History ought to be teaching us lessons. Too often events, attitudes and actions of the past are discarded in favor of current wisdom. For instance, my mother discarded my baseball card collection because it was taking up space in the attic. In that collection was an Al Kaline rookie card, an early Mickey Mantle and several other Hall of Fame players. Mom innocently discarded value she could not see.
As our culture careens in careless amorality we may learn a great lesson by remembering the past. In 1956, Elvis Presley made a historic appearance on the "Ed Sullivan Show," reaching an audience of 56 million. Incredibly, lest Presley's trademark hip gyrations scandalize the era's conservative viewers, the show's producers issued an unusual order: that the cameras not shoot anything below Mr. Presley's waist. We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?
In the last 25 years many churches disbanded Sunday School and replaced it with nothing. And, Biblical literacy is plummeting. Congregations once agreed to cultural expressions of personal behavior for church membership. Many of the commonly held norms have been jettisoned because they were old fashioned and legalistic. Now we have no stated boundaries of acceptable behavior and the church looks and behaves more like the world than ever. Even pulpit language has been diluted.
Should we go back? I doubt that we can in the short run. But, if we patiently look with a longer view of history, we may learn to deliberately proceed to a rich faith and an admirable life style which reflects our understanding of God’s Word and values our heritage. Peter, when describing early Christian events in the book of Acts used “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” as an historical mooring post, a connection with the past. God back? We cannot! But, we can go ahead with an appreciation for the past and complete what has been put in motion by our fathers.
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