(Note: This was taken and adapted from one of my Crosswalk Premium Devotional Videos. Used by permission.)
Do you ever find yourself rehashing past mistakes? Maybe your adult son or daughter has become enslaved to self-destructing behavior, and your mind keeps replaying all your parenting regrets. Or, maybe you’re trying to repair a marriage damaged from years of neglect and your heart aches for the relational intimacy lost.
As someone who’s been on a healing and growth journey for a long, hot minute–out of necessity!–I understand the sting of regret.
When I focus on my mistakes, or all I’ve lost due to the mistakes of others, however, I quickly land in a place of despair. When I instead focus on, and make much of, the love, heart, power, and grace of God, working in and through me, I’m filled with hope and the reminder that He excels at rebuilding the rubble in our lives—as He did with the ancient Israelites some twenty-five hundred years ago.
After seventy years of living in exile, due to their idolatry and wickedness, they had returned to their homeland in Jerusalem, which their enemies had reduced to rubble.
And so, by the miraculous hand of God, they began the task of rebuilding what, in essence, evil nearly destroyed.
Eventually, under leaders named Ezra and Zerubbabel, they rebuilt the Temple. This brings us to the time period recorded in the book Nehemiah, which chronicles when Nehemiah returned to Jerusalem to help the ancient Israelites rebuild the city’s walls.
They complete this massive undertaking in chapter 6 and the people and leaders are redistributed throughout the land—to avoid overcrowding in Jerusalem.
Once everyone was settled, Ezra, Nehemiah and the Levites gathered the people for a celebration and public reading of Scripture.
Hearing God’s word, the people became grieved by all the ways they’d dishonored the Lord, and as today’s passage states, began to weep. To which Nehemiah and the other religious leaders replied:
“This day is holy to the LORD your God. Do not mourn or weep.” For all the people had been weeping as they listened to the words of the Law. Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.”
In other words, “Now is a time for celebration, not weeping, to praise the Lord for all He’s done to restore His people and their land.”
They encouraged the people to receive and celebrate God’s lavish and abundant grace.
May we learn to do the same. We can’t go back and undo or change the past, but we can rest in the redemption given us in Christ and move forward empowered by His Spirit at work in us.
We can learn to receive, and live deeply anchored in His grace, knowing that His mercies are new every morning, and He is, at every moment, rebuilding, repairing, and restoring what sin and our world’s evil threatened to destroy. In my experience, this is a lifelong process of bringing our hurts, insecurities and regrets to Christ, sitting in His presence and allowing His love to wash over us, and consistently choosing to His truths, such as that we’re His beloved children, to wash over us.
