Yesterday Is Not Your Jailor

“Grace and the Grave”

What if yesterday isn’t your jailer but a grave Christ has already emptied?

In this episode, we face the pull of regret, grief, and nostalgia and follow Scripture’s path into the freedom of God’s eternal now, where your story is no longer a trial without end but a record of mercy.

We talk about how grace reframes your past, not by erasing it but by placing it inside the finished work of Jesus. The cross becomes the real place where your old self died. The resurrection becomes your new identity. Memory itself becomes a witness to God’s kindness rather than a museum of failure.

Paul’s words about forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward come alive again. It isn’t about denial. It’s about posture, turning from what once defined you to the One who already redeemed it.

You’ll hear why the blood of Jesus did more than cover sin. It removed it, once and for all. Your guilt has been carried away as far as the east is from the west, never to find you again. We walk through what it means to be united with Christ, clothed in His righteousness, and standing in grace right now, even when your emotions are still catching up to what’s already true in Him.

We honor grief without rushing it, while also remembering the God who calls Himself “I Am.” He is present in every moment you thought He had forgotten. Like Joseph, you’ll see that God can take what was meant for evil and turn it for good without rewriting history or pretending it didn’t hurt.

We’ll also talk about the quiet trap of nostalgia the way it flatters the past and blinds us to mercy happening right now. Ecclesiastes warns us not to say, “Why were the former days better than these?” because the question itself misses what God is doing in the present.

The gospel calls us into that present tense of grace into the eternal now of the One who is, who holds your scarred story, and who turns those scars into beauty.

If this conversation meets you in that tender place between regret and hope, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs fresh courage, and leave a review so others can find their way to rest and renewal in Christ.

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Chapters

• 0:53 The Question Of Yesterday’s Grip
• 1:08 Forgetting And Reaching Forward
• 2:02 Grace, Identity, And The Cross
• 4:48 Mourning, Memory, And Redemption
• 7:32 Even Now: From If Only To I Am
• 9:37 Nostalgia Versus God’s Present Mercy
• 10:05 Living In The Eternal Now

Transcript

Austin Gardn er: 0:27

What do you do when yesterday just won't let go? How do you live free in the eternal now of our God, the great I am? You know you do not need to let go. It's already been let go of. The Bible says, This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. Forgetting and reaching. And then in Lamentation 3 it says, It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning, new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness. Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new work. God is always doing something new. But there are mornings, and there are when the past greets us before the sunrise. Our mind begins in quiet replay. Before the coffee even brews, we say, What have we lost and what we wish we had done differently? I've lived there. I know what it is to drag yesterday into today and call it a reflection, a memory, when it's really captivity. I thought that remembering was loyalty, that revisiting pain was somehow spiritual honesty. But what I was really doing was living in a place God has already left. Grace is not found by walking backwards. The I am never returns to what was. Grace is not found by walking backward. The I am never returns. He calls us into what is. It is possible to be forgiven and still live as though you're on trial. You can know you're loved, yet walk as if you're waiting for the verdict to change. But the truth is that your past does not exist to God the way it exists to you. The cross has already dealt with your past. Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him. That verse is not poetry, it's history. Your old life, the one filled with guilt, failure, shame, and regret, was nailed to the cross with Christ. When he died, your past died with him. The you that sinned, that lived rebellion, that broke what you could not fix, that person no longer exists. When God raised Jesus from the dead, he raised you too. The new creation that came out of the tomb carries no trace of what was. The blood of Jesus did not merely cover your sins, it removed it from existence. He placed it as far as the east is from the west. That's how far he removed our transgressions from us. And east and west never meet. You cannot measure that distance. When God looks at you now, he does not see a sinner trying to be better. He sees his own child, united to his son, clothed in righteousness, standing in grace. You do not live under the shadow of what was. You live in the light of what Christ is, and that is Christ in you, the hope of glory. To forgive is the heart of God. It's not pretending that it never happened. It's remembering who you are in Christ. The Bible says, their sins and iniquities will I remember no more. God speaking, Hebrews 10 17. He's not developing spiritual amnesia. He's choosing to see you through the lens of his son's finished work. He remembers you according to the obedience of Jesus, not according to the failures of your flesh. That means when you bring up your past, you're bringing up to God something He no longer recognizes. He looks at you and says, That person's gone. That person was crucified. Who stands before me now is my beloved, in whom I am well pleased. You do not need to let go of your past in your own strength. You simply need to realize it has already been let go of. You're not escaping your history. You're waking up to the truth that Christ has absorbed it. We mourn not only what we did wrong, but what life took from us. People, dreams, and years we cannot recover. Mourning is holy when it leads to comfort. Jesus wept at Lazarus' tomb, proving that tears are sacred, but grief turns bitter when it closes our eyes to the presence that still abides. What if I told you that nothing is truly lost in God is ever gone. It's never really gone. You are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. Everything that was ever truly part of you, every joy, every relationship anchored in love, every purpose that came from him is hidden in Christ. You have not lost what mattered most. It's kept safe in the heart of God. And that's not a metaphor, it's a mystery of union. Love does not vanish, it changes forms. What once was presence becomes promise. In eternity nothing of love is wasted. That means even the empty spaces in your heart are not empty. They are places where resurrection is waiting. We often think of healing as erasure, that to be whole we must forget. But God does not erase your story, he redeems it. He takes the same moments that broke you and fills with them with new meaning. See, Joseph looked at the very brothers who betrayed him and said, You thought evil against me, but God meant it for good. Joseph wasn't denying the betrayal. He just saw it from the other side of grace. That's what redemption does. It rewrites the meaning of your memories without erasing them. The pain remains real, but it no longer rules you. It becomes evidence of love's endurance. God does not ask you to forget your story. He asks you to invite him into it until even your scars become a part of his beauty. The words if only can poison a soul. If only I had said it differently, if only I'd gone sooner, if only I'd seen the warning. But God is not the God of if only, He's the God of even now. Martha stood before Jesus and said, Lord, if you'd have been here, my brother might not have, or my brother wouldn't have died. She was trapped between yesterday's disappointment and tomorrow's hope. Jesus' answer was, I am the resurrection and the life. He did not speak of the past or of the future. He declared himself the living present. That is the same Jesus who speaks to you. Even now, in the ruins of what might have been, the resurrection life is at work. Even now, grace is rewriting your story. Even now, the I am stands where your if only once stood. Bitterness begins when we believe God left us. It grows in a soil of separation. The lie that God's goodness stopped where our pain began. But grace reveals the opposite. The moment you thought he was absent was the moment he held you most tightly. All things work together for good to them that love God. The good is not the event, the good is God. God redeeming every moment. When that truth dawns, bitterness dies, because you realize that even your broken years are not outside his mercy. The cross reached back into them and filled them with his present. You are not trying to forget the past or forgive the past. It has been included in the forgiveness of the cross. Nostalgia pretends to honor the past, but it quietly dethrones God in the present. It says the best is behind me and calls that humility when it's really unbelief. Ecclesiastes says, Say not thou what is the cause that the former days were better than these, for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this. God has never stopped being good. He has never stopped being there. He is not a memory to visit, he's the presence you live in. When you dwell on the good old days, you blind yourself to the good that's happening now. The same mercy that met you then meets you here. Grace is not something that happens in time. It's eternity stepping into your moment. You're not waiting for eternity to begin, you're already in the eternal one. Jesus said, At that day you shall know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. That day is now. You live in the eternal now of the I am. That means the past cannot chain you, the future cannot frighten you. You exist in the very life of God. You do not need to let go of yesterday. Yesterday has already been absorbed into his everlasting now. You cannot be defined by what was, because you've been refined by who is. When Paul said forgetting those things were divine, he did not mean wiping your memory clean. He meant remembering from the right side of the cross. You no longer view your story as a record of your mistakes. You view it as a record of his mercy. Every chapter that once brought shame now brings a testimony of redemption. Remember that your past died with Christ and your life is hidden in him. You start living, you stop living as a person who failed, and you start living as a person who was raised. You stop begging for what was and start thanking him for what is. You cannot lose your grip on yesterday because you never held it alone. The hands that were pierced for you are the same hands that hold you now. And neither shall any man pluck you out of his hands. Not even you, not even your guilt, not even your grief. Grace is a stronger grip than regret. You're not trying to find peace, peace has already found you. You're not trying to earn healing. Healing is the presence of the healer who lives within you. You're already home, even when your emotions have not arrived yet. Your past has already been crucified with Christ. Grace does not erase what was, it redeems it. You're not striving to move on, you're waking up to the truth that you're already free. Yesterday is not a ghost that haunts you, it is a grave that Christ has already emptied. You do not live in what was, you live in who is. The I am holds every yesterday in his hands and fills every today with his presence.