Sodom and Gomorrah was a wicked place. The sin was great there, and God decided to destroy the whole city. He shared His decision with Abraham. But Abraham's nephew, Lot, and his family lived in Sodom.
So Abraham pleaded with God, "If there are fifty innocent people in the city, will you destroy the whole city? Won't you spare it in order to save the fifty?"
The Lord answered, "If I find fifty innocent people in Sodom, I will spare the whole city for their sake."
Then Abraham bargained God down to forty-five, forty, then thirty, twenty and finally, ten.
But ten could not be found so God made a way for Lot and his family to get out before the whole city was destroyed. "Don't look back," they were told. But Lot's wife did. And she turned into a pillar of salt.
She disobeyed God and became permanently stuck in the past. Just like a lot of us. We rehearse how life used to be, about our past loves, our high school days, our glory days, and we are permanently tied to our past.
But God wants to do a new thing in our lives. He wants to give us the future that He promised us in Jeremiah 29:11, but as long as we cling to events and hurts of the past, we will never be able to march into the future.
Jesus preached about how you can't put new wine into old wine skins because the old wine skins would burst. That is how our lives are. God cannot put new things in our lives until we have cut ties with our past, until we have moved on without looking back.
God has wonderful things in store for you--new relationships, new prosperity, new promises, but as long as we are looking backward, we will never see what is headed our way.
