I admit it: I cringe almost every time I consider my life before Christ – and even at some events since He transformed me from His creature into His child at the turn of the millennium.

But thanks be to God, it’s not necessary to wallow in our pasts. In fact, contrary to the advice of a certain increasingly powerful medical discipline, He tells us not to:

"Do not remember the former things, Nor consider the things of old.” (Isaiah 43:18)

"For as the heavens are high above the earth, So great is His mercy toward those who fear Him; As far as the east is from the west, So far has He removed our transgressions from us.” (Psalm 103:11-12) 

“Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 3:13-14)

And so on and so forth; the Bible tells us repeatedly that, once we are His, we are to forget the past and move on with our new lives. “Therefore,” wrote the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 5, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” 

What a relief to know that we are no longer the people who thought and said and did all those ghastly things! There’s no longer any need to drown them in booze or drugs, work or entertainment, elaborate self-justifications or any of the hundreds of other ways we humans try to silence our God-given consciences.

Because here’s the truth: Once we’ve repented of our sins and trusted in Christ, we are free to leave the past behind and move on with our new lives in Him. Sure, we may have to suffer the temporal consequences of our transgressions as long as this life lasts; but the Lord Jesus paid their eternal penalty, in full, on the cross almost 2000 years ago.

“What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed?” Paul asks at the end of Romans 6. “For the end of those things is death. But now having been set free from sin, and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness, and the end, everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

What's the appropriate response? Perhaps Paul said it best, in Romans 7: "O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God--through Jesus Christ our Lord!" 

I have a special fondness for the movies of the 1940s and early ‘50s, for a number of reasons – not the least of which is the chance (silly as it may seem) to get a glimpse of the furniture and clothing that graced my happy childhood. For instance, one of my favorites is Mildred Pierce, the 1945 Joan Crawford melodrama featuring a supper club that was surely modeled on one my family frequented over a half century ago.

And then there’s anything starring Dana Andrews, surely the cutest actor who ever graced the big screen and the son of a Baptist pastor, which may explain why he stayed married to the same woman for more than 50 years, until the day he died. No word on his spiritual life; his latest journalism-professor biographer clearly thinks “religion” is the height of foolishness, and doesn’t explore his subject’s most profound beliefs.

But even as I grow hungrier for glimpses of a happy past that surely point to a joyful forevermore, I find myself increasingly disturbed by the take-away messages of these movies.

One recent attraction was 1949’s My Foolish Heart, starring Susan Hayward, along with – you guessed it – Dana Andrews.  In this movie, hard-drinking Hayward is stuck in a miserable marriage. We find out through the film-length flashback that she had become pregnant by her true love Andrews just before he was killed in the war. Then, to cover her shame, she married her best friend’s boyfriend. Hence, the miserable marriage. Although the heroine eventually pays for her moral failings with her self-inflicted misery, she brings the story to a close by pulling herself up by the bootstraps and doing what she sees as the right thing.

Movies like this one seem to have one critical theme in common: There’s no sign of God in any of them, no sign of an afterlife. You would think that, if she really loved the Andrews character in My Foolish Heart, the Hayward character would have explored the possibility of him still existing somewhere out there – and would have learned that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and that no one comes to the Father apart from Him. Then, on the hope that her true love had trusted in Him before dying, she could have pursued the Lord’s truth in the hope of being reunited with him for all eternity.

But sadly, the happy endings of this era, and this genre, offer only temporal happiness, with each character apparently staggering to a Christ-less eternity. 

What a great example of what has gone wrong with the western world. True, it’s been underway for a long, long time; it was in 1889 that the old reprobate Oscar Wilde wrote, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life." But it’s clear that motion pictures have raised the influence of “art” on our culture, and individual lives, exponentially, with eternally tragic implications.

You’ve probably noticed that there’s a demonic agenda in operation these days, an agenda whose purpose seems to be ridiculing, punishing and silencing Christians. The hiss has already become audible to many who take seriously Jesus’ Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20).

I’ve just had another taste of it myself, and I’m miffed. Someone with an agenda has borne false witness against me. 

In my flesh, I want to meet my accuser and defend myself; in my worst moments, I want to strike back. But is that the right thing to do, by God’s standards?

Of course it isn’t. At what was arguably the most critical point in His earthly life, Jesus met His enemies’ accusations with silence (Matthew 27:12-14). He who is our perfect model, “when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously” (1 Peter 2:3). 

And following the divine example of silence might be the easy part. 

Consider what Jesus said, in the Sermon on the Mount, about dealing with our enemies: “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). And remember His prayer from the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34).

An impossible standard for us humans to meet, of course, but one we must attempt to emulate if we want to point the lost to Him – which should of course be our most urgent goal. 

As the great 19th century preacher Charles Spurgeon said, “If sinners will be damned, at least let them leap to Hell over our bodies. And if they will perish, let them perish with our arms about their knees, imploring them to stay. If Hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let not one go there unwarned and unprayed for.”

“For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” -- 
2 Corinthians 4:18b

This verse is from one of my favorite passages in all of scripture, telling us as it does that we needn’t worry about our earthly afflictions. They’re light, in the context of all eternity; and they are working for us a “far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (verse 17).   

So don’t sweat today’s problems, folks. Don’t even really consider them, if they involve things that you can see – your money or career or possessions, your appearance or wardrobe or career, your hipness or lack thereof. These things are all just temporary, and they have nothing to do with what’s in store for us in eternity.

Talk about liberation! And this is just one of scores of Bible passages that free the believer in Jesus Christ from the bondage of this world.

What blows my mind is how I spent years believing just the opposite, thanks to the teaching of a popular Journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a little gem of ‘70s higher education that he called the Ploggly Theory.

According to this professor, the Ploggly Theory said, in a nutshell: If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. And this includes fairies, demons, devils and gods. 

Isn’t that interesting? It’s a direct contradiction of the apostle Paul’s teaching that “the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” And it was a key component of '70s-era Journalism training, at least at UWM.

“If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.” To think that my widowed Christian mother paid good money to have this professor teach me this lie.

And to think that I was not smart enough (or perhaps enough of a truth hawk) to call him on it – to say, “Hey, Professor, does that mean love doesn’t exist? How about peace? How about other unseen things, like patience and charity, joy and truth, faithfulness and self-control? Or how about hatred and jealousy, idolatry and selfish ambition? Do none of these ‘unseen things’ exist?” 

Such a challenge might have led to an interesting discussion, especially if one of my classmates had turned out to be biblically literate – a real possibility 40 years ago. But even without that key component, our lives might all have turned out differently if just one of us had had the intellect, and the guts, to exercise a little critical thinking.

But it didn’t happen. In fact, I took as many classes as possible from the Journalism professor who taught me about the Ploggly Theory.  And I was far from alone; my hippie-dippy friends were equally crazy about him.

How can this be, that such a beloved professor could  teach such a bold and spiritually destructive lie, and get away with it?

I guess the apostle Paul answered that question, too, in the 11th chapter of the same epistle to the Corinthians: “Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light.”

Wish I’d known all of this back then. Wish I’d known, too, about the apostle Peter’s warning in chapter 5 of his first epistle: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”

Of course, the Ploggy Theory would have told me to ignore such warnings, since devils and demons don’t exist. But maybe, just maybe, I might have at least given the issue a little thought.