A new year

So yesterday in church the sermon was Philippians 3:12-14. I am sure many people heard a sermon from this passage because it is an applicable passage for a new year. One thing struck me from main point 1 which I do not believe that I will ever forget. Dr. Benton was expounding upon this little phrase, "Forgetting what is behind". Most of the time when we see that phrase we think of only the bad things in life. You know things we all want to forget, but it doesn't say that, it says, forgetting what is behind, meaning all things. Now, we understand that this is not a literal forgetting since we cannot literally forget all of our past, so we would take this to mean something to the effect of not dwelling on the past. If you take that to mean both good and bad, we can see that holding on to our "good" past experiences can keep us from "straining to what is ahead".
Why? When we are so entangled in the good things we have done in the past. In our good experiences in the past, we can live a life where we just dwell on the past, just as easily as those who dwell on the bad things from the past.
Think of it this way. We all have known that guy or girl who is still enamored in the so-called glory days of high school accomplishments. We laughed at them in college when all they talked about was how good they played basketball or football, but didn't seem to live in the present.
The thing is, most of us do the same thing, but it's not sports, but maybe that nostalgia we hold on to from the "good old days" when things were "better", or, for me, it's dwelling on all the fun places I hung out at in Oklahoma before I moved to St. Louis. I still hold on to that and what I have discovered is that holding on to the good has kept me from pressing on to more good in the future as I endevor to live out my Christian walk.
What about you?

Book of the day The Holiness of God by R.C. Sproul