Classic Sermon #6055: Freeing Ourselves from the Past (A)

Exodus chapter 2, verses 2 through 10, a story you know very well, but I want to approach it from a slightly different angle. It speaks about the birth of Moses. The word of the Lord says:

“… a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a daughter of Levi. She conceived and gave birth to a son, and seeing that he was beautiful, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she took a little ark of bulrushes, coated it with asphalt and pitch, placed the child in it, and set it among the reeds by the riverbank….”

You know that Pharaoh wanted to kill the Jewish children, which is why they hid him.

“… and his sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to the child. And Pharaoh’s daughter came down to bathe in the river, and while her maidens walked along the riverbank, she saw the little ark among the reeds and sent one of her maids to fetch it. When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the child was crying. Having compassion on him, she said, ‘This is one of the Hebrews’ children.’ Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter—that is, Moses’ sister—‘Shall I go and call a nurse from among the Hebrew women to nurse this child for you?’ And Pharaoh’s daughter replied, ‘Go.’ Then the maiden went and called the child’s mother, to whom Pharaoh’s daughter said, ‘Take this child and nurse him for me, and I will pay you.’ And the woman took the child and nursed him. And when the child grew, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, who took him as her son—that is, she adopted him—and named him Moses, saying, ‘Because I drew him out of the water….’”

Now let us turn quickly to First Corinthians 13:11, one or two verses that I also want you to keep in mind, a very well-known passage. First Corinthians 13:11, that famous passage about love, where the Apostle Paul says:

“… When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I judged as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things….”

And the final passage is found in Second Corinthians, the next book, chapter 5, verse 17. And it says there—listen to this, brothers and sisters; I do not know how many of you, or even I myself, have truly believed what it says there—it says:

“… Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new….”

The subject that concerns me today is the past. The Bible says that God dwells in an eternal present, in eternity. God does not know this thing we call present, past, and future. His time is the time of eternity. Man must imitate God; to a certain extent, the Christian must imitate God and live in the present, in the now. But what about the past? Because, brothers and sisters, the past sometimes governs our present, and that is the part I want to address today.

And, in a manner of speaking, we could say that this sermon points to the need each of us has to free ourselves from the past. We have to free ourselves from this master who enslaves us. I am thinking of what Christ said: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” And the Jews said to Him, “Who, us? We have never been slaves to anyone; we do not need to be set free.”

But the Lord was also speaking to them about that Israelite past to which they were clinging, so that they could not see the present reality of the Messiah who stood there before them. They had that past glory of Israel, when Israel ruled all the nations surrounding the Middle East, and they wanted to return to that glory. They were filled with the pride of a people who had once been great, and they could not recognize the humble Messiah who came riding on a donkey as a symbol of the humility of the Son of God.

And they did not want to recognize that, subconsciously, an image of the past was governing their perceptions, their words, their actions, and their reactions to the Messiah who stood before them. They could not see God’s glorious present because they were enslaved by the past.

And it was as though a tape recorder were playing a message and telling them, “No, the Messiah cannot be like this. The Messiah will be a glorious being who will come on a white horse with a great, gleaming sword in His hand, and He will free us from the Roman yoke and restore Israel once again to its former position of glory.” And so, while the humble Messiah, Jesus Christ, spoke to them of a spiritual, inward, mental, profound liberation, what they had was that recording of Israel’s glorious military and political past, and it kept them from gaining access to the Lord’s present truth that was right there before them.

And brothers and sisters, many times we, children of God and believers in Jesus Christ who have the privilege of holding the Word in our hands, make the same mistake. We cannot perceive the present accurately, nor can we respond to present experiences, nor can we be happy with our present, because in the subconscious part of our minds, back there, without our realizing it, a tape recorder is playing messages made up of our experiences from the distant past, often from our childhood. And so we distort present experiences according to the coded messages on that recording. We do not hear the voices of our present; we distort them because they do not agree with the voices and tone of that prerecorded message lodged in the back of our consciousness.

Again, these things do not sound very spiritual, because what I want to do is contrast what the Word of God says with that reality among God’s people. The Apostle Paul says, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I judged as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

But brothers and sisters, most human beings do not live up to that ambitious pattern set forth in the Word of God. Even though we are already grown men and women, with wives, husbands, children, jobs, and adult responsibilities, there is still a child inside us with a prerecorded message that governs many of our actions, words, perceptions, and reactions to present experiences.

And so that glorious image of an adulthood that has left the things of childhood behind and is now entering fully into the responsibilities, privileges, and glory of being an adult does not correspond to the reality of our lives.

There is that other glorious passage in Corinthians: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new”—Second Corinthians 5. What does that mean? Again, the same thing: once we enter into the glorious presence, influence, healing, and healing grace of Jesus Christ, in the mind of God what now exists is a man, a woman, a young person who has left behind the deforming wounds of the past, the traumas of childhood, and the ugly things from our past experiences—the resentments, the wounds. And then, in the mind of God, God’s desire and God’s resources are there so that we may leap forward and enter into a glorious newness of life in Jesus Christ.

And yet, again, that often does not happen in the lives of believers. On the contrary, we continue to be that old creature, not only in the sense of sin, but also in the sense that we continue carrying the negative baggage of our past experiences. We have not freed ourselves from the ghosts in our past or from the dead bodies we have locked inside our closets. Many times, we do not even know they are there.

And what happens? As we said earlier, when the experiences of our past—many of them deforming—are not observed and analyzed in the light of the Word of God, when they simply remain tucked away in the back of our mental house and we do not know why they are there, or even that they are there, or how to explain them, those repressed experiences deep within our being distort our lives and manifest themselves negatively in our existence.

It is like when you enter your house and smell a bad odor. And you say, “What is going on? I just cleaned the house, and everything is perfumed,” and so on. And you begin to search. You check the garbage—there is nothing. You check whether the children threw something somewhere—there is nothing. But the house smells bad. Whether or not you know where the thing making the house smell bad is, the house smells bad, because that does not depend on your awareness; it depends on the fact that something foul-smelling is there, contaminating the air in the house. And until you go and search and find the piece of meat—forgive me for being a little graphic—that has been hidden there for three or four days, rotting and making the house smell bad, you cannot free yourself from that foul odor.

The same thing happens with our consciousness. There are experiences from our past and our childhood that have marked us deeply and torn our personality and sensitivity. We do not know what it is, but it is there, governing our life and distorting our actions. And because it is there, repressed and locked away behind doors that we ourselves locked without realizing it, deceiving ourselves, those experiences remain there contaminating everything. They smell bad because no air reaches them, and they contaminate our emotional life, our emotions, and our thoughts, once again distorting our actions.

And so one must go and examine those rooms, investigate the rooms of the house, look for those padlocks that are already corroded because they have never been opened, unlock them, and open the door so that the light can enter. And that is something we must do regularly in our lives: a kind of mental and emotional hygiene through which we return to our past and examine its experiences so that the light of the Spirit of God—and here is the key—and the Word of God can shine upon those hidden areas of our lives and heal them. At the end, I will speak a little more about these techniques of mental and emotional hygiene. For the Bible says that the Word of God is living and effective and penetrates, it says, even to the dividing of joints and bones, and divides soul from spirit. And it says that there is nothing in this world hidden from its scrutiny.

And when you allow the Word of God to enter your life and the grace of Jesus Christ to enter those areas of your life that lie there dormant, shriveled, and foul-smelling, then the light of the Spirit—the wind of the Spirit—enters and blows through them, cleansing those areas.

There are three psychological mechanisms at work in this matter of the past that I would like to discuss briefly with you, at the risk of sounding very technical. What I would like is simply this: even if we resolve nothing today, because these subjects take so long to discuss, at least may we leave here sensitized and made aware of the importance of that mental hygiene—of returning to our past from time to time and analyzing and observing it with honesty and with the integrity that comes from the Lord, so that God may then do His work there.

The first mechanism is the following, and I would call it “retention.” It is simply the fact that—I used an illustration this week while speaking with someone from the church—we can compare the human mind to a lake, a deep lake. Fishermen and swimmers come onto that lake, along with people who go there to bathe in the summer, and you see that while they are fishing, when they finish a can of beer, they throw it away and the can sinks to the bottom. And if they catch a fish they do not like and it is already dead, they take it, throw it away, and the fish sinks to the bottom and rots there in the water. And if a boat sinks, it goes to the bottom and remains there. The surface looks very clean, but down there at the bottom of the lake lies the whole history of all the boats and people that have passed across the surface of that lake and stopped there. That lake is a receptacle that receives everything, good and bad. There, as I have said, are the empty, corroded cans; there are pieces of wood already eaten away by the water; there are also living, healthy fish swimming about, as well as algae and healthy vegetation. There is good and there is evil; there is life and there is death; there is what smells good and there is what smells bad. And the overall quality of that lake’s water is the sum total of all the things that have fallen into it.

And so it is with our personality; so it is with our mind; so it is with our emotions. Psychologists say that human beings forget none of their experiences. There are things I saw today while walking from my house to this place that I did not even know I had seen, but they are recorded within me. They are there, and they have affected me. I do not know how they have affected me, but they are there. Whether I am aware of them does not determine whether they are there or not. My conscious and subconscious minds record them, and somehow, continually—I do not know how—I am absorbing all the experiences of my past, and so are you. They are falling in there and being deposited, and without realizing it, you are organizing them and placing them in different compartments of your life. Some are too painful, and because you do not like thinking about things that are too painful and cause you anxiety, you take them and put them far down at the very bottom, in the last closet, and pretend you never saw them; or, if you did see them, after a moment you pretend you forgot them. But they are there, and they are affecting you.

Some time ago I was talking with a person, and he told me about a very painful experience. I am not going to be too specific, but during his childhood, when he was a boy—and he only came to discover this through weeks of counseling with a Christian psychologist—one night his parents caused him to suffer terrible humiliation, and he did not remember it. Later, as he recalled it, he said he clearly remembered how, that night, already in bed and crying, he said to himself, “It doesn’t matter. Tomorrow I won’t remember what happened, and everything will be all right.” And that experience seems to have had such a great impact on his life that, years and years later, that person, now an adult, cannot be happy in a relationship because there are things back there in his past that he did not even remember. They have affected him. And I could mention other cases of things that happen and then, later, the light comes on for us, and we say, “Goodness, that really did happen years ago, and it has been affecting me.”

And that subconscious message has remained there; that experience we repressed because it was too painful, we stored it in the depths of our being, but it remains. Remember what I said: physicists say that energy can neither be destroyed nor created, but it can be changed into different forms. And the negative and positive energies that enter our lives do not disappear; they remain there, moving, except that we suppress them, disguise them, and channel them in other ways, but they are there, operating within us.

So let us remember this, brothers and sisters: every experience in our lives remains within us, and whether it affects us positively or negatively depends on what we do with that experience.

But remember that our subconscious, which is the largest part of our personality—those things of which we are not conscious—makes up something like 99% of our personality. What you remember and believe affects you is only 1%; it is only one part, the tiny tip of an immense mountain. And we believe that this is who I am, the part of myself that I know, but no: the greater part of me is the entire depth of that enormous lake, corrupted and contaminated by twenty thousand corrosive and destructive substances that have been accumulating at the bottom of the lake and have tainted the quality of the water. So that is an important point, and we can use it to remember that the experiences we give our children affect them for their entire lives, and to be careful—let me say this in passing—about how we treat our children, because they are like a recording device absorbing every sound, whether or not we are aware of it, as well as every experience and everything they see and feel. Our past is there with us; you carry it. The good and bad, small and great experiences of your childhood are with you 30, 40, 60, 80 years later, and they are influencing your life. And the simple fact that you are aware of this will help you look back and try to analyze your existence in light of that long journey, of that baggage you carry with you.

The second thing is this aspect of repression, which is a psychological term, and it is the idea that, as I was saying, when you have a very negative experience that causes you anxiety or displeasure, or that threatens your perception of yourself, your world, someone you love very much, or your system of ethical, moral, or spiritual values—when we are confronted with an experience or a memory that threatens us in a very profound way, do you know what we do? We hide it deep down, repress it, forget it; and human beings are equipped in such a way that they can do that. Do not ask me; no one knows how that mechanism works, but the fact is that the mechanism of repression is very real, and you hide what you do not like, what causes you tension, and what causes you anxiety, and you disguise it. There is another word: you sublimate it. What you then do is express it; you have to express the presence of that thing inside you, and often our neuroses, traumas, obsessions, compulsions, and outward habits are ways in which we symbolically express those energies that are repressed and hidden there, but there is a correspondence. And when those things cause us fear or pain, we hide them and pretend they do not exist.

Take, for example, the fact that every child wants his father and mother to be perfect. No child wants to see inconsistencies or flaws in his parents, because that threatens the child’s sense of security. The child wants to think that his parents are all-powerful and can protect him from any problem, that they are good, and that they love him intensely. And so a mechanism often operates in the child’s mind to repress anything that would make him see his parents in a negative light. And so you see that there are many children who do realize that their parents do not love them, or that they are excessively authoritarian toward them and have suppressed their personalities, that they are abusive, that they are neglectful, that they did not want them; but in his heart, the child cannot admit to himself that his parents are bad, in other words, or that they do not love him. So he represses the knowledge he has become aware of and replaces it with a fictitious truth: “My parents care about me; my parents love me.” And then they grow up with that conscious, schizophrenic truth: on the one hand, they have built a beautiful castle above, but the real part below is a castle of skeletons and monsters; that is the subconscious.

So, outwardly, you see that he does all kinds of good things for his parents: he brings them flowers when they are elderly, etc., etc. But inwardly he is living a very neurotic life and harbors anger and resentment toward the parents who did not love him when he was a child and did not care for him, and so he is divided. And he manifests that deeply repressed knowledge in destructive ways, sometimes doing things that are ultimately aggressive toward his parents. Perhaps the flower he brings them one Sunday is counterbalanced by his forgetting them for the next six months in order to get back at them. Or he may do still other things, or wait until they are old and then put them in some place simply to rot there and forget about them. Who knows how many of the things happening today to the elderly, and all those things, are due to a generation filled with resentment toward parents who neglected them in the past?

And these are ways in which the person does not tell himself the truth. If you ask him, “Do you love your parents?” he says, “I love them tremendously. I would give my life for them. They are the best parents in the world.” But they have repressed the truth they have known since childhood, and so they manifest that truth in unconsciously aggressive ways, without realizing it.

And we operate through that mechanism in different ways in our lives—with our friendships, our different experiences, and all of that—but it is there. In a sense, we are punishing others, the world, and the people we think have offended us in various ways. That is, we create a fictitious truth and a real truth for ourselves. And so one must be careful. If I do not understand how I am functioning, if there is some resentment in me that needs to be expressed toward a friend, my father, my pastor, or whoever it may be, and if I do not express it, deal with it, talk about it, and resolve it in light of the Word of God, it will fester there, sink deep into my being, and cause anguish within me. And we often think, “No, I don’t resent so-and-so. No, I love that person tremendously.” But in our inner reality, we are full of bitterness, hatred, and resentment. And Satan sees the reality, and God has to work within that reality—not according to the fictions we create for ourselves, but according to the emotional reality of our being.

And that is why, if you are not careful and do not realize that there truly are grudges within you, that there is an inferiority complex and that there are things stemming from your past—you are not conscious of them—you may think that you are doing very well before God, but there are things inside you that do not allow divine grace to penetrate. And that is why we often go to church year after year after year and do not grow or prosper: because we are not being honest with ourselves.

Remember what we were saying about the truth that sets us free. When that truth penetrates our being and we discover it in light of the Word of God, that truth sets us free. Then, by understanding the mechanisms operating in our lives, we can dispel them, control them, and deal with them. Again: repression.

And the third mechanism is transference. You transfer experiences from the past into the present. If, for example—let me give you a quick example—your father... We parents make mistakes; I am one of them. But suppose you grew up in an environment where your father was extremely authoritarian, harassed and abused you, and prevented you from developing as a complete human being. Perhaps you do not even realize this about yourself, but you discovered it, you understood it, and you harbor tremendous resentment toward your father—or perhaps you are imagining it. I do not want to attack fathers alone; perhaps that is how you are interpreting it. But it is there, and it is happening within your being. What happens? Later, you come to church, and by then, through the course of your life, you have developed a problem with authority figures, because your father is the primary authority figure in your life. You have therefore transferred that resentment against your father, who represents authority, to every person or institution that represents authority. Then one day, for some minor reason, the pastor says to you, “Brother, could you sit down? Instead of sitting back there, why don’t you sit up front so that other brothers and sisters can come in?” And you do not know how, but inwardly you react with anger and resentment against the pastor who is making you give up your seat: “Why do I have to get up from my seat if this is the church?” and so on. So you stay there and protest. Often, you may be reacting out of resentment toward authority figures; the pastor is one of those authority figures who reminds you of your father, as are the deacons. And so you harbor great resentment toward any authority that reminds you of those things you went through, or believe you went through, in the past. And that is transference.

We transfer experiences from one sphere of experience to another. You had a problem with a police officer many years ago, and every police officer you see on the street makes you want to grab a stone and smash his head, because you are transferring the vivid negative experience of that incident to every similar figure.

There are people, for example, whom we meet for the first time, and we look at their face, their features, and the way they dress, and something inside us seems to reject that person. And if we are in a charismatic Christian setting, we say, “Oh, the Spirit is telling me that there is something wrong with that individual; I need to avoid him. God has given me a gift of discernment.” Look, many times, perhaps, as I was saying, you are simply projecting; you are transferring experiences from the past because this individual reminds you of someone in the past who did such-and-such a thing to you or who turned out to be a bad person. And now, because that person unconsciously reminds you of that individual, you are transferring the bad memories and resentments onto this other individual, causing those bad feelings to come alive again. The poor person does not even know what is happening in your mind, and neither do you know what is happening.

Now, if you are already aware of that past experience, analyze yourself, and connect with yourself, you can avoid being unfair to that individual, who may turn out to be the best person in the world.

And here, then, you have three mechanisms that operate continually: the mechanism of retention—we retain everything that happens in our lives; the mechanism of repression—we repress and hide what we do not like, what causes us anxiety or pain; and the third mechanism, transference—we transfer experiences and memories from the past into areas and experiences that remind us of the same thing from the past, into equivalent situations.

And these things, brothers and sisters, cause our past to govern our present lives many times without our realizing it. We are simply going to leave it there and remember that we therefore need to come before the Lord, as the psalmist says, returning to that passage that is so appropriate for this kind of sermon:

“Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts, and see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way…”

That is to say, brothers and sisters, no human being can keep present in his mind that entire flood of experiences that have cut through, pierced, and penetrated our lives. No one can do that except God; only God knows all things and understands them all, and understands the connections between the different events in a human being’s life. But I do not know them. So I have to come continually to the Lord and say to Him, Father, I know that I am a being eminently capable of deceiving myself, and I ask You to examine me continually in the light of Your Holy Spirit and to help me begin to free those areas of my life that are repressed and hidden and that I have not seen, so that You may help me heal inwardly.

Let us not take ourselves too seriously in our present thoughts. What I believe and what seems completely rational to me, and what seems completely legitimate to me in terms of a feeling or an attitude I have, may simply be, once again, one of those mechanisms of self-deception operating in me. And I have to be honest enough with God and with myself to say, hey, I do not know every part of my life. Lord, if I am wrong in this attitude toward this person, or in this kind of conduct in the church, or in this kind of attitude toward my wife or my children, Father, help me understand where this comes from. Because what most of us say is, no, I am right. This is because of such and such things. So-and-so is like that; therefore, he deserves to be treated this way or that way. But one of those mechanisms may be operating within us, causing us to act unjustly toward our children, our wives, our husbands, our parishioners in the church, our brothers and sisters, or our coworkers. And as we critically analyze our past in the light of the Word and of God’s understanding, with the light of God’s Spirit blowing and shining upon our lives, we are going to discover many things—if we are honest, if we truly have a covenant with God that He may enlighten us however He wishes, and if we are open. God will cause that lie repressed there to begin floating to the surface. Such things do not surface more often because we do not allow the Lord to do it; we are closed. We tell the Lord, yes, Lord, I want to know Your truth—but that is a lie; inwardly, we are repressing those truths.

That analysis of our past and of those mechanisms has to… The image of a carpet came to mind this morning, one of those thick carpets with many fibers or threads sticking upward. And what happens? With the trampling of life, and people walking over it with dirty and wet feet and twenty thousand other things, the fibers of that carpet, which were so lush and free when the carpet was new, begin to harden, become intertwined with one another, and fall down, turning into hard clumps. And that is often what happens to us. Those experiences from the past have caused the innocence of childhood to lose its beauty and greenness, becoming compressed and dried out. Then the innocence and beauty of childhood—those threads, those fibers of our personality—grow hard and tangled. And although God’s water comes, sometimes they are so hard and resistant, and we cling to them so tightly, that we do not allow it in.

The carpet fibers are so hard that they resist the water. That is why those shampooing machines are needed: they rotate, seize the fibers, and move them with great force, loosening and untangling them, so that the water and shampoo can then have their cleansing effect, bringing the particles to the surface so they can be cleaned away.

And I believe that, in part, we have to help the Holy Spirit, because that is the part played by our human freedom, our free will: helping the Spirit of God by examining ourselves, questioning ourselves with integrity and honesty in the light of the Word, and causing those tangled fibers to come up and separate so that the water of God’s Word and of God’s Spirit may then truly penetrate deep within and bring all that grime, all that filth, to the surface and remove it.

If you remain there self-assured, closed up within yourself, relying on yourself and convinced that your map of reality is the only true one and that nothing has changed, then you will not be set free by God. But if you say, Lord, I know that I am a sinner; Lord, I know that life in this perverted world, pierced through by sin, has twisted me. I need You—search me, O God, know my heart, test me, and see whether there is any wicked way in me. That is to say, Lord, see whether there are areas of my life that are twisted and lodged there—whether it is that wounded child, or that vengeful child, or that angry child, that depressed child with low self-esteem or all kinds of resentments, or with a destructive and dark view of the world—so that child may come to the surface for You to tend to him, give him Your comfort, cleanse him, heal him, and bring him into Your wholeness.

Because I believe that what God says is true: if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. But we have to open ourselves so that the Lord may then enter and make that aspect of our lives a reality.

We said earlier that the Lord told Joshua, I have given you every land upon which the sole of your foot shall tread. And then He said to him, but see, I command you to be strong and courageous; do not fear or lose heart, because I will be with you wherever you go, and so on. He gave him the Word; He told him, do not depart from this way, meditate on the Word, teach it to your children, and so on. Joshua also had a part to play. The Lord had told him, wherever you go with My sword in My name, I will give you every enemy who stands before you; but see, I command you to exert yourself. Be brave; have the courage to look at the reality of your life exactly as it is, to see it laid bare, so that My promise may then become a reality in your life. Use My Word, use My understanding, use the messages and the teachers’ teachings, use the signs, use prayer as weapons through which those hardened fibers of your carpet can be set free, so that My Word may penetrate into the depths of your being.

Brothers and sisters, let us make a covenant like that with the Lord. Let us say to Him, Father, if there is anything in my past, if some stunted child has remained stuck there inside me, I want You to bring him into the light, help me look at my past in this way, heal me, and cleanse me; and the Lord will do it.

Thanks be to the Lord because His Word is real, His Word is powerful, and if we entrust our lives to the Lord, He will be faithful to straighten them out and lead us along paths of truth. God bless us.