The Good Old Days

Ecclesiastes 7:10 Do not say "why were the old days better than these?"  For it is not wise to ask such a question.

Ahh, The good old days. Do you remember them? The days of type writers, record players, black and white T.V’s and I still remember our first VCR, and Microwave. Come on you know the days, back when you could work on your own car without having to hook it up to a computer to find out what was broke. Back when it was safe for kids to leave in the morning and spend all day playing with the other kids in the neighborhood, as long as they were home for dinner. When there was still winners and losers in little league, and not everyone made the team. We didn’t have to wear seat belts, and we got our butts whipped when we were bad, and our mouths washed out with soap when we cussed! How did we ever survive?

There was a time in our country as Christians you were not the odd ball. On any given Sunday morning you would find the majority of the town in church. Tent revival services swept the country, with each nigh overflowing to standing room only, People lined up for a good dose of conviction. Hell and repentance was preached from the pulpit, and sin was still called sin.

Well I grew up in the 80’s and it is easy to look back only twenty plus years ago, and say “Man times were just better then” Actually last night I found myself looking back only about eight years ago, when my life just seemed simpler. It was then as I was drifting through my confused memories of my days in the Marine Corps, that my wife reminded me that things weren’t all that great.

Well Solomon had the same insight and today’s passage is pretty straight forward. Don’t dwell on the past. Sure it is fun to walk down memory trail every now and then, but when we stay on that trail for too long, we lose sight of the present. We become discontent with where god has brought us to, and we start acting defeated because “things will never be like that again.”

Warren Wiersbe in the Bible Exposition Commentary put it well when he said “the good old days are a combination of bad memory and a good imagination.” There is a lot of truth in that statement. That is what my wife reminded me of last night. Things were not all that great back when I thought they were.. I wasn’t walking with God the way I am now, we had our struggles, our testing, and our failures. But my bad memory fixed with good imagination was starting to become a great distraction in my life of today.

When we say things will never be like that again, we are right. The days of tent revivals and door to door cold call evangelism are simply not effective in the world we live in today. And you know what, that’s o.k. However if we constantly dwell on the past and how we have changed we will never move forward from where we are.

So Tent revivals are gone, let’s come up with a new way of presenting the timeless truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. So door to door evangelism get’s a door slammed in your face, how else can we reach our community?

I don’t have all the answers; however I do know that God’s Word is perfect. Recognition of sin is still the plow that converts the soil to receive the seed. The message has never changed, but we must find new methods without changing the meaning.

Last night I saw a commercial where all these kids had their own laptop in school, and I thought wow, my son will never know what it was like when I was in school, and you know what hit me, that it is alright. I also realized that old fashion pipe organs are a dying thing, and that is alright too. We must not grip so tightly to the good old days, or the future will slip away!

Action Step: Stop and take a look around at today, don’t compare it to yesterday, instead ask God to show you how it should look tomorrow!