Remember Not the Sins of My Youth Is a Prayer About a Younger Man

There is a man I would like to have a word with and I am never going to get the chance.

He is about thirty five. He is in a hurry. He is extremely confident about several things that are not true and he would not listen to me for four seconds, and he is the reason I use a cane.

I am describing myself, obviously. And I want to be honest about the specific feeling, because it took me years to work out what it was.

It is not guilt. Guilt is about God and about the people I hurt and I have taken that where it goes. This is different. This is anger, and it is aimed at a person, and the person is unavailable, which means it has nowhere to land and so it lands on the only version of him that is still around, which is me.

That is the mechanism, and I have met a lot of people running it. A man in a body he did not have to be in, furious at somebody he cannot confront, taking it out on the only available representative.

There is a prayer in the Psalms that is aimed at exactly this and it asks for something very specific.

What the prayer actually asks for

Here it is.

Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions: according to thy mercy remember thou me for thy goodness' sake, O LORD. (Psalm 25:7, King James Version)

Two halves and they are both requests about memory.

Remember not the sins of my youth. He is not asking for the consequences to be undone. Notice that. He does not ask for a reversal, and there is no suggestion anywhere in the psalm that his circumstances change.

According to thy mercy remember thou me. He asks to be remembered under a different heading. Not by the record; by the mercy. The same man, filed differently.

That is the request a person in a permanent consequence can actually make, because it is not asking for a rewind and it is not pretending the younger man did not exist.

You are able to ask to be remembered under a different heading than your own record. Psalm 25:7 asks according to thy mercy remember thou me rather than asking for a reversal, and it is the Holy Spirit, Romans 8:16 bearing witness with our spirit, who tells a person how they are filed when their own memory says otherwise.

He names the size of it out loud

Four verses later he does something most people would not do in a prayer.

For thy name's sake, O LORD, pardon mine iniquity; for it is great. (Psalm 25:11)

For it is great. He does not minimize it in order to make the request more reasonable. He states the size as part of the argument, which is a completely different move from the one most people make.

The logic is not: it was not that bad, so forgive it. The logic is: it is enormous, and Your name is the ground I am standing on, so forgive it.

Which is the answer to a man arguing with his own younger self. That argument is always about size. He is trying to establish how bad it was, and both sides of him are agreed that it was bad, and so the argument has no possible end.

David does not settle the size. He grants it and moves the ground.

You are standing on a name rather than on an assessment of the damage. Psalm 25:11 says pardon mine iniquity; for it is great. It is the same Spirit, 1 Corinthians 6:11 saying ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God, who is named beside the Name that the request stands on.

The years are restored rather than returned

There is a promise about lost years that is worth reading carefully, because it does not say what people wish it said.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten. (Joel 2:25)

I have watched people take that verse and expect a rewind, and then be quietly devastated when a body does not come back.

Read the chapter it sits in. What follows is a harvest, and eating in plenty, and being satisfied. It is not a description of time reversing. It is a description of something ahead being large enough that an arithmetic stops being the point.

And there is one more thing in that verse that matters here more than anything: the locusts are described in the same sentence as God's own army, which means the loss is not being treated as an accident being tidied up. It is named, and the promise sits on top of the naming.

You are being offered something ahead rather than a reversal behind. Joel 2:25 sits inside a chapter about harvest rather than about time. It is the Spirit of God, Romans 8:23 called the firstfruits, who is named as the down payment on what is ahead.

The younger man is not the one with the standing

And here is what finally ended the argument for me, and it is a matter of authority rather than of feeling.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. (Romans 8:1)

No condemnation. Which includes the condemnation being handed down by a thirty five year old who is not here any more.

He does not have standing. He never did, and he certainly does not now. He is not the court, he is a piece of history, and the verdict on a man in Christ was issued somewhere else entirely.

And Paul says something about the arrangement that makes the whole conversation strange:

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. (2 Corinthians 5:17)

Old things are passed away. I am not going to pretend that means a leg comes back, because it plainly does not and I have one. It means the man is not the same man, and the person I keep arguing with is not the person answering.

You are not the man who did this, and Scripture describes that as a change of creature rather than of behavior. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, and it is His Spirit, Titus 3:5 named in the washing of regeneration, who did the making that a person cannot argue their way into.

And if the anger at your younger self has begun turning into something that frightens you, say it out loud to a person: a doctor, a counselor, a sponsor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. Anger with nowhere to land goes inward, and inward is exactly where it should not be left alone.