“I will restore to you the years that the locusts ate,
my great army that I sent against you,
and you will eat in plenty and be filled,
and you will praise the name of the Lord your God
who dealt wondrously with you.
My people shall never be disappointed.”
Joel 2:25–26
The locusts that ate up Israel’s crops were sent by God to punish Israel for her many sins. That is why God called those locusts His “great army”. But then God spoke of a day when He would heal her land and bless her so much that it would make up for the years of her being cursed. In other words, because Israel learned from her error to obey God, her years of being apart from God had not been wasted after all! God’s abundant mercy transformed even them into part of her blessed life.
Sometimes we look back at our past with regret for what we consider to be wasted years. But those years are not wasted if we learned from them to obey God. The very fact that we can see the foolishness of those years means that our eyes have been opened by God to see them as He saw them then. It means we have grown! No time is wasted that brings us, one way or another, closer to God. We make even the years of our rebellion against God valuable when we get the point. For those who are in Christ, there is no such thing as a wasted year. He gives us a new past, a past of perfect victory from the beginning of time, a past which taught us the fear and the love of God!
God used Abraham’s lie about Sarah being his sister to bless him and increase his wealth. The time Abraham spent alone and miserable because of his lie was not wasted time because his loneliness drove him closer to God. As a result, God turned Abraham’s lie into an investment that paid great dividends. My father once was dying of cancer because of disobedience, he told us, but he repented and was healed. Was the time of his suffering with cancer wasted time? He didn’t think so; he thanked God for it and often referred to “that blessed cancer”, for through that ordeal, he learned to fear and love God better.
Nothing in your old past need ever burden you if Jesus has given you a new one. He used whatever you went through to get you to him – and using those things, he succeeded! Every soul who gets the gold from their old past ends up thanking God for all of it. Every trial is an opportunity, and every failure is merely a stepping stone for those who come to Jesus.
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This blog is so good. It’s tough sometimes when I think back on the times of my teenage years that I was away from the saints and the precious things Jesus was doing in peoples lives at that time, and to remember the foolishness of my youth. I remember my thinking at that time and how I thought I was wanting to do my own thing, but really, I was just running from God. I had to learn a lot of things the hard way. BUT, when Jesus started tugging on my heart, and I began to humble myself to his call, my life changed, my attitude changed, everything changed. (I was 26 by then.) Then I started seeing and feeling the remorse of the things I had done and missed. As time went on, it would be heavy on me the more I learned and felt in the Spirit. I would pray and ask Jesus for help and relief often. One night in a meeting, the Spirit was blessing us all, and in the middle of that, I heard “I have restored what the canker worm has eaten”. Shew! That went straight down to my heart. I knew from that moment on, everything that was happening with me in Jesus was new and not repentance from the past. What a sweet feeling that was!
