Faith and Regret

A healthy relationship with Jesus Christ means having a right attitude toward time:  we don’t wallow in the past or obsess over the future; we don’t pine away with nostalgia for “the good old days,” nor do we fixate on a rosy tomorrow.  Instead, we trust the Lord here and now.

To be sure, past and future are important.  Historical events are at the very heart of Christianity, such as the bodily resurrection of Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:1-26).  And faith involves placing our hope in future grace:  Christ will prevail in building his church, finishing his mission, defeating all evil, estab­lishing his reign, and gathering us into his radi­ant eternal presence (Matthew 16:18; Philippians 2:9-11; John 14:3).

So we do care very much about past and future realities.  But we’re called to live in the present.  To put it differently, faith in Jesus means being at peace knowing we can’t change the past or control the future.

One way we can fail to apply our faith in dealing with the past is by harboring regret.  When you revisit and rehash yesterday’s story, when your mental reflex keeps saying “If only” (If only I’d spoken up… kept quiet… taken a stand… walked away…), and when you dwell on how things should have gone differently, somewhere you’ve turned away from faith and into a God-forgetting, self-centered attitude.

There’s a time to remember and a time to forget.  We should recall the hopeless, guilty state we were in before being saved (Ephesians 2:11-12):  if we forget this, we won’t cherish Christ and his grace.  And yet, we should also forget the past: “Forgetting what lies behind and strain­ing forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:13-14).

So, when to do which?  John Piper advises: “Wherever remembering our failures will help us fly to Christ, love Christ, rest in Christ, cher­ish grace, sing of mercy, serve with zeal, then let’s get on with rem­em­bering and regretting.  But wherever remembering begins to paral­yze us with the weight of failure and remorse so that we don’t love Christ more, or cherish grace more, or serve with greater energy, then let us forget and press on by the power of grace for the little time we have left.”

I appreciate how Barry Cooper distinguishes between godly and worldly forms of regret in his article, “Forget Regret”:  Godly sorrow is a transitional stage that brings repentance, but worldly grief leads to death (2 Corinthians 7:10).  “Good regret pays a fleeting visit; bad regret, like the thoughtless party guest at 3 a.m., outstays its welcome. Good regret is a doorway; bad regret is a destination. Good regret makes us more preoccupied with Jesus; bad regret makes us more preoccupied with self.”

So remember, “The past has no jurisdiction in the kingdom of God… Nothing in your past, present, or future can separate you from the love of Christ.”  So trust the Lord with yesterday’s issues even as you press forward in his calling toward tomorrow’s joy.