“Does your past play a role when you become a Christian?”
This is another one of those questions whose meaning is a
little hard to nail down, but the answer is the same either way we read it: No.
A good past, even a past chock full of good
works and moral excellence — if any of us could truly claim one —
cannot qualify us for a relationship with God. Likewise, even a past rife with
the most wretched
sin and excess cannot disqualify us from getting right with God and seeking
to live a life that pleases him. There is nothing impressive in our past that
we can bring to God for his pleasure: “All our righteous deeds are like a polluted
garment.” But there is also nothing in our past which will drive us
from God’s presence forever if we truly repent: “Every
sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people.”
What matters is whether your past is really your present. Let
me explain that a bit.
Putting the Past Behind
The past is the past when you have rejected it and moved on.
This is true whether the past was full of things the world calls good or things
the world calls bad. So the apostle Paul can say about his own hard-earned religious
qualifications, “Whatever gain I had, I counted
as loss for the sake of Christ.” Equally, he says about former thieves,
adulterers and homosexuals, “Such were
some of you.” In effect, “You’re not that now. You are something else.” If you
have written off your own past, counting yourself dead to it for the sake of
Christ, then you are ready to move forward in the Christian life.
Of course that doesn’t mean our past goes away. On the
contrary, the effects and consequences of past misdeeds and mistakes often
remain with us our entire lives. You cannot unlearn sexual experience, disclaim
responsibility for a child born out of wedlock, or rewire your brain to be
exactly the way it was prior to three years of meth addiction. You cannot
un-pickle a liver or totally reverse the damage cigarette smoking has done to
your lungs. Your angry ex-wife will still be your angry ex-wife, the abusive father
or husband you escaped will still be the same person he always was, and the child who hasn’t
called in five years may not call this year either. The past is what it
is, and becoming a Christian doesn’t change that.
Or, to take a less emotionally-charged example, if you come
to Christ from a “high church” background full of stained glass, choirs and
cathedrals, you may find the Christianity of the New Testament a little bit austere
and colorless for your tastes. You may miss the lushness, liturgy, pomp and
meticulous organization of the institutional church even if you came to Christ
because the teaching of the high churches had utterly failed to address your
real spiritual needs. The institutional church knows how to stir your soul even
when it cannot feed your spirit. In this sense too, the past may not go away.
You may find yourself occasionally longing for certain aspects of your largely-empty
religious past, even if you have pledged to leave those things behind.
But recurring desires and practical complications that arise
out of our various histories need not keep us from living fulfilled Christian
lives, even if our past occasionally presents us with challenges other
Christians don’t face. So long as following Christ remains more important to
you than hanging on to your past, you will do just fine.
The Past in the Present
However, the past is not really the past if you are determined
to carry it with you into your new relationship with God through Christ. If
that is what you are doing, then what you are calling your past is actually
your present.
Christianity is not an option you can “add on” to a full
life experience in order to make it fuller and richer. Christ does not tolerate
any rivals for the throne of our hearts, whether these rivals are moral evils
or things we may consider to be blessings. It is for this reason that Jesus
told his disciples, “Whoever loves father or mother more
than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me
is not worthy of me.” It is certainly possible to have Mom+Christ, or Wife+Christ
or Child+Christ or Job+Christ, but only so long as those other people and
things in your life don’t force you to prioritize them over your relationship
with the Lord Jesus. If and when they do, they need to be soundly punted into
second spot on your list. As the Lord himself put it, “No
one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the
other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.”
If you are willing to follow Christ only so long as it doesn’t
cost you a relationship, a position or anything else you deem truly important in life, then you are not really following Christ
at all. You are just heading in the same direction as the people you go to
church with while it remains convenient for you. When you are finally forced to
choose between Christ and the thing you love most, you will find out very
quickly how real your profession of faith was.
And believe me, that choice will present itself one day.
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