How To Handle Bad Memories

Hello again and welcome to Become a Competent Biblical Counselor. This is Dr. Dave Jones, and today's episode is entitled How to Handle Bad Memories. You got some bad memories? Let's look see what God's Word has to say about how do you handle those bad memories. And so it's good to be with you again in your home today. I hope that you'll just be able to settle back and sit down in an easy chair and think about something that's very important to all of us, and that's our memories. You know, we so often sing and hear people talking about the fond memories of the past. Well, that's wonderful. God gave us our memories for very wonderful purposes. Not only so that we could savor and remember the good of the past, but also so that we could get along day by day and not have to think again afresh about every action that we take, and so on. Many things could be done simply out of habit, which is in a sense an aspect of memory. If you had to think about how to tie your shoe every morning, and which foot to put in out of the bed first in the morning, which eye to open first, and how to unscrew the cap of the toothpaste, you wouldn't get to bed at midnight. Well, to breakfast it anyway. We're not talking about that side of memory today. We're talking instead about the curse that sin has brought to us through our memories. That is, in a world of sin, memory, which was intended as a real and wonderful blessing for man as it was built into him, can become one of the most nagging, terrifying factors in your life. We're talking about how to handle bad memories. There are people who are listening today who are plagued with bad memories, memories of sin, memories of immorality, of failure, of the way that they've hurt other people, all sorts of vivid bad memories which they replay. Sometimes when they lie in bed at night before they go to sleep, they hardly find it possible to get sleep because those memories come back and almost as if they were reliving the scene, the TV in their minds go on and the whole world show is replayed again, again and again. Day after day, night after night they face these memories. What can be done about them? How can they be handled? What is it that can really make the difference for you? The first thing that you need to do is to put the past where it belongs into the past. Now you can't do that by just some act of will. You can't just say, Oh, I'm going to shove it all back there and stop making the past a present reality by memory. Memory just doesn't work that way. You see, you need something else to feed into that memory picture. You need to feed in a new event in the memory. You need to change the story. The story that continues to be repeated day after day and night after night needs a new conclusion to it. Instead of the bad conclusion which you remember, it needs to be rewritten now with an epilogue, with a conclusion that changes the whole picture that says where sin abounded, grace more abounds. Instead of remembering the abounding sin, you now need to be able to remember even more vividly the way in which God by His grace turned the sin into a blessing by overcoming and overriding and overshadowing all the consequences and all the badness of the past by His grace. And this is exactly what you can remember in such times as those. Putting the past into the past first of all means setting all matters to rest before God and other persons. If you have never really sought forgiveness before God, that's the first thing you need to do. If your sin has never yet been brought before him, if you believe in Jesus Christ as your Savior, but you have not gone to your Father and said to him, Father, I have sinned against you, then you need to do that. You need to tell God that you are sorry for your sin and to tell him that you believe that Jesus Christ has died for it, and to come before him and get that cleansing which he promises in first John when he says that he is faithful and just to forgive us of all of our unrighteousness. Then you need to go to your brother if you have offended him. If you have heard another with the word, you need to go and seek his forgiveness. It may be that right here is the stumbling block. Right here is where the memory picture can be changed. Right here is where the epilogue needs a difference. You may have gone to God and found forgiveness, but you may never have turned to your brother who you may be your husband, who may be your wife, who may be that woman who lives down the street or that other person at church. Whoever it may be, if there are things to be set straight with another person or even with the government, if you've committed a crime or with the income tax people, if that's your problem, whoever it is that you need to set things right with, you need to do that first, and that will help to put the past into the past. Secondly, you must not allow patterns of brooding to continue. People who are troubled by memory spend a lot of time, an awful lot of time sitting and thinking. It's just the way it goes. That kind of pattern needs to be shattered. It needs to be busted. I know you school teachers think that bursted is a better way of saying it. But even though that's better English, it doesn't sound so good, so I'm just going to say busted. Those patterns need to be busted. They need to be shattered and broken so that they no longer prevail in your life. You can't afford yourself the dubious luxury of just sitting and thinking for long periods of time, of rehashing and going back over all the past. When you catch yourself doing that, then you have a list ready of all kinds of things that you could be doing that would be profitable and productive to do and to think about at that time that God would have you do. And therefore, you will be able to replace your preoccupation about the past with occupation that is profitable in the present. And lastly, it may be that your problem is not really so much a difficulty of bad memories, but that the bad memories are stirred up by the fact that there are present difficulties in the pattern of life that you still have. You may really have gotten forgiven by God, and you may have been forgiven by your neighbor, and yet still the problem may occur. What is wrong under these circumstances? Well, usually we find that when people are having those kinds of problems, even though they've received forgiveness from God or forgiveness from their neighbor, or sometimes they come in saying, Yeah, but I don't know how to forgive myself. What they really need is not to forgive themselves. That's not the problem at all. We're all too ready to forgive ourselves, in fact. The real problem is that they recognize that when they are living in the past, as they did, and that the way that they lived and the patterns that they had developed that led to the problem for which they needed to seek forgiveness from God and from others, that they're really still those same people with those same patterns that have never been changed. Maybe they lied a lot in the past, and so they've now sought God's forgiveness for the last lie, and they've sought the forgiveness of a husband or a wife or a child or a parent or whoever it may be for the last lie. But they know that basically down underneath they are still liars, and they know that given the right kind of pressure, that they're still programmed to lie. And so what really concerns them is the fact that something more needs to be done. The pattern of lying needs to be busted, needs to be put off. So how do you do that? Well, in Ephesians 4 it makes it very clear. We haven't time to go into it all, but listen to the dynamic clearly. The dynamic is put off, he says in verse 22, or lay aside the old man. That is the old ways, those old patterns, those manners of life in which he's speaking in the early part of verse 22. And now here's the key. Put on the new man. That is, it's not merely a matter of breaking the pattern, it is not merely a matter of putting off or quitting something from the past, that the only way that that can be done is by building in new patterns, new habits that are in accord with the word of God. For example, in verse twenty eight, he says, Let him who steals at this steal no more. There's the put off. But now rather than let him labor, performing with his own hands which is good, in order that he may have something to share with him who is in need. You see, the new way has to replace the old. It's a matter of repackaging with the very will of God Himself as it is expressed in His Word. So we end by saying, Lord, help us to do just that. Help us to repackage our lives by the power of the Holy Spirit as He enables us not only to understand, but to build in new patterns from the Word of God into our living. For we praise in Christ's name. Amen. Thanks for listening. Hopefully, uh if you're struggling with bad memories or you know somebody who is, the dynamic of putting off and putting on is something that we call it the replacement dynamic. Stop doing this and start doing this. It's an action-oriented command, and you will feel so much better based upon the actions that you have taken. And the actions that you have taken are based upon what the Holy Spirit has guided you to do. It's very biblical and it's never wrong. Any questions? Let me know at Bible Help for You, the number for you at gmail.com. Recognize and enjoy the blessings that you have today.