“Cast your burden on the Lord [releasing the weight of it] and He will sustain you; He will never allow the [consistently] righteous to be moved (made to slip, fall, or fail).” Psalm 55:22 Amplified Version
We are to cast our cares onto the Lord, allowing Him to be the Lord over what we care about. One area I found that I want to care for, or nurture, is my past – the failures, the successes, and the people. There are past mistakes I would like to fix, past successes I would like to check in on, and past relationships I would like to improve. However, God wants me to move forward with my life, and in order to do that, I cannot continue to nurture what happened yesterday.
I repent of my mistakes, doing what I can to reconcile them, but at some point I have to let go. Because my focus has to be on what is at hand, I have to leave behind the part that I played in a past assignment. Some of those situations or people could seem left undone, or incomplete; but when God says to let go, He is asking us to move forward, leaving the concerns for the past people and places to His care. God asks us to trust Him with what He asks us to move on from. Whether we left something or someone in good shape or bad shape, God is able to finish what we started, and He will do all He can to restore and complete it.
There are past relationships I would love to continue to nurture, however God has released me from them in order to give attention to the people who are in my life today. Some of those relationships that were unhealthy in your past will continue to be unhealthy throughout your lifetime, and God knows it. Their opinions and their behavior will stay the same, or even worsen. God knows some people will not change, and you are not responsible to try to bring an effect to people God has released you from. Sometimes you lead people as far as they will go, and then God asks you to turn them over to Him. When you cast your past onto the Lord, it doesn’t mean you don’t care about them, it just means you are no longer responsible to care for them. When a past situation or a relationship is still in need of nurturing, it doesn’t mean we are the ones to do the nurturing. God is able to give better care to those people and those circumstances than we are. When you give the past to the Lord, you do so, not because you don’t care, but because you do care. We cannot continue to carry what God has released us from, because God’s grace to carry it has lifted. Without His grace, it will become a burden to heavy for us to lift on our own. Cast your past onto the Lord through prayer. He cannot work until you let Him work. Let go and let God!
Application: If God leads you to reconcile something in your past, then reconcile it; otherwise, let the past stay in the past and move forward.