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Christian Network

There is a tendency among Christians to link spiritual growth with forsaking the past. We desire profound change to happen; the kind of change that allows us to rapidly leave behind the parts of our old life we now consider unnecessary or useless in the eyes of God. The parts I speak of are not the inherently sinful ones. The sins of our past must not be allowed any place in our Christian life from the time of conversion on. No, the things we address here are the morally neutral aspects of our past. These 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. New believers often try to reject everything that made them who they were before their spiritual rebirth.

Such rejection 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 running our lives into the ground. In the deep desire to put our self-directed lives behind us we attempt to throw out everything that we feel is 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. 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 is always 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. Could it be that, all those years before, we discarded part of who God made and wanted us to be? Our new faith led us to try to erase nearly everything we once were in our pre-conversion life. Did 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 that childhood enthusiasm for becoming an artist, pilot or veterinarian when we grew up was God-given, even though we did not yet know Him 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 results 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 lives and instead 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 Christian pilgrimage. His loving plan for our future may involve re-integrating some of our old loves into the new ones we have as believers. Then we can come to better know and embrace who our Lord always meant us to be