Dwelling on the Past

There is a car commerical circulating on TV that deals with a past auto insurance scam. The scene is a woman who is applying for a job and has to confess to being a part of an auto insurance fraud some years past.  She promises the company that it is in the past, but the commerical ends by allowing us to think that this mess up from her past is still very much a part of her present life and will affect whether she gets the job or not...
Imperfect pasts.
Think about that for a second.  All around us, what has happened in our past tends to affect- in a positive way or a negative way- our future lives.  Examples?  Past grades affect college plans.  Past mistakes affect how people trust you in the future.  There tends to be thiese burden from our pasts that aren't so perfect, that we carry around with us, which we can't seem to shake...
Sometimes our imperfect past stems from something we did- our sin, our mistakes.  Sometimes what others have done to us leaves an imperfect taste in our mouths.  And something just the way the ball falls in life gets us feeling imperfect- our looks, our smarts, our ability to make friends, etc...
Face it, we are messed up people.  Whether it is our sin, or some small little issue we, or the people around us, have with ourselves- we are imperfect.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to grow into Christlikeness more and more each day.  But the truth is, sin or not, we will fail, we will fall, and we will be imperfect.  So the question now becomes, will we dwell on our imperfections (this week- our past imperfections), or will we look to a perfect God who promises to do "immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine"...because He is perfect and He is calling imperfect people to trust Him...

Use the questions below as you work this idea of your IMPERFECT PAST and trusting that God desires to use you despite your failures.

1. Read John 4
- Do you connect at all with the woman at the well?  How she is held down in life by her past?

2. Read the response of the disciples in verse 27.  You may not have an imperfect past...at least not as bad in comparison to the people around you...but do you treat others who have imperfect pasts as if they are nothing?  As if God can't use them?

3.  Do you believe that a perfect God can take the broken lives of anyone and use them in some way or some how?  If you said yes, how should that belief affect how you view the people who may not be so perfect, around you?

4. Try to make a list of all the perfect people in the Bible?  (My list only has 1 person...).  Now make a list of people who weren't so perfect in the Bible, yet God used them in spite of their not so perfect ways?
- Does this give you hope that God can use you?

5. Read Ephesians 3:20
- Does God have boundaries as to what He can do?
- Who holds the power (or perfection) in this verse?  Where is this power stored?
- What is the point of God doing "immeasureably more?"

Join us at Matt & Amanda's this Thursday at 7pm as we take this topic of our Imperfect Pasts a bit deeper!