Last Sunday’s message was so good, I have to share it with you all today. Christine Caine is one of my favourite speakers and the message she blessed us with is how I got to the title ‘don’t look back’.

The message was based on Luke 17:20-37 ‘The Coming of the Kingdom’. In the midst of discourse about the end times, Jesus drops these three words ‘remember Lot’s wife’ [Luke 17:32 – the second shortest verse in the Bible]. Now Lot’s wife has one of the shortest bios in the Bible and yet she is the only person Jesus tells us to remember in the gospel. To many, it may come as a surprise that out of the 170 women in scripture, Jesus only tells us to remember one.

So in the midst of everything going on in the world, maybe the word for us in this season is ‘remember Lot’s wife’. Now in order to remember Lot’s wife, we have to go back to Genesis 19 – Sodom and Gomorrah Destroyed. The city was about to be destroyed and the angel of the Lord came to rescue Lot, his wife and kids and bring them out.

As soon as they had brought them out, one of them said, “Flee for your lives! Don’t look back, and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!” Then the LORD rained down burning sulphur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

Genesis 19:17, 24-26

The only thing we know about Lot’s wife is that the angel of the Lord said ‘don’t look back’ and she did the one thing she was asked not to do—she looked back at what she was leaving. We can only imagine she looked back and longed/lingered for things of the past, like relationships, freedom, confidence, friendships that she perhaps did not want to leave. But the Lord had given her a way out, into the future He had for her. In this season, it is so important that we do not look back for things that God has called us to leave behind. We must boldly step into the future, following God’s lead. Otherwise, we will become [spiritual speaking] a pillar of salt [stuck]. The fullness of God’s promise is in the future—we can glance back, but not look back and linger. It’s time to move forward, to step into the fullness of all that God has promised us. So many of us are stuck because of what we had hoped—but a lot of our ‘hopes’ have revealed what some of our idols were. We had misplaced hope. Theologically, our hope has gone nowhere—because Jesus is our hope [see Hebrews 10:23]. For scripture says, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Moving through 2022, lets realign our hope. Let’s choose to be prisoners of hope—stop worrying and lamenting on what ‘was’ and instead fix our eyes on Jesus Christ.