Classic Sermon #6055: Letting Go of the Past (A)

Exodus chapter 2, verse from 2 to 10, a story that you know very well but I want to give it a slightly different approach. Talk about the birth of Moses, says the word of the Lord that:

“…a man from the family of Levi went and took a daughter of Levi to be his wife, and she conceived and gave birth to a son, and seeing that he was beautiful, she hid him for three months, but being unable to hide him any longer, she took a chest. of reeds and caulked it with asphalt and tar and placed the child in it and put it in a reedbed on the river bank….”

You know that Pharaoh wanted to kill the Jewish children so they hid him.

"...and one of his sisters stood in the distance to see what would happen to the child and Pharaoh's daughter went down to wash in the river and her maidens walking along the river bank saw the chest in the reedbed and sent her maidservant to take it and when he opened it he saw the child and behold, the child was crying and having compassion on him, he said, this is one of the children of the Hebrews. Then his sister saw the daughter of Pharaoh, -that is, the sister of Moses,- will I go and call you a nurse of the Hebrews to raise this child for you? And Pharaoh's daughter answered, go. Then the maiden went and called the child's mother to whom Pharaoh's daughter said, take this child and raise it for me and I will pay you. And the woman took the child and raised him and when the child grew up she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, who adopted him, that is, she adopted him, and named him Moses, saying, because I drew him out of the waters..."

Now let's quickly go to First Corinthians 13:11, a verse or two that I want you to keep in mind there as well, very familiar. First Corinthians 13:11, that famous passage about love, the Apostle Paul says there:

"... When I was a child I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I judged like a child, but when I became a man I left what I was as a child..."

And the last passage is found in Second Corinthians, the next book, chapter 5, verse 17 and there it says, listen to this, brothers, I don't know how many of you truly, I also have believed what it says there, it says:

"... So if anyone is in Christ he is a new creature, old things have passed away, behold, all things have become new..."

The issue that concerns me today is the past. God dwells, says the Bible, in an eternal present, in an eternity. God does not know that of present, past and future. His time is the time of eternity. Man has to imitate, the Christian to a certain extent has to imitate God and live in the present, in the now. But what about the past, because brothers, the past sometimes governs our present and there is the part that I want to play on this day.

And if we were to speak in one way, we could say that this sermon points to the need that each of us has to free ourselves from the past. We have to, this man who enslaves us, I am thinking about what Christ said, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free, and the Jews said to him, who are we? We have never been slaves to anyone, we do not have to be free.

But the Lord was also speaking to them about that Israelite past that they were clinging to and they couldn't see the present of the Messiah that was there in front of them, because they had that past glory of Israel, when Israel ruled all the nations around the Middle East. , and they wanted to return to that glory and were filled with that pride of the people that once was great and could not recognize the humble Messiah who came walking on a donkey as a symbol of the humility of the son of God.

And they did not want to acknowledge that there was an image from the past there subconsciously that was governing their perceptions, their words, their actions, their reactions to the Messiah who was standing in front of them, and they could not see the glorious present of God because they were enslaved by the past.

And there was like a tape recorder that was playing a message and telling them, no, the Messiah cannot be like that, the Messiah is going to be a glorious being who is going to come on a white horse with a great and shining sword in his hand and we it is going to liberate from the Roman yoke and it is going to restore Israel back to its former position of glory. And then that tape recorder, while the humble Messiah that was Jesus Christ spoke to them about a spiritual, internal, mental, profound liberation, what they had was that tape recorder of Israel's glorious, military, political past, and it did not allow them then to have access to the present truth of the Lord who was there.

And brothers, many times we, children of God, believers in Jesus Christ, who have the privilege of speaking in our hands, make the same mistake. And we cannot perceive the present accurately, nor can we react to the experiences of the present, nor can we be happy with our present, because in the subconscious of our mind, behind there, without realizing it, a tape recorder is working whose messages are made up of our experiences back there. the remote past, many times from our childhood. And then the experiences of the present, we distort them according to the coded messages of that recorder. And we do not listen to the voices of our present, we distort them because they do not match the voices and the tonality of that pre-recorded message that is there in the back of our consciousness.

Again, these things do not sound very spiritual because what I want is to contrast what the word of God says with that reality of the people of God. The Apostle Paul says, when I was a child I spoke like a child, I judged like a child, I thought like a child, but when I became a man I left the things that were of a child.

But brothers, most human beings do not fill that ambitious pattern of the word of God. Although we are already grown men and women, with wives, husbands, children, work, adult responsibilities, there is still a child within us with a pre-recorded 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 fully entering the responsibilities, privileges and glory of being an adult, does not match the reality of our lives.

There is that other glorious passage in First Corinthians, if anyone is in Christ he is a new creature, old things have passed away, behold, all things are made new, Second Corinthians 5. What does that mean? Again, the same, that when we enter the glorious presence, influence, healing, healing grace of Jesus Christ, in the mind of God there is already a man, a woman, a young man who has left behind the deforming wounds of the past and the traumas of childhood and the ugly things of our past experiences, the grudges, the wounds, and already then in the mind of God the desire of God, and the resources of God are there for us to then jump and access to a glorious newness of life in Jesus Christ.

And yet, once again, this often does not occur 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 to carry the negative baggage of our experiences. From the past. And we have not freed ourselves from the ghosts that are in our past and from the dead that we have locked up in our closets. Many times without knowing that they are there.

and what happens? That, as we said before, when the experiences of our past, many of them distorting, are not observed and analyzed in the light of the word of God, when they remain there simply tucked away in the back of our mental house and we do not know why. they are there or that they are there, nor how to explain them, those repressed experiences that are deep within our being distort our lives and manifest themselves in negative ways in our existence.

It's like when you enter your house and you smell a bad smell. And you say what happens if I just washed the house and everything is perfumed, etc. And you start looking, look for the garbage, there is nothing, look if the boys threw something somewhere, there is nothing, but the house smells bad. The fact that you know or don't know where it is that makes the house smell bad, the house smells bad because that does not depend on your conscience but depends on the fact that something is there that is smelly and that it is contaminating the air of home. And until you go and search and find where the piece of meat is, excuse me for being a little grotesque, hiding there for three or four days rotting and making the house smell bad, you can't get rid of that bad smell.

It also happens with our conscience. There are experiences from our past and from our childhood that have marked us in a profound way and have torn our personality and sensibility and we don't know what it is but it is there and it is ruling our lives and it is deforming our actions and how it is there repressed and locked up, with keys that we ourselves have closed without realizing it, deceiving ourselves, they are there contaminating, they are smelling bad because the air does not penetrate them and they are contaminating our affective life, our emotions, our thoughts, and again deforming our actions .

And then one has to go and examine those rooms and do an investigation of the rooms in the house and look for those padlocks that are already corroded because they have never been opened, and open them and open the door to let the light in. And that we have to do regularly in our lives, a kind of mental and emotional hygiene in which we go back to our past and examine the experiences of the past so that the light of God's spirit, here is the key, and so that the word of God, and at the end I am going to touch a little more on these techniques of mental and emotional hygiene, so that the light of the spirit of God and the word of God can shine on those hidden areas of our life and can heal them because The Bible says that the word of God is alive and effective and penetrates, it says, until it breaks joints and bones and divides the soul from the spirit. And he says that there are no things in this world that are hidden from his 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 are there sleepy and shrunken and that smell bad, then the light of the spirit, the wind of the spirit enters and blows and cleans those areas.

There are three psychological mechanisms at work in this matter of the past that I would like to briefly touch on with you at the risk of sounding very technical. What I would like is that simply if we do not resolve anything on this day because they are issues that take so long to discuss, at least that we leave here sensitized, aware of the importance of that mental hygiene, of returning to our past from time to time and to look at it and look at it honestly and with the integrity of the Lord so that then God can do His work there.

The first mechanism is the following and I would call it "retention", and it is the simple fact that I used an illustration this week speaking with a person from the church, that the human mind can be compared to a lake, a deep lake and The fishermen and the swimmers come over that lake, and the people who go to bathe in summer and you see that what they are fishing, they take the can of beer when they run out, throw it away and the can goes to the bottom. And if a fish that they didn't like comes out and it's already dead, they catch it, throw it away and the fish goes to the bottom and rots there in the middle of the water. And if a ship sinks, it goes to the bottom and stays there. The surface looks very clean, but down there at the bottom of the lake there is a whole history of all the boats and the people that have passed through the surface of that lake and stopped there and that lake is a receptacle that receives everything, what good and bad. There, as I tell you, are the empty and corroded cans, there are pieces of wood already eaten away by the water, there are also the live, healthy fish that move and there are the algae and the healthy vegetation, there is the good and there is the bad, there is life and there is death, there is what smells good and there is what smells bad. And the absolute quality of the water in that lake is a sum total of all the things that have fallen into it.

And it is also our personality, it is also our mind, it is also our emotions. Human beings, say psychologists, do not forget anything about their experiences. There are things that I walked from my house to here today, I saw that I didn't even know I saw but they are registered within me. They are there and they have affected me, I don't know how they have affected me but they are there. The fact that I am aware of them does not mean that they are or are not. My consciousness and my subconscious register it and I am, I don't know how continuously, and you are also absorbing all the experiences of your past and they are falling there, they are being deposited, and you are inadvertently ordering them and placing them in different compartments of your life, some are too painful and since you don't like to think about those things that are too painful and cause you anxiety, you take them and put them deep in the back, in the last closet and make You realize you never saw them, or if you did, you briefly realize you forgot about them, but they are there and they are affecting you.

Some time ago I was talking to a person and he told me about a very painful experience, I'm not going to be too specific, but in his childhood his parents, when he was a child and he came to discover that only through weeks of counseling with a Christian psychologist, one night his parents made him feel very embarrassed and he did not remember that. Then, remembering, he says that he remembers very clearly when at night already in his bed crying, he said to himself, it doesn't matter, tomorrow I won't remember what happened and everything will be fine. And that experience seems to have had such a big impact on his life, that years and years later that adult person can't be happy in terms of a relationship because there are things there in his past that he didn't even remember. They have affected you. And I could mention other cases of things that happen and then the light goes on, and one says, wow, that really happened years ago and this has been affecting me.

And that subconscious message has remained there, that experience that we have repressed because it was too painful, we have kept it in the depths of our being but it remains. Remember what I was saying, that physicists say that energy can neither be destroyed nor created, but it can be changed in different ways. And the negative and positive energies that enter our lives do not disappear, they continue to move, it's just that we suppress them and disguise them and channel them in other ways, but they are there working within us.

So let's remember this, brothers, every experience of our life remains within us and it depends on what we do with that experience so that it affects us in a positive or negative way.

But remember that, that our subconscious, which is the broadest part of our personality, those things of which we are not aware of, makes up about 99% of our personality. What you remember and believe affects you is only 1%, it is only a part, a tip of an immense mountain. And we believe that this is me, the part that I know of myself, but no, the greater part of me is the entire bottom of that huge lake that is there corrupted and contaminated with twenty thousand corrosive and destructive substances that have have been accumulating at the bottom of the lake and have affected the quality of the water. So that's an important point and we can use that to remember that the experiences that we give our children affect them for life and be careful, I say that by the way, how we treat our children because they are a tape recorder that it is absorbing all sounds, whether we are aware of it or not, and all experiences and all things that you see and feel. Our past is there with us, you carry it. The good and bad and small and large experiences of your childhood are with you, 30, 40, 60, 80 years later and are influencing your life. And the simple fact that you are aware of this will help you to look back and try to analyze your existence in the light of that long career, of that baggage that you carry with you.

The second thing is this aspect of repression, which is in psychological terms and is the idea that, what I was saying, when you have a very negative experience, that it causes you anxiety or that it upsets you or that it threatens your perception of yourself or of your world, or of someone you love very much, or of your system of ethical or moral or spiritual values, when we are threatened with an experience or a memory that threatens us in a very profound way, you know what we do, hide it deep down, repress it, forget it, and the human being is equipped in a way that can do that. Don't ask me, nobody knows how that mechanism works, but the fact is that the mechanism of repression is very real and you hide what you don't like and what causes you tension and what causes anxiety and cover it up. There is another word, it sublimates it, so what you do is express it, you have to express the presence of it inside, and many times the neuroses and traumas, and the obsessions and compulsions, and our external habits They are ways for us to symbolically express those energies that are repressed and hidden there, but there is an equivalence and when those things cause us fear or pain, we hide them, and we pretend that they do not exist.

Let's say the example of every child wants his father and mother to be perfect. No child wants to see the inconsistencies in their parents' flaws because that threatens the child's safety. The child wants to think that his parents are all-powerful and that they can protect him from any problem, that they are good, that they love him intensely, and then in the child's mind there is a mechanism often to repress everything that makes him see his parents. parents in a negative light. And then you see that there are many children who do, they realize that their parents do not love them or that they are too authoritarian over them and that they have repressed their personality, and that they are abusive, that they are neglectful, that they do not want them , but in the heart of the child, the child cannot admit to himself that his parents are bad, in other words, or that he does not like them. So he represses that knowledge that he has realized and replaces it with a fictitious truth, that my parents love me, my parents love me, and then they grow up with that conscious, schizophrenic truth, on the one hand they have built a priceless castle on the other. above, but the real part, below is a castle of skeletons and monsters, it is the subconscious.

So on the surface you see him doing all sorts of nice things for his parents, bringing them flowers when they are old, etc, etc., but inside he is living a very neurotic life and has an anger and resentment towards his parents that he doesn't they wanted him when he was a child, and they didn't take care of him, and then he's divided. And that deep knowledge that is repressed is manifested in destructive ways, sometimes doing things that are ultimately aggressive against his parents, maybe that flower that he brings him on a Sunday, is counterbalanced with forgetting him for six months later to get revenge on them. Or do other things still, or wait until they're old and then put them somewhere to rot and just forget about them. Who knows how many of the things that happen today with the elderly and all things, are due to a generation that is full of resentment towards their parents who neglected them in other times.

And are they ways that the person does not say to each other, if you ask him, do you love your parents? 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 that they have known since childhood and then manifest that truth in unconscious aggressive ways, without their realizing it.

And we work with that mechanism in different ways in our life, with our friendships, with our different experiences, all of this, but it's there, in a sense we are punishing others, the world and the people we think have offended us in forms, that is, we create a fictitious truth and a real truth. And then one has to be careful, if one does not know how I am functioning, if there is some resentment in me to express towards a friend, or towards my father or towards my pastor, whatever, if I do not express that and do not I deal with it, and I don't speak it and I don't resolve it in the light of God's word, that is going to be festering there, and it is going to be getting into the depths of my being and it is going to be causing anguish in me. And we often believe, no, if I don't have resentment against so and so, no, if I love that person in a tremendous way. But in our internal reality we are full of resentment and hatred and resentment. And Satan sees reality and God has to operate within that reality, not according to the fictions that we create for ourselves, but according to the affective reality of our being.

And that is why if you are not careful and you do not realize that there are grudges in you and there is an inferiority complex, and there are things that are due to your past, you are not aware of them, you believe that you are before God very well, but within you there are things that do not allow divine grace to penetrate. And that's why many times we go to church year after year after year and we don't grow and we don't prosper because we're not being honest with ourselves.

Remember what we said about the truth that sets us free. When that truth penetrates our being and we discover it in the light of the word of God, that truth frees us and then by understanding the mechanisms that are operating in our lives, then we can dispel them and we can control them and we can deal with them. Again, suppression.

And the third mechanism is transfer. You transfer the experiences of the past to the present. If you, for example, were, let's say, I'll give a quick example, if your father, parents make mistakes, I'm one of them, but if let's say you grew up in an environment where your father was extremely authoritarian and harassed and abused you from you and prevented you from developing as a full human being, perhaps you don't even realize that you did, but you discovered it, you understood it and you have a tremendous resentment towards your father, or perhaps you are imagining it. I don't want to attack the parents only, perhaps you are interpreting it that way, but it is there and it is happening in your being. What's happening? That then later you arrive at church and you already have a problem with authority figures throughout your life because your father is the primary authority figure in your life, and you then have transferred that resentment against your father who represents authority against any person, or any institution that represents authority. Then one day the pastor, let's say, for some minimal reason says to him, brother, you could sit, instead of sitting back there, why don't you sit better there in front so that other brothers can come. And you don't know how but you react with anger inside, and a resentment against the pastor who is taking you out of your seat, and why do I have to get up from my seat if this is the church, etc., then you stay there and protest. Many times you are perhaps reacting to a grudge against authority figures, the pastor is one of those authority figures that reminds you, the deacons. And then you have a great resentment against any authority that reminds you of those things that you have gone through or believe have happened in the past. And that's the transfer.

We transfer experiences from one domain of expertise to another domain of expertise. You had a problem with a policeman many years ago, every policeman you see on the street wants to have a stone and break his head, because you are transferring the living negative experience of that experience to any similar figure.

There are people we know, for example, who are introduced to us and we look at their faces, features and the way they dress and something inside of us kind of rejects that person. And if we are in a charismatic Christian environment, we say, oh, the spirit is telling me that there is something wrong with that individual, we must avoid it. God has given me a gift of discernment. Look, perhaps many times, as I was saying, it is simply that you are projecting, you are transferring the experiences of the past that this individual reminds you of someone in the past who did such and such a thing or who revealed himself to be a bad person, and now as that person unconsciously reminds you of that individual, you are transferring the bad memories and resentments to that other individual and you are causing them to relive those bad feelings again. The poor person doesn't even know what's going on in his mind, nor do you know what's going on.

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

And here you have three mechanisms that are operating continuously, that is, the retention mechanism, we retain everything that happens in our lives, the repression mechanism, we repress and hide what we do not like, that causes us anxiety or pain. , and third mechanism of transference, we transfer the experiences, memories of the past to our spheres and experiences that remind us of the same thing of the past, in equivalent situations.

And these things make, brothers, that our life, our past is often governing our present life without realizing it. Let's just leave it there and remember that we then need to come before the Lord, as the psalmist says, going back to that passage that is so appropriate for this type of sermon:

"Search me, O God, and know my heart, try me and know my thoughts and see if there is in me a path of perversity and guide me on the eternal path..."

That is to say, brothers, no human being can keep in mind all that flow of experiences that have cut and pierced and penetrated our life. No one can do that, unless it is God, only God knows all things and understands everything and understands the connections between the different events in the life of a human being. But I don't know. So I have to continually come to the Lord and tell him, Father, I know that I am an eminently capable being to deceive myself and I ask you to continually examine me in the light of your Holy Spirit and help me to go releasing those areas of my life that are repressed and hidden and that I have not seen so that you help me heal inside.

Let's not take ourselves too seriously in our current thoughts, what I believe and seems totally rational and seems totally legitimate in terms of a feeling, an attitude that I have, it may just be, again, one of those mechanisms of self delusion operating in me, and I have to be honest enough with God and with myself to say, hey, I don't know all the parts of my life. Lord, if I am wrong in this attitude with this person, or in this type of conduct in church or in this type of attitude with my wife, or with my children, Father, help me to understand where this comes from. Because what most of us say is, no, I'm fine. This is due to such and such things. So-and-so is like that therefore he deserves to be treated like this and like that. but it may be that one of those mechanisms is working in us that is making us act unfairly with our children or with our wives, our husbands, with our parishioners in the church, with our brothers and sisters, with co-workers, and at the same time. We critically analyze our past in the light of God's word and understanding and the light of God's spirit blowing and shining on our life, we are going to discover many things, if we are honest and if we have a true pact with God, of may God illuminate us as he wants, and we are open, God is going to make that lie that is repressed there begin to float to the surface, they do not float more often because we do not allow the Lord, we are closed. We say to the Lord, yes, Lord, I want to know your truth but a lie, within us we are repressing those truths.

That analysis of our past and those mechanisms has to... The image came to my mind this morning of a carpet, of those dense carpets that have many threads or threads that are facing up, and what happens? With the trampling of life, and people passing through it with dirty feet and twenty thousand other things and wet, the threads of that carpet that were very leafy and free, when the carpet was new, harden and intertwine with each other and they fall and become hard things. And so it happens to us many times, those experiences of the past have made the innocence of childhood lose its beauty and its greenness and they start appropriating and drying up and then the innocence and beauty of childhood, those threads, those threads of our personality, they harden and become entangled and although the water of God comes, sometimes they are so hard and so resistant, and we are so clinging to them that we do not allow them.

The carpet piles are so hard that they resist water. That's why you need those rotating shampoo machines that grab the strands and remove them with strong power and unravel and untangle them and then the water and the shampoo can do their cleaning effect and make the particles come up and then be cleansed.

And I believe that in part we have to help the Holy Spirit because that is the part of our human freedom, our free will, to help the spirit of God, ourselves doing a self-analysis and questioning ourselves with integrity and honesty in light of the word and making the tangled strands come out and part so that the water of the word of God and the spirit of God can then really go down deep and pull all that dirt, all that dirty to the surface and wash it away.

If you stay there sure of yourself, closed in on yourself, confident in yourself, confident that your map of reality is the only true one and that nothing has changed, then you are not going to be set free by God. Now if you say, Lord, I know that I am a sinner, Lord I know that this life in this perverted and sin-pierced world has twisted me, I need to, search me oh God, know my heart, test me and see if there is in me a path of perversity. That is, Lord, see if there are in me those areas of my life that are twisted and that are stuck there, that hurt child, or that vengeful child, or that angry child, that depressed child, with low self-esteem or with all kinds of resentments, or with a destructive and black image of the world, that this child can come to the surface so that you treat him, give him your comfort and clean him, and heal him and take him out to your health.

Because I believe that what God says is true, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things have passed away, behold, all things have become new. But we have to open ourselves so that the Lord enters then and makes that aspect of our life a reality.

We said before that the Lord said to Joshua, I have given you all the land that the sole of your foot will tread on, and then he said to him, but look, I am commanding you to strive and be brave, do not fear or dismay because I will be with you wherever you go. you go, etc. He gave him the word, told him not to stray from this path, meditate on the word, teach it to your children, etc. Joshua had a part to play as well. The Lord had told him, wherever you go with my sword in my name, I am going to give you every enemy that stands before you, but see that I command you to make an effort. Be brave, have the courage to look at reality as it is in your life, see it naked so that then my promise can become a reality in your life. Use my word, use my understanding, use the messages, the teachings of the masters, use the signs, use prayer as weapons through which those hardened strands of your carpet can be released so that my word can penetrate in the depth of your being.

Brethren, we are going to make a pact with the Lord like this. tell him, Father, if there is something in my past, if there is something there that some stagnant, atrophied child has remained inside of me, I want you to bring it to light and that you help me look at my past in this way and that You heal me and you cleanse me, and the Lord will do it.

Thank the Lord because his word is real, his word is powerful and if we leave our life to the Lord, he will be faithful to straighten it out and lead us on paths of truth. God bless us.