The Dangers of Nostalgia
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00:00:05.000 | Pastor John, today's question is a compilation of a number of email questions we've received in the past,
00:00:10.000 | and essentially it boils down to this.
00:00:12.000 | What counsel would you give for listeners who are overly nostalgic and who almost live in the past?
00:00:19.000 | What are the dangers?
00:00:21.000 | It is possible to sin against God and hurt your own soul by failing to remember the past and by remembering it in the wrong way.
00:00:36.000 | In other words, you can blow it both ways.
00:00:39.000 | You can wreck your life by neglecting the past, and you can neglect your life by an excessive living in the past.
00:00:49.000 | The word "nostalgia" may point, I think, to something innocent and healthy or something excessive and unhealthy.
00:01:01.000 | I don't think it's a bad thing—I hope not—to have a fond, wistful memory of college days.
00:01:10.000 | For me to walk around on Wheaton campus is a pretty emotional thing.
00:01:14.000 | I frankly find it a kind of painful pleasure.
00:01:18.000 | It would be unhealthy, however, this thing called nostalgia, if you thought about those past experiences continually
00:01:29.000 | and felt burdened by the fact that they're never going to come again,
00:01:35.000 | a kind of paralyzing regret that it's all over and the best days are in the past.
00:01:42.000 | There's no future like it.
00:01:44.000 | I mean, that starts to be unhealthy.
00:01:48.000 | So what we need, I think, is a biblical vision, or you might even call it a theology, of the past.
00:01:58.000 | The past is not for fueling and paralyzing regret and disappointment.
00:02:06.000 | The past is not meant for fueling anger and grudges.
00:02:11.000 | A lot of people use the past for regret and use the past for disappointment and use the past for grudges and use the past for anger.
00:02:19.000 | Those are all misuses of the past.
00:02:23.000 | That's not what the past is for.
00:02:25.000 | God didn't give us the past to make us regretful and to paralyze us with disappointment or rage or grudge.
00:02:34.000 | There are positive uses of the past that He did ordain.
00:02:39.000 | And let me just mention four.
00:02:43.000 | Gratitude, repentance, faith, and knowledge or wisdom.
00:02:52.000 | So gratitude, Psalm 107.
00:02:55.000 | "Let them thank the Lord for His steadfast love, for His wondrous works to the children of man.
00:03:02.000 | I will remember the deeds of the Lord.
00:03:05.000 | Yes, I will remember your wonders of old," Psalm 77.
00:03:10.000 | Remember the wondrous works that He has done, His miracles and judgments that He uttered, 1 Chronicles 16.
00:03:18.000 | In other words, history is an ever-growing reservoir of past grace where the thankfulness of our hearts can drink and drink with continual pleasure.
00:03:34.000 | That's what it's for, the drinking of thankfulness.
00:03:39.000 | And when I say past, I mean five seconds ago to 5,000 years ago.
00:03:46.000 | It's all past.
00:03:47.000 | Here's number two.
00:03:48.000 | The past is a source of healthy repentance.
00:03:53.000 | Ephesians 2.12.
00:03:54.000 | "Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise.
00:04:04.000 | You had no hope and were without God in the world."
00:04:08.000 | Isn't it amazing that He told us to remember that?
00:04:11.000 | I just think that's amazing.
00:04:13.000 | I mean, don't we want to forget that?
00:04:15.000 | No, we don't want to forget that.
00:04:17.000 | Because if we forget from what we were saved, our sense of repentance will be shallow and our enjoyment of grace will be thin.
00:04:29.000 | So it was a healthy remembering that Paul was calling the Ephesians to do for the sake of a healthy repenting.
00:04:38.000 | He said in 2 Corinthians 7, "Godly grief produces repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death."
00:04:51.000 | In other words, there is a way to think about your past that leads to repentance, leads to salvation, leads to life, leads to joy, through and beyond regret.
00:05:01.000 | And there's a worldly way to think about the past that paralyzes you and brings death.
00:05:08.000 | Third, the past is a source of faith for the future.
00:05:13.000 | My favorite verse, perhaps, in all the Bible is Romans 8.32.
00:05:19.000 | "He who did," that's past, "did not spare his own son, but gave," past, "himself up for us all."
00:05:28.000 | And here comes the logic. "How will," that's future, "how will he not with him graciously give us all things?"
00:05:36.000 | Oh, I love the logic of that verse.
00:05:38.000 | Because of our focus on the past, namely God's willingness in history to give his son,
00:05:46.000 | therefore our faith is undaunted for the reception of all of his promises in the future.
00:05:55.000 | The past serves the future by feeding faith because of all the faithful works of God to make a future for us in the past.
00:06:06.000 | Israel failed precisely to do this, and that's why they were undone in the wilderness.
00:06:15.000 | Psalm 106, "Our fathers, when they were in Egypt, did not consider your wondrous works."
00:06:22.000 | They did not remember the abundance of your steadfast love, but rebelled at the sea.
00:06:29.000 | Why did they rebel? They didn't remember.
00:06:31.000 | They didn't remember so they didn't have faith to walk with Moses through the sea the way they should have.
00:06:37.000 | And they grumbled on the other side.
00:06:39.000 | All of it was rooted in forgetting past grace, so they didn't trust him for future grace because they didn't remember past grace.
00:06:47.000 | And number four, the last one, this is kind of a theology of past.
00:06:51.000 | It's my understanding of what I'm doing here.
00:06:53.000 | It's a mini theology of the past.
00:06:55.000 | The past is a great reservoir of knowledge and wisdom.
00:07:03.000 | Where else can we learn anything except from the past?
00:07:08.000 | The future has not happened yet.
00:07:10.000 | You can't learn anything from what hasn't happened yet.
00:07:13.000 | The present is ephemeral.
00:07:16.000 | I mean, try to learn something from the present.
00:07:18.000 | I mean, try to focus on the present.
00:07:20.000 | As soon as you got the present focused, it's the past.
00:07:23.000 | I mean, every millisecond is flowing over the waterfall of the present, turning into a past reservoir just as soon as you see it go over the waterfall.
00:07:32.000 | As soon as you focus on a moment, it's become a past moment.
00:07:36.000 | The only thing we can focus on that has any stability at all are the products of the past.
00:07:42.000 | All books are from the past.
00:07:44.000 | All videos are from the past.
00:07:46.000 | All recordings are from the past.
00:07:49.000 | And this sentence that I just quoted, "All recordings are from the past," is now past.
00:07:54.000 | All the means of stored knowledge and wisdom are from the past.
00:07:59.000 | It's the only place we have to go to learn anything or to grow in knowledge or in wisdom.
00:08:07.000 | So, for the Christian, that means mainly the Bible, which was, like all other books written, in the past.
00:08:16.000 | So, for the Christian, let it be said, "The best is always yet to come."
00:08:22.000 | And I really mean that.
00:08:24.000 | I mean, for eternity, starting right now, the best is always yet to come for the Christian.
00:08:31.000 | So, the future is massively important.
00:08:34.000 | We are people of hope, and therefore we do not live in the past.
00:08:40.000 | We draw thankfulness from the past.
00:08:42.000 | We draw life-giving repentance from the past.
00:08:45.000 | We feed our faith and hope on the faithfulness of God in the past.
00:08:50.000 | And we learn everything we know and get all the wisdom we have from the past.
00:08:55.000 | But all of it is for the sake of this afternoon's joy and this afternoon's faith
00:09:02.000 | and this afternoon's obedience and the joy of all eternity.
00:09:07.000 | Beautiful. Thank you, Pastor John.
00:09:10.000 | "The best is yet to come."
00:09:12.000 | And to flip this discussion around for more on how grace works out in the future,
00:09:17.000 | go to DesiringGod.org, click on the Books tab, and find the book that's titled "Future Grace."
00:09:24.000 | "Future Grace" is one of the essential reads from John Piper, in my opinion.
00:09:29.000 | And you'll find it on our website, DesiringGod.org.
00:09:33.000 | Click on the Books tab and look for the title "Future Grace."
00:09:38.000 | Tomorrow we return with one of the most frequently asked questions
00:09:40.000 | that we have not yet addressed on the podcast, "Do pets go to heaven?"
00:09:45.000 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you tomorrow.
00:09:48.000 | (end)
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