Teaching Text

Philippians 3:10-14

“I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

Sermon Recap

This Sunday, Pastor Jon continued the FREED series by asking one of the most personal questions the series will raise: can you be free from your past?

Pastor Jon opened by sharing that early in his marriage, he and his wife Christy once took the Adverse Childhood Experiences assessment, a clinical tool that measures how early family dysfunction shapes us later in life. Out of ten categories, they scored nine. Pastor Jon noted that this kind of history doesn’t just disappear. As James Baldwin wrote, “people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.” The question the sermon set out to answer was not whether the past affects us, but whether we can actually be free from it, and if so, how.

The framework Pastor Jon brought in comes from psychology's Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, which identifies how our orientation toward past, present, or future shapes mental health and decision-making. People with the least healthy outlook tend to be anchored in a negative past. Sin does exactly that: it exerts power over you by trapping you in what has already happened. The antidote is not denial or distraction, but what he called eschatological realism, a clear and vivid sense of the future God has for you. He illustrated this with a story from early in his faith, working in a butcher shop and being pressured to compromise, until news came that he had been accepted into Bible college in America. Suddenly nothing his coworkers could say touched him. He was living from a different future, and it broke the hold the present had on him.

Paul is the instructive figure here. He had a past that could have defined him entirely: complicit in the murder of Christians, later rejected by the very church he gave his life to serve. And yet in Philippians 3 he writes about forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead. Pastor Jon was careful to distinguish biblical forgetting from its counterfeits. Bypassing, numbing, stuffing things down, these are not what Paul means. Biblical forgetting is specific: forgetting failure, forgetting guilt, forgetting the pride that can calcify around even our wounds. There is also a cultural temptation, particularly among younger generations, to let trauma become identity. Paul pushes back. In Christ, we have been given a new identity more defining than anything we have been through.

The pastoral word underneath all of it: Satan loves to keep you in your past because he knows he cannot touch your future. God, in his mercy, does not simply free us from what we have been through. He redeems it, and uses the very things we have carried to bring healing to others. The Scripture gives us a redemptive orientation toward time: a past that has been redeemed, a present marked by wonder, and a future held open by hope.