Cut the Ropes!

“What sorrow for those who drag their sins behind them with ropes made of lies, who drag wickedness behind them like a cart!” Isaiah 5:18, NLT. This verse painted quite a picture in my head.
I’ll start by saying the prophet here is talking to a group of people who “never think about the Lord or notice what he is doing” (v. 12). So what I’m saying isn’t what Isaiah was saying—but I think it can work for us.
I thought about this verse in connection with Hebrews 12:1b—“Let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us.”
Most of the people reading this are trying to run the race, seeking God with all they have, wanting to please God. Yet how many know it’s hard to run when you’re dragging something behind you?
And the picture I got was of someone trying to move forward while dragging their past behind them—all their old sins, all their mistakes, all their failures.  And the lie that’s keeping them tangled up in it all is that this is who they will always be.
2 Corinthians 5:17 says that anyone who belongs to Christ “has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!”
Yet somehow we convince ourselves that this verse doesn’t really apply to us; and we keep carting our mess behind us. We long to be close to our Father, to feel his approval, to experience all the good God has for our lives. But we insist on trying to do it while lugging around the memory of who we used to be.
Jesus paid the price to allow us to come close to the Father. Our King is holding out to us a crown of beauty and garments of praise in order to bring us into that place where he makes us new—and we refuse them to sit in our ashes. “Don’t you remember what I’ve done, God? Don’t you know who I am? I can’t take those.”
Abraham came from a family of idol makers. Moses killed a man. David slept with another man’s wife and had her husband killed. Paul had Christians tortured and killed. Peter denied Jesus on the eve of his crucifixion.
Yet somehow these men severed themselves from their past. They pushed past every mistake and refused to allow it to convince them they were disqualified. And they became mighty in the Kingdom of God.
That’s supposed to be all of us. It can be all of us—if we let it happen. If we cooperate with God and let the past be cut off and our lives be made new.
No more excuses, no more waiting, no more shoving down our dreams—let the ropes be cut today!

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