"And Joseph called the name of the firstborn Manasseh: For God, said he, hath made me forget all my toil, and all my father's house. And the name of the second called he Ephraim: For God hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction."
(Gen. 41:51)
As a novice preacher I heard Billy Graham make the statement that most patients in mental institutions are there because of something in their past that they can't forget. I find this true in dealing with God's people today. Most live defeated lives because they drag around the ball and chain of past unpleasantries, thus never making any progress in their Christian lives. It slows them down to almost a halt.
God, Joseph tells us, made him to forget all the hurts and abuses he had suffered as a teenager and early manhood: the envy and hatred of his brethren, the horrible pit experience, being sold as a slave, wrongly imprisoned for thirteen years, losing everything he held near and dear to him. As it says in Job, "… thou shalt forget thy misery, and
Joseph didn't forget the past as a fact, but in its dominating the present. The very fact he mentions it shows it was in his mental file cabinet. But he had tagged it, "Closed." As I often tell people, "He had buried his past and threw away the shovel." He didn't dig it up daily; he couldn't, he had thrown away the means of resurrecting his past!
And how did God accomplish Joseph's forgetting all the indignities of the years past? By a fruitful life in the present. When he put the past and present in life's scale the present blessings far outweighed the past's horridness. He saw his affliction of the past brought great fruitfulness in the present. As we're told in Exodus, "But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew."
"Victory or defeat is determined by where we choose to camp mentally, in the pain of the past or pleasantries present."
(rds)
By An Old Disciple
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