Understanding our experiences through the lens of God’s redemptive purposes is essential to healing and transforming our ruling passions. Recognizing and reinterpreting our pain is foundational to walking in freedom and purpose.

Most of us carry stories—some beautiful, others heartbreaking. For many, the weight of past trauma or failure can feel like a mark of shame or a permanent limitation. But what if the very pain you’ve experienced is not a barrier to your calling but a bridge toward it? What if, instead of disqualifying us, our wounds become the soil where God cultivates healing and purpose?

This concept lies at the heart of The Spiritually Healthy Leader: Finding Freedom from Self-Sabotage, where I explore how our “ruling passions”—deep, unexamined emotional drivers rooted in past wounds—can sabotage our spiritual lives until we learn to reinterpret them through God’s redemptive lens and are brought under the healing and truth of God’s sovereignty. God is in control of all things. Nothing happens apart from his divine plan. Nothing happens by accident. And God can take our tragedies, pain, hurts, losses, and even abuse and redeem them for his glory.

Be a Good Steward of Your Past

One of the most liberating truths is this: You have the exact past God allowed you to have.

This doesn’t mean that everything in your past was good, right, or godly. It means that nothing is wasted in the hands of a sovereign God. You can’t change your past, but you can steward it well, letting it become part of God’s redemptive story. As Dan Allender has noted, you don’t have a story; you are God’s story!

Scripture makes this clear: the most grievous act in human history—the crucifixion of Jesus—was both evil and part of God’s definite plan (Acts 2:23–24; 4:27–28). God’s sovereignty never excuses sin, but it does mean that even sin and suffering do not thwart God’s purposes.

Joseph

Few biblical stories illustrate this better than Joseph’s. As a result of his brothers’ abuse, Joseph spends decades separated from his family and endures harsh treatment in Egypt. He is falsely accused of attempted rape and left languishing in prison for years.

Despite this abuse, Joseph remains faithful to God and seeks to honor him, even when victimized over many years.

In Genesis 45 we see how God sovereignly accomplishes his purposes through Joseph’s suffering. Through events orchestrated by God, Joseph eventually becomes second-in-command in Egypt, and his brothers stand before him. Given his power and their grievous sins against him, Joseph could have taken revenge. But rather than using his past wounds to justify disobeying God, he says,

“Do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you….So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God.”
Genesis 45:5, 8 NIV

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