the Weeping Prophet had to say in Lamentations 3:21-23 must become one of our go-to reminders.

We have to get rid of all the ghosts. We must stop letting the enemy’s dossier of our flaws, faults, and failures define us now and in the future. When we fail to release the past, we empower it, and that’s never good. When we don’t forgive someone because we’re convinced that by doing so, we are empowering a hurtful person, we’re believing a lie.

Please remember—forgiveness is actually self-empowerment. There is power in forgiveness. Liberating power. Wonder-working power. Bitterness keeps power away. Grace and forgiveness bring it back to where it belongs.

God’s forgiveness of us is not the end of the story. Not at all. Jesus didn’t just come to forgive us. He came to do something even greater. He came to cleanse us—to completely remove the stain. To completely remove the guilt and shame. He came to renew our lives as if those bad things never happened. He came to redeem us. He came to release us.