Romantic Past

As humans we tend to romanticize the past. I was listening to a TV preacher talking about the good ole days of the U.S. of A. He was speaking in glowing terms of our countries past. No need to remind him about lynching and murder, white only water fountains and Japanese internment camps. All was good and glorious, what a great past. He was attempting to insight believers to defend this past.

We must avoid romanticizing our past. It is not pretty and it never will be. This lie infects churches and movements and it keeps us from seeing what matters most. The book of Genesis certainly doesn’t romanticize our faiths past. We have Abraham twice giving his wife to others in an attempt to save his own neck. We have Peter and the apostles failing on a regular basis. The church in Corinth is certainly not the poster child for healthy congregations. We must avoid this tendency at romance.

It leaves us open to self righteousness and deceit. Jesus warned that we should seek the plank out of our own eye before we look to help a brother with his speck. When we romanticize our past we see no plank because one could never exist. We either look like liars or fools to those whose eye contains the speck. A classic example today is marriage. Many believers attack the homosexual movement and warn about the dangers of homosexual marriage and yet when believers have just as much divorce as non-believers than romanticism has begun.

It leads us to put our hope in the wrong thing. When believers romanticized the early church it led them to think that restoring it would make everything better. This romantic lie has caused many a division and ended up taking our eyes off of Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, and placed it on a set of randomly chosen institutional markers.

Many people today are still digging out from this romantic dream, others probably never will. The beauty of being a Christ follower is that we are following, we are on a journey that will only be completed upon Christ return. We live looking forward not back.

As Christ follower we can admit our mistakes, our sins and our failures, because that is not the point. We don’t have to romanticize our past because that is the story. This is why the Messiah had to come. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and there is nothing romantic about that.