Nostalgia is a tricky thing
Why do we remember what we remember?
If you’ve ever been involved with the work of church revitalisation, then you know that one of the big obstacles that comes is nostalgia. This church is no longer what it once was. It has not died, but it nearly did. It has done the hard work of seeing that something needed to change if gospel work was going to continue in that place.
But eventually there will come the ultimatum. The choice between doing what used to work and what works now. Or, the choice between chasing what the church used to be and what it has, or will, become.
I say that nostalgia is a tricky thing because it works both ways. It can cause a longing for what used to be that cripples you. That leaves you like Uncle Rico.
At the same time, there can be a danger in forgetting the past. In forgetting where you came from. This might lead you to forget what you know is true. When churches do this, when they forget what is true, the consequences are disastrous. The same goes for individual Christians. When we forget the decisive change that has taken place by our believing the gospel, we can backslide.
2 Timothy 1:3–7:
I thank God whom I serve, as did my ancestors, with a clear conscience, as I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. As I remember your tears, I long to see you, that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well. For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.1
Continuing on in 2 Timothy, Paul gets quite nostalgic. You can see it in the quote above. As Paul writes, he is remembering. He is looking back.
But his looking back isn’t a wistful one. He isn’t looking back, daydreaming about the past. He is looking back to remember who he is writing to. He is looking back at the relationship he has with Timothy. He is looking back to remember their shared heritage of belief in God’s word. A faith that they have inherited and made their own.
As Paul writes to his troubled protégé, what does he want him to know? That despite his feelings about the current situation, that despite Paul’s imprisonment2, his faith is real. He really, truly still belongs to God. He himself is the dwelling place of Holy Spirit.
Tired Christians are at great risk of losing heart because it simply takes more effort to keep going. Here in the west, it is hard to say that the church is experiencing the kind of persecution that we read of in the Bible. Paul experienced horrors that feel to us like a relic of the past. Something that couldn’t happen anymore.
But there is still a low-level persecution or attack that we experience simply by living in a world that is not what it was or will be. As Paul writes in Romans 8:22, “the whole creation has been groaning.” Our bodies don’t work as they ought to. Our relationships are not what they could be. Even the most fulfilling work has days of tedium, blood, sweat, and tears.
Each day, the world we live in and the circumstances we find ourselves in scream at us that God is not there and that, if he is, he doesn’t love us.
Which is why we need to keep going back to this truth: God gave us a spirit of power and love and self-control. Not that we are simply given a tool and left to get on with it, but that as we depend on him, as we fight to think about what is true, honourable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, then the God of peace will be with us.
Didn’t Jesus promise as much when he ascended?
Emphasis my own
This particular imprisonment has significant implications for the future of the young church.