One day long ago, my buddy and I decided to drive his old car across a dry creek bed. A fun idea turned out to be a bad idea.  Half way over, we sunk deep in the gravel.  Everything we tried to get unstuck did not work.  Idea after idea failed.  Our “horse” was stuck, for sure and for certain.  Evening was coming on and our options were walking home or going to someone’s house and calling home.  In those days there were no cell phones.  Both plans were not acceptable to a couple of enterprising fellows like us.  Either option spelled defeat.  Of course, we were, in fact, completely defeated.  By now my mom, who kept close tabs on me, even though I considered that not needful, had dispatched my dad to check on the whereabouts of her number one and only son.  And there he was, in his company car, coming over the hill with the radio antenna whipping in the wind.  My hero, then and now, and always will be.  “What are you boys doing,” he asked. We replied as manly as we could,  “We’ve tried everything and we can’t get unstuck.”  He didn’t laugh or even chastise us for what we had done as I recall.  He had a way of teaching without saying one word.  He simply said, “Take some air out of the tires”.  We did and Ronny drove out easily.  Ronny and I learned a big lesson that day, and it was more than how to get a stuck car out of a creek.

Satan works 24/7 to get us “stuck in the creek.”  One of his methods is to get us to  submit to unrealistic guilt.  Realistic guilt is good, it triggers us to repent of what we’ve done wrong and get on with life.  Unrealistic guilt sends us back into time to review old sins and shortcomings that God has long ago forgiven and forgotten “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more” Isaiah 43:25 (NIV).

God does, yet sometimes, we can’t.  Satan’s trick is to trot out old stuff from thirty, forty years ago, or yesterday. Satan tries to present ourselves to ourselves as the same person we were then, with old memories of old sins, “ever before us”, as King David said. But we are not the same person we were then, we’re not even the same person we were one second ago. The blood of Jesus makes that so. Satan can’t keep us stuck in the creek, the blood of Jesus frees us! That blood makes us the person we want to be and more important, what God wants us to be. “ And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” 2 Corinthians 3:18 (NIV)

We are new creatures, not stuck in the mud, not forever stuck in a bad movie presented by Satan, watching, remembering, and lamenting old shells we have should have long ago moved out and away from. We shouldn’t have to live in those old shells anymore. “I have been crucified with Christ and no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Galatians 2:20 (NIV). We are getting newer every day, with each breath we take, until our final one, when we say, dear God, “ thank You for loving me”.