Joshua 1:6-9 says,
“6 Be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them. 7 Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good success wherever you go. 8 This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. 9 Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”
The Lord’s presence is the foundation of why we should be courageous. Fear and trepidation will be mixed with our courage, but courage helps us to do God’s will even as we tremble. This passage also teaches us the importance of meditating on God’s Word and applying God’s Word as we live in obedience to God and His holy Word.
In the spring of this year, we did a book club study on Jackson TerKeurst’s book entitled, The Only Way Forward is Back. Jackson TerKeurst, after seeing TV footage of the Russia and Ukraine war, had flashbacks to his childhood in Liberia where he suffered the trauma of being separated from his family due to a civil war in Liberia. The violence he saw in his childhood, he could not erase. The same is true for all of us, what we see, we cannot erase. We will always have to deal with our past and reflect on it. Part of our struggle in the present is how to think about our past in a healthy way.
Jackson Terkeurst gives the advice that we should seek healing for our memories through the grace of God. That does not mean you can delete your past. Jackson could have easily fallen into bitterness, questioning why God had allowed him to experience such intense violence in his childhood, but instead he prayed for God’s healing of his painful and negative emotions and expressed gratitude to the Lord for the blessings of his past.
Getting free from the past is not, however, a passive process. It involves action on our part. Yes, the Lord is our deliverer. He is the One who delivers us from the negative consequences of our past so that it no longer has control over us: affecting our emotional state, controlling the way that we think, or influencing our behavior in an unhealthy and sinful way. For the deliverance to be complete, however, we have to work with Him as He works. This is an important aspect of our growth and the renewal of our minds, that we might be transformed in our thinking in accordance with the teaching of God’s Word.
As Jackson TerKeurst states, the only way forward towards healing in your life is to face what is in your past and seek the Lord to be at work in any trauma or difficulty you experienced, with gratitude for the many ways that God has worked and is at work in your life.
