Start Over: Help and Hope for Your New BeginningSample

When it comes to starting over, what is your biggest struggle today?

Is it letting go of the past?

Is it having hope for the future?

Is it beating yourself up in the present?

One of the reasons I wrote this devotional plan was I’ve struggled to start over in my life. Right now, I’m thinking of several occasions when I needed to begin again and move forward but I remained stuck for weeks and months. In one area of my life, I couldn’t start over for years!

If you’re struggling to start over, then I want to ask you to consider an important area to explore. That area is the way you relate to God.

Did you know that what you believe about God determines how you treat yourself? A.W. Tozer famously wrote, “The most important thing about you is what you think about when you think about God.” I agree with Tozer, but I also like to apply what he said specifically. If we think about God in certain ways, we find ourselves stuck in mental and emotional loops where we beat ourselves up and shame ourselves for what happened in the past or what hasn’t happened yet in our lives.

I took some courageous steps forward in my career about ten years ago. I started to feel some momentum, but then I got dealt a big dose of rejection. So, I gave up. I told myself that the opinions of a few people I’d encountered were the absolute truth about me and then I settled for a lesser view of myself and a smaller version of my calling.

The voice in my head was a critical, shaming, and condemning voice. That’s how I spoke to myself in this particular area and frankly, that’s how I felt God spoke about me.

Yet, that isn’t the way God speaks to us. God doesn’t speak with condemnation. We learn this from the experiences of the second most famous person in the New Testament.

The Apostle Paul wrote about his ongoing struggle to do what he wanted to do. Famously in Romans 7, Paul noted that the good he wants to do he doesn’t do and the things he doesn’t want to do, he finds himself doing again. He cried out, “What a wretched man that I am. Who will save me?”

Paul feels like he failed. He needed to start over again, but his view of himself was self-condemnation. The beauty of the Bible is that we see what God is truly like in Romans 7-8. Romans 8 begins with a strong declaration of how God responds to our failures to do what we want to do. “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

The voice of God is never condemnation in the lives of those who’ve embraced His grace! As we see in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the response of God to His children coming home in need of a new beginning is compassion.

As you start over, what you believe about God is going to determine how you treat yourself. Perhaps part of this season of new beginnings is a new understanding of God based on what you read in the Bible.

God wants us to learn from where we’ve been. However, God is not interested in condemning and rejecting us for those failures.

This is a reminder I need whenever I start over so that I don’t get stuck in shame and self-condemnation.

Tomorrow, as you continue to step forward in the area where you are starting over, you’ll learn how God’s grace and your efforts fit together beautifully!