I don’t know how to begin,” Jill said, looking troubled. “I’m afraid that if I tell you what happened, you’ll think I’m an unfit mother or that I don’t love my child.”
“I don’t know what it is you did,” I replied, “but I can tell that you’re very concerned about it. Why don’t you tell me about it, and then we’ll see what I think.”
So Jill began. Whenever her four-year-old daughter made a mistake, such as spilling her milk or making a mess, Jill would lose control and explode. She would verbally attack her daughter, screaming horribly hurtful things and calling Amanda names. Then, devastated, she’d realize what she was doing and immediately leave the room. Her guilt overwhelmed her.
“How long has this been going on?” I asked.
“For about the last year and a half. Ever since Amanda became enough of a person to move around and make messes and mistakes. They’re really not even mistakes; she’s so young, I know she’s just learning. But at those times, I totally lose control. I don’t even think about what Amanda knows or doesn’t know. I’ve lost it by then, and almost don’t even know where I am.”
“What have you tried so far?”
“Mostly memorizing Scripture about anger and taking ‘timeouts’ when I’m angry. But most of the time I can’t do that. By the time I know I’m angry, it’s all over.”
“This may sound like a crazy question, Jill, but did you ever experience anything like that when you were a child?”
“Well, I … “ Unable to finish her sentence, she began sobbing uncontrollably. It was a while before she was able to talk again. When she did, she told horror stories about how her mother screamed at her, about how verbally abusive her home had been. Jill had only to commit some minor mistake, and her mother yelled at her that she was stupid, bad, worthless. Yet as she talked about her past, her pain and fear soon overcame her, and she soon shut down again.
She was reluctant to speak about her traumatic past, Jill said, because of what her pastor had taught her about looking at the past. “The Bible says that old things are passed away and all things are new,” Jill told me. “I’m a new creation. How can things from the past have any hold on me? I must forget what lies behind and press on. I just need to depend on the Holy Spirit to empower me, and I need to repent of my anger, and I’m sure I’ll be okay.”
“Have you tried that?” I asked her.
Her look told me she had and that it had not worked.
She did not know why her past hurts were still causing her pain, and why she was repeating them with her own daughter. She felt helpless.
Jill’s story is not unusual. Many adults repeat their parents’ patterns in their own parenting, or are affected by what they suffered as a child. A thirty-five-year-old woman is unable to fall asleep at night because of memories of violence she suffered as a child. A happily married woman cannot have sexual intercourse with her husband because of memories of childhood sexual abuse. A forty-year-old man suffers immobilizing depression every time he watches his parents interact with his children, because he remembers how they raised him to be impossibly perfect.
In each instance, adults in favorable circumstances are being affected by things that happened in their past. Although they had tried to leave the past behind, those past events stubbornly kept disrupting their functioning in the present.
In these cases, people recognized how the past hurt their adult lives. Even more problematic, however, is when one’s life isn’t working—and the individual doesn’t know why. He gets depressed or suffers panic attacks. She can’t stop bingeing and purging. He spends his paycheck away as soon as he gets it. She is unable to meet simple goals she sets for herself.
The most common problems are relational: People are drawn into unhealthy relationships, or they constantly repeat a destructive relational pattern, regardless of their efforts to break it. For example, they find themselves attracted to critical or controlling people. Or they get hooked up with abusive individuals and are unable to repeatedly stand up to them. Or—and this may be the most heartbreaking—they are unable to respond to good people, distancing themselves from those who love them. And they can’t figure out why they do it.
Some of them enter therapy, and their therapists reveal the connection of their problems to relationships in their past, or to past hurts that they’ve never dealt with. Such patients discover unfinished business inside them.
Then Christian friends or teachers tell them that because they are a new creation in Christ, the past should have no claim over them. They should “forget what lies behind and press on” (Phil. 3:13–14).
As if that’s not confusing enough, some discover that it was therapy, not faith, that helped them deal with their past and that ushered them into a degree of freedom and resolution. Despite their increasing relief from emotional pain, they’re nagged by guilt, by the feeling that they’ve done something unspiritual. After all, they reason, they didn’t rely on Christ for healing, but ran off to therapy—what some Bible teachers denounce as humanistic, secular psychology. They feel as if Christ saved them, but therapy healed them.
In this chapter we will explore the false assumption “I need to leave the past behind.” Proponents of this idea say the past is not important; we should just press on to what lies ahead. Yet this is a misapplication of Scripture; dealing with our past is very biblical.
Jason came into therapy because his wife was frustrated with his emotional distance from the children. As we explored what made it difficult for him to connect with his children, I asked Jason about his own father.
His father was wonderful, Jason told me, and he had always looked up to him. “It seems that you and your father did much better together than you and your children are doing,” I said. “I wonder what went wrong.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with his death.”
“What do you mean?”
“He died when I was thirteen. He just never woke up one morning. I watched the paramedics come in and take him away under a sheet. Mom never talked about it. My uncle made all the funeral arrangements, but he didn’t talk about it, either.” And then he began to cry.
As we continued to work, he began to recognize his anger toward God for the sudden loss of his father, and toward his mother and uncle for not helping him through his feelings of grief. As he worked through the loss and felt the grief he never allowed himself to experience when he was a teenager, he stopped distancing himself from his own children.
His progress puzzled him. “Why did the past affect me now?” he asked.
“When were you feeling the pain of your father’s death?”
“Well, now—today, as an adult.”
“So, we really aren’t talking about the past at all, are we? You carry your grief in your soul today. Your father’s death occurred years ago, but your pain you feel today, right now. That is the present, not the past.”
“I guess that’s true,” Jason replied. “I would feel distant every time I started to get close to the kids, because getting close to the kids got me close to my feelings about my father.”
“I think you’re right,” I said. “The past can’t really affect us, but our present feelings about the past can.”
We as humans are caught in the flow of time. We divide our lives into past, present, and future. But the Bible looks at our lives from the perspective of eternity, in which there is no past or future—only the present. The things we would say are “in our past” are, according to the Bible, part of our present, since from the perspective of eternity that is all there is.
People have hurt us, we have hurt people, we have suffered wrong, and we have done things that are wrong. We would say, “All those things happened in the past and can’t be changed.” But the Bible shifts the focus from the past to the eternal present: “What is the state of your soul and everything in it now? Have your past experiences been exposed to the light? Have they been forgiven? Have you repented of them? Have you exposed the hurt to love and light? Have we grieved over and let go of hurtful things, or are we still hanging onto them? We need to see our lives and our souls not as past and present, but as eternal.
Again, what the Bible always asks of us is this: Have the things in our souls—pain, patterns, skills, desires, fears—been exposed to the light of God’s grace, truth, and forgiveness? If so, those things are healed and transformed. However, if we don’t expose things of the past to the light of God’s truth and love, they remain in darkness and are still alive today, creating fruits of darkness in us. Unconnected from the transforming power of God’s love and light, they take on a life of their own.
Jill’s relationship with her mother had never been brought out into the open, never been exposed to the light. Still plaguing Jill in a hurtful and unforgiving way, her relationship with her mother had not been transformed through forgiveness—and so it was very much alive in the present. Jason’s grief for his father had never been expressed, so it remained alive, part of Jason’s day-to-day feelings into his adulthood. Whatever in us has not been brought out into the open still has a life of its own in the past—and you can be sure that it will affect our present relationships.
The teaching that we need not worry about the past’s influence on us is especially destructive and unbiblical because it forbids bringing the things that are in the darkness into the light and having the grace of God touch them.
A misinterpretation of the popular “forget the past” Scripture explains why many never bring their feelings into the light.
But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a, loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. … But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 3:7–9, 13–14)
“What is behind” Paul is not his hurts or situations that require him to forgive someone or even his old sins. The past that Paul is forgetting is his old way of trying to achieve righteousness. He spends the entire first part of this chapter listing his accomplishments to illustrate to the Philippians how he vainly tried to please God. But it didn’t work, he says. He’s leaving the old system behind. He’s found a new faith.
In fact, by enumerating his accomplishments earlier in the chapter, he was bringing them to the light, confessing them, grieving them. He never denied what he had done.
Paul, then, is not saying in this passage to let bygones be bygones, as some inaccurately interpret it. To the contrary, the apostle models for us the act of bringing one’s past to the light and confessing it.
Teachers who tell you simply to forget the past and press on are ignoring or even contradicting pivotal biblical commands. These directives reveal why dealing with the past is so important.
The first biblical directive is that we bring into the light whatever is in darkness. Our past, in biblical terms, is our history. The Bible isn’t concerned about when something happened, whether today or ten years ago. The Bible is interested only in whether we have denied the problem and pushed it into the darkness, or whether we have exposed it to the light and dealt with it in God’s way. Have we covered it up, or have we confessed it and brought it to the light?
Confession, or bringing things to the light, opens us up to the process of transformation. And transformation is what God is interested in: “Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. … Everything exposed by the light becomes visible” (Eph. 5:11, 13).
We can see this truth in Jill’s life. She was very angry at her mother for how she had been treated, and that anger had never been brought into the light. Hadn’t her pastor told her to forget the past, like Paul taught? As a result, she had never been “angry without sinning,” and that unresolved anger poisoned her relationship with her daughter (Eph. 4:26–27). By not dealing with her anger, she had given the Devil a foothold in her personality.
Besides covering up feelings and hurts from the past, we often have hidden motives generated by past relationships. For example, a man is highly ambitious in order to gain the approval of his mother. A woman approaches everything competitively, always thinking of coming out on top, in order to settle an old score with a sister. Such motives usually relate to a problem in a past relationship that has never been resolved.
In short, the past is important because, until we deal with it, it is part of what the Bible calls “the darkness” of our soul. If we have not confessed sins of the past or forgiven others for sinning against us, then these sins rule us, and the devil gains a stronghold in our lives. To teach that examining the past is wrong contradicts the Bible’s teaching to deal with the darkness inside. Past relationships and feelings usually need to be dealt with in the present.
Unless we look at the past, furthermore, we cannot truly forgive. Forgiveness deals with the past. Forgiveness is God’s way of making right things that have hurt us. To know whom to forgive, we must know what happened to us, name the sin, and realize who is guilty.
The hurt and abuse people faced as children show themselves in behavioral and relational patterns—patterns that often result from unforgiveness in their hearts. Because they have never forgiven those who hurt them, they may still be unconsciously angry at them.
Tom constantly argued with his superiors over trivial matters. He made an issue of everything, then always had to get in the last blow. When he began exploring this problem in counseling, he realized that he was still trying to settle an old score with his father. His father always had to have the upper hand in a discussion and would put young Tom down whenever they talked. Although Tom thought he had forgiven his father years ago, his present behavior showed otherwise. He gradually realized that he had not forgiven his father, but was still trying to make all the authority figures in his life pay what his father owed.
As Tom got in touch with the anger he felt toward his father, he started to deal with the anger and let it go. That is, he began doing the work of grace: “Forgiving others as God in Christ has forgiven you” (Eph. 4:32). Once he accepted his father, he could accept other authority figures as well.
Another problem with teaching that you should leave the past behind is its disregard for the brokenhearted (much like teaching that Christians should not have pain, as we discussed in chapter 2). The Bible repeatedly describes how, in the words of the psalmist, God is “close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Ps. 34:18).
A primary way that God heals the brokenhearted is through his church. As its members, we are his hands to touch each other’s pain. He has commanded us to love and minister to one another with compassion, mercy, confrontation, help, and strength. The New Testament repeatedly commands us to minister emotionally, spiritually, and physically to one another.
In fact, God gets plainly upset when his people do not help his hurting ones: “You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured.” Not only will he do the job for us (“I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak”), but he will destroy “the sleek and the strong,” those with power who had fattened themselves by oppressing the weak (Ezek. 34:4, 16).
An individual may suffer pain now because of past wounds that have gone untouched by love. Such abandoned or otherwise hurt people carry broken, abused hearts. And however convincingly a teacher claims that such hurts simply vanish with time, they don’t. They need to be touched.
What heals them is God’s love through his people and his Spirit. When someone has a broken heart, they need the love of other believers. The Bible says that loving one another is a manifestation of the grace of God (1 Peter 4:8).
Those who have been hurt by the family they grew up in need the love and care of their new family, the family of God (Luke 8:21), to heal their old wounds and give them the love they need.
Openness to the past is the way through grief, which in turn is the process of letting go of things that we were once attached to. This letting go allows us to be open to the present. In short, loss opens the door to new life.
Grieving is a conscious process by which we deliberately release our attachment to persons, goals, wishes, or religious systems that we no longer can have. Our attachment to these outgrown things, in fact, keeps us from connecting to new and better things that God has for us (2 Cor. 6:11–13).
Lot’s wife was one who held onto the past and was unable to connect with new things. Leave Sodom, God told her. But her ties were so strong that she was not able to leave completely. Instead of grieving her losses and moving on, she looked back longingly at her former life, and “she became a pillar of salt” (Gen. 19:26).
Jesus alluded to her when he taught the concept of losing one’s life. “Remember Lot’s wife!” he says. “Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Luke 17:32–33). Ties to the old life keep us from living the new life God has planned for us.
Hurts and losses in our past can keep us stuck emotionally and spiritually if we do not grieve them, thereby releasing them. You can be tied to a person who is dead, tied to a person whose love you can’t have, tied to the approval of someone who will never give it, tied to a fantasy impossible to realize. Whatever it is, an emotional tie to something from the past can keep us stuck in the present.
God’s way of dealing with this is through grief, or letting go. We are freed by realizing what we have lost, feeling anger and sadness, and then letting go.
Listen to the value that the Bible places on grieving:
It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure. (Eccl. 7:2–4)
Ironically, sadness can move a person out of pain and into happiness. Grief can transform a heart, a fact that many who have worked their way through depression can testify to. As they worked through their underlying sadness, their depression lifted.
Only when we feel the pain of our losses can we connect with the care available to us. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matt. 5:4). Many have care available to them, but they are unable to accept it because they have not mourned. Grieving opens up a heart to let new love in.
Too many individuals experience a loss in life yet never grieve—despite the fact that it is normal to grieve. Scriptures record many instances of God grieving: He grieved the loss of a perfect creation. He expressed his pain and grief on the cross of Calvary. Jesus, a man “acquainted with grief,” was sad when his friend Lazarus died. When we lose something important and do not grieve, our heart holds onto the old attachment—and we get stuck. We can move on only as the grieving process allows us to let go.
If our heart is frozen in grief, we are unable to feel feelings God has designed for us. Many people experience frozen grief as depression. Grief (sadness and anger) that has not been expressed and resolved leads to depression. (Solomon speaks of grief being associated with a happy heart.) Sadness and anger need to go somewhere. If we express them, we let go of them and can move toward happiness. But depression does not go anywhere; it sits like a block of mud. Often it needs to be washed away with tears of sadness, and then it moves out of one’s system.
So avoid the teaching that one should leave the past behind, for it hinders people from grieving. If you do not grieve, you’ll be stuck holding onto old things in your heart. Instead, do as Paul did when he “consider[ed] everything a loss” (Phil. 3:8). Talk about the past. Acknowledge it. Grieve over it, as God designed. (He gave you tear ducts for a reason.) Then let it go. Lose it. This death opens the door for a resurrection. Do not fear mourning, and pay no attention to anyone who tells you that mourning the past is unbiblical. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:4).
When people examine the patterns they learned in the families they grew up in—that is, their families of origin—they are often accused of sidestepping their own problems and blaming their parents for their behavior. “Why do you avoid life?” they are asked. “Why do you insist on fixating on things you can’t change?”
Certainly, it is easy to blame others when we ought to take responsibility for our own behavior. Some individuals are stuck in the blaming rut. (We addressed this problem in Assumption #4.)
However, there are solid biblical reasons for exploring the past—in particular, your past in your family of origin. We have already discussed some reasons: bringing things out of darkness, understanding whom we need to forgive, realizing with whom we should reconcile, and grieving.
An equally important reason for understanding the past is to repent—to turn away from patterns we learned in our families of origin.
The Old Testament records instance after instance of God confronting people for walking in the wicked ways of their fathers. He points out that they are repeating generational sin, and calls them to repentance. He gives them insight into their behavior.1
“Do not be like your fathers and brothers, who were unfaithful to the Lord, the God of their fathers, so that he made them an object of horror, as you see. Do not be stiff-necked, as your fathers were; submit to the Lord” (2 Chron. 30:7–8).
“Will you judge them? Will you judge them, son of man? Then confront them with the detestable practices of their fathers and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says’” (Ezek. 20:4).
God asked them to see the evil of their fathers, disagree with it, and turn to his ways.
Nehemiah tells us that the Israelites “stood in their places and confessed their sins and the wickedness of their fathers” (9:2). We similarly experience spiritual revival and repentance by understanding which ways of our parents were not pleasing to God, were not ways in which he wants us to relate to him or to each other. Only when you bring these patterns into the open can you call them evil and turn from them.
Conversely, when people deny the sins of their fathers, they are destined to repeat them. If they never acknowledge hurtful, even evil patterns of relating, they blindly go on repeating them. They hurt their own children as they were hurt themselves.
Insight and confession, then, break the chain of generational sin and give hope. Yet many feel destined to continue dysfunctional patterns because they were taught an erroneous interpretation of Exodus 20:5, which speaks of sin being carried on into the third and fourth generations. That is a half truth, however. The Bible also teaches that God will honor any individual in a generational chain who repents; his repentance will help him break the links of that chain.
The person who sins will die. The son will not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son’s iniquity; the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself. But if the wicked man turns from all his sins which he has committed and observes all My statutes and practices justice and righteousness, he shall surely live; he shall not die. All his transgressions which he has committed will not be remembered against him; because of his righteousness which he has practiced, he will live. (Ezek. 18:20–22 NASB)
God is always willing to forgive those who acknowledge their sin and repent. The chain of generational sin can be broken.
Much of repentance is looking at the past to see what you learned, from whom you learned it, and how you are repeating that pattern today. Confession and repentance of ungodly family ways—a common pattern—is a powerful dynamic of the spiritual life. Confess whatever wicked ways were learned in your early years, turn from them, and enjoy the freedom that comes from walking in the light of God and not repeating inherited patterns of darkness.
If in this moral inventory we find not only generational, family sin but personal sin that we alone are responsible for, we need to confess that sin, ask for forgiveness, and move on (1 John 1:9). And this confession is not for God’s ears only. We need to confess to each other (see James 5:16) in order to feel the full power of the grace of God. Many have never felt God’s grace because they’ve never confessed their darkness to another person and felt his or her full acceptance. One of the ways we feel God’s acceptance is through the love of his people (1 Peter 4:10).
In addition, we need to ask forgiveness of, and make amends to, the people we have hurt. Making amends leads to reconciliation, ownership of our sin, and help for the people we have hurt. Acknowledging our own sin against other people makes them feel better and helps them work through what we did to them.
Listen to what Jesus says about this:
If therefore you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your offering there before the altar, and go your way; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering. Make friends quickly with your opponent at law while you are with him on the way, in order that your opponent may not deliver you to the judge, and the judge to the officer, and you be thrown into prison. Truly I say to you, you shall not come out of there, until you have paid up the last cent. (Matt. 5:23–26 NASB)
God is serious about how we treat each other. In making amends there is healing for us as well as healing for those we hurt.
It is blatantly wrong to teach that we should just forget the past, for the simple reason that the past will one day be our entire life. Past, present, and future are aspects of our soul that need to be reconciled to God.
We cannot change our past. But we must change our internal connections to those who have hurt us by forgiving them. We must release our demand that they somehow make it up to us. We need to let go of lost dreams and people.
We must take our living hurts from the past to those who can heal them. We must bring to light patterns we have learned from our parents and other adults, confess those destructive patterns, disagree with them, and repent from them. If we have wronged people, we must confess our sin, apologize to those we have hurt, and make amends.
Though none of these processes change the past, they nevertheless redeem the past. God is in the process of reconciling everything that has gone wrong, including our personal past: he deals with the past, reconciling people to himself, repairing damage, rebuilding what sin has destroyed. But in order for him to deal with our past, we need to bring all of our broken parts to him. This is the ultimate dealing with the past. God “was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Col. 1:19–20).
Bring your history to God, whether it happened two days or twenty years ago. Bring it to him and to his people, allow his light and grace to transform it, bring his truth to bear on it, and experience the reconciliation of your whole life.