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Your life is one story—lost and saved—working out for your good and His glory (Romans 8:28). At the beginning and all the way to the end, your life’s script comes from the hand of God. He is the author, and you are the participant in the narrative that He is writing. Whether you spent most of your past rebelling against God or following Him, He was there. The good and bad of your life, whether those things happened in your pre- or post-salvation experience, are part of the Lord’s sovereign care and design. Becoming born again does not erase what has happened to you, but it does release you from the bondage of what has happened to you (2 Corinthians 5:17).
To be adopted by your heavenly Father is an other-worldly change from what you used to be to what you can be. God adorned you in the garments of redemption. You are eating at the King’s table, fully secure in your new lifestyle as God’s child—if you are born again (2 Samuel 9:11). For some Christians, the good news of Christ is more theoretical than functional. Because of the horrendous events of these believers’ pasts, they struggle with what happened to them. I understand the struggle in their lives. As a two-decade, physically and verbally abused son of an angry drunk who buried two murdered brothers and went through a horrible divorce, I am sympathetic to those who continue to struggle with what happened to them.
Your past can be like a dark shadow that never leaves. It is like living in a world where the sun never shines. This seeming curse is how the past can control a person’s present, which has a determining impact on their future. Being born a second time is supposed to have a practical and transformative effect on our lives. God adopted and declared us not guilty of all past, present, and future sins, as well as releasing us from the evil of others. This work is a passive operation that the Lord does to us (Ephesians 2:8-9; Romans 8:1). Our sanctification is different; it is not as passive.
After salvation, God requires you to cooperate with Him in the work He has previously prepared for you. The Lord wants you to participate and enjoy the new relationship with Him. (See Ephesians 2:10; Philippians 2:12-13.) Thus, there is work to do after regeneration (James 2:17). Though this cooperative activity with God is not a condition of your salvation, it is an essential responsibility that affects the quality of your life. This assumption is where your past can be a problem, even crippling your experience with God and others, which is why a struggler needs a new practical theology regarding the past. Part of that theology should include these eight ideas.
1—The Past Is Significant
To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires (Ephesians 4:22).
The psychological culture makes way too much of the past; they see the past as a mystery to be unlocked. There is no biblical warrant for this worldview. The Lord would not lock up your past and then ask you to go on a mysterious field trip to find the secret key to your future sanctification. This concept makes no sense. Conversely, the Christian culture has too easily dismissed the past as though it does not matter, which is also a mistake. Of course, you do not want to be that continual backward-looking Christian who never gains forward momentum in their progressive sanctification.
We can live in this tension because Christ connects the quality of our sanctification to who we are in Him, not to who we were in Adam. You have a former manner of life that affects your current manner of life. Paul told the Ephesian Christians that their former way of life impacted their current way of life. He did not ignore what they were before the Lord saved them, and he did not want them to dismiss it lightly.
2—We Are Not Victims
There is a measure of significance to your past, but it should not have controlling power. No person is a helpless victim whose present manner of life is determined by their past manner of life. If your past has more power over you than the grace of God, your thinking about your past is not in line with the gospel. There is a way you are supposed to think about your past, which was Paul’s point to them. He had concerns about how a Gentile worldview shaped their thinking. Paul was aware, so he told the Ephesians to be careful about how their past may corrupt their thinking. Carefully read how Paul talked about this.
Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ! (Ephesians 4:17-20).
3—The Past Affects the Present
Paul was concerned that their thinking might not change. He appealed to the Ephesian converts to no longer walk like the Gentiles, who did so in the futility of their minds. They did this due to ignorance, which meant the Ephesians had not learned Christ the way they should have. They had a darkened understanding that was alienated from the life found in God. The real issue for a person who has been affected by their past is how they are thinking about their past. To be in Christ is a worldview shift. You have come out of darkness, and you are now a child of the light. The number one problem I experience with people who are still affected by their past is they continue to think like they are unbelievers. They do not have a stabilized and maturing faith in God. (See 2 Corinthians 4:6; 2 Peter 3:18; Hebrews 5:11-14.)
4—We Reconstruct the Past
For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).
This point is where it gets interesting for past-dominated Christians. What happened to them by those in their past has more power over them than what is going on with them by God (John 17:17). They live more like fleshly Christians than spiritual Christians. There are arguments from the past that have shaped them. These arguments rise up against the knowledge of God. These thought fortresses control them. The irony is that no person can perfectly interpret or reproduce what has happened to them. Their finiteness and fallenness are conditions that lead them to practice reconstruction. It happens often in counseling.
I will meet with a couple, and one of them will rehearse the weekend’s argument with me. Typically, the other spouse jumps in and says, “That’s not how it happened.” The rebutting spouse is correct. Neither of them can reconstruct their weekend accurately. Their fine-tuned filters and presuppositions disallow them to see the events accurately. They have skewed interpretive filters, tilting toward their unique finite and fallen tendencies. This fact about all of our arguments, in itself, should cause anyone to be suspicious of how they think about what has happened to them.
5—God Was in the Past
The safer way to go is to see our pasts as coming from the Lord for His glory, our good, and the benefit of others. This worldview stabilizes me when I think about my past. I am not a victim of my past but a unique man made in God’s image, who the Lord has given a past for His purposes. God knew me before I was born. He brought me into this world through two particular sinners. He carved a path through my past that led me to the cross. It did not matter what kind of sinners my parents were. How could I get from my first birth to my second birth and not be affected by those in my life? It is like we are walking through the world in semi-clean clothes. By the time we get to Jesus Christ, our clothes are filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). The good news is that God was there, making a path where no path existed, bringing us to His dear Son so we could be born a second time. God was and is with us (Genesis 39:2).
6—Culture Distorts the Past
Unbelievers will try to change their past because that is the only thing they can do. They have a presuppositional lens shaped by a godless worldview. How could they view their past any other way? Their starting point, like ours, determines their ending point. Too many Christians have culturally convoluted thinking about their pasts. They were indoctrinated by worldviews and shaped by influences that have little to do with the Scriptures. If the culture begins by denying the Lord, there is no way they can arrive at God-centered solutions. At the same time, I do not fault the world for doing what it does because that is all it can do. What flummoxes me is how some Christians continue to drink from wells that cannot hold water (Jeremiah 2:13). Nearly all of this confusion about the past is because we have submitted our thoughts to theologies devoid of God and His Word.
7—We Distort the Past
None of us are trustworthy enough to come to infallible conclusions about our pasts. We all should hold a healthy suspicion of ourselves, especially about how we think about what has happened to us. This view is not negative. It is humble self-awareness and wisdom. We cannot be fully aware of our assumptions, values, influences, habits, and blind spots that shape our former manner of life. Paul told the Ephesians believers that their former manner of life was corrupted through deceitful desires. So is ours. We must hold our pasts loosely and not accept that what happened to us is our identity. We are to no longer walk as the Gentiles. We are a new creation, made and shaped by God. Rather than spending our days thinking about what has happened to us, it would be more productive to reflect on how God wants to work in our lives today. Backward fixations will keep us in the grip of our pasts. Forward fixations will change our lives. If we’re going to change our past, we must change the only thing we can manage today.
8—Rewrite Your Future
As you incrementally alter your present, you will stand at some future day with a Christ-centered past. Today, you might look at your past and see the darkness. In the future, you will look backward and see a beautiful life with God. This transformation was my story. After several decades of progressive sanctification, God gave me a different identity situated in Christ, not in Adam. What happened to me was real and powerful, but it is not who I am. I am a Christian—a Christ-follower. My past serves redemptive purposes today. Read this list in the CTA—examine your life and walk with Christ. Take the time to reflect and discuss with a friend what you should do to change your past by changing who you are today. Just a few changes can give you a God-honoring future.
Rick launched the Life Over Coffee global training network in 2008 to bring hope and help for you and others by creating resources that spark conversations for transformation. His primary responsibilities are resource creation and leadership development, which he does through speaking, writing, podcasting, and educating.
In 1990 he earned a BA in Theology and, in 1991, a BS in Education. In 1993, he received his ordination into Christian ministry, and in 2000 he graduated with an MA in Counseling from The Master’s University. In 2006 he was recognized as a Fellow of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC).
