My Future, My Past

Last night at church, one of the songs had a line in it that I was fixed on. The line was "reign over my future and my past." As I was listening to this, I began to question, what does it mean for us to allow God to reign over our past? We so many times hear what it means for Him to reign over our future and to give all of our hopes, dreams, fears, and controls over to Him. We so often hear the passage from Jeremiah 29 that tells us that He has a fantastic future that is already planned for us. But what about our past? I think the passage we so often turn to is the one from Psalms that talks about forgetting our sins as far as the east is from the west. My next question was, am I allowing Him to reign over my past? Or, do I still hold onto it as if there is something that I can do to change it? Yes, there are things in our pasts that we would rather run away from and ignore, but is that allowing God to reign over it? The conclusion that I came to is rather simple. In order for God to reign over my past, I must allow Him to use my past. I must allow Him to take everything that I have done, every situation that I have encountered, and use that for my future. I must also hand over guilt and shame to Him and receive grace in its place. The new question is, will we allow Him to continuously reign over our past?