Reconsidering Our Past

There is a tendency among some Christians to link spiritual growth with forsaking all aspects of their past. They deeply desire profound change to happen; the kind of change that allows them to rapidly leave behind the old life they now consider worthless in the eyes of God. It seems forgetting all that is past in their experience is one of the most obvious and best ways to accomplish this goal.

The problem is that all of the experiences of that old life were not necessary inherently sinful. The sins of our past must not be allowed any place in our Christian life from the time of conversion onwards, this is true, but there are morally neutral and even morally positive aspects of our past. These aspects take many forms. They may be the enthusiasms, friendships, career goals or even the deep emotions and transcendent experiences we had before Christ came into our lives, but which might have pointed us towards Him. New believers often try to reject everything that made them who they were before their spiritual rebirth, assuming that nothing they were could possibly have been something their new Savior might have made them to be before they came to know Him.

Such rejection often seemed wise in the dramatic days of that rebirth. This is especially true for those of us who came to the end of ourselves only after effectively running our lives into the ground. In the deep desire to put our self-directed lives behind us we attempted to throw out everything that we felt was not “spiritual”. After all, aren’t we new creations? The cross is before us and the world behind us. Everything old must go.

Or so we think.

But years later we may begin to feel that we are not progressing in the faith, that we are not where we should be by this time. Accompanying that is a feeling that there is unfinished business in our lives. More disturbingly, we may have a sense of not knowing who we are, even in Christ. The Christian life does not seem to make sense anymore because all we assumed God would have accomplished in our lives “by now” has not come to pass.

When this happens the immediate temptation is to believe that some terrible sin harbored in our hearts is behind the spiritual malaise we experience. Sometimes this is true. A besetting sin can poison our relationship with God and remove us from His will. The result can be a terrible sense of being in the wrong place. Life cannot make sense when we are in the far country of the Prodigal.

There is, however, another possibility not related to sin. Could it be that, all those years before, we discarded part of who God made us to be? Our new and fervent zeal led some of us to try to erase nearly everything we once were in our pre-conversion life. Could it be possible we throw the proverbial babe out with the bathwater?

I have known of more than one believer who made the decision to go into “full-time ministry” only to find out after years of blood, sweat and tears that they make terrible pastors, evangelists, missionaries, etc. Sometimes the shock of failure has been enough to deeply shake their faith, putting them into a spiritual tailspin. Why would God “radically save” them if it was not His intention that they would be the next Billy Graham?

Yet perhaps these vocational shipwrecks are blessings in disguise. God is not above using the severe mercy of letting us bang our heads against the wall to show us the truth about who we are really meant to be in Him. Perhaps the childhood enthusiasm for becoming an artist, pilot or veterinarian when we grew up was God-given, even though we did not yet know that God personally as a Christian.

By the same token maybe some of the joyous or happy feelings we once knew as unbelievers were not sinful counterfeits, but blessed manifestations of God’s common grace being shed upon our lives. The wonders of childhood, for instance, can be experienced by all human beings, though they come in a time before many of us are even consciously aware of the concept of a transcendent God.

It could be that some of us need to stop fearing every aspect of our early pre-Christian lives and instead, with the help of the Spirit, begin to selectively re-embrace those things that once brought us some health and happiness during that time. It might even be that this is a necessary pre-cursor to God moving us on in our earthly pilgrimage if we find ourselves “stuck”. His loving plan for our future may well involve re-integrating some of our old loves into the new ones we have found as believers. Once we allow, and even pursue, this re-integration we may come to better know and embrace the totality of who our Lord always meant us to be. This comes with understanding and embracing what He may have always wanted for us, to let at least some of what was not inherently sinful in our pasts become a part of our future in Him