What About Nostalgia? Praising God And Having Gratitude For The Mighty Deeds Of Old While Looking To The Wonderous Glories Of The Future.

AI Generated Transcript (I only fixed the mis-spelling of my name and used ChatGPT to add all the sane paragraph breaks - I left the rest of the mess just the way AI delivered it haha):

Do you like nostalgia? Welcome to Jon's Voice Notes, where I, Jon, pick a topic and go stream of consciousness without any plan to just find out what I say. And I say what I want to say today.

Actually, in my notes, this is called the What I Want to Say Today audio blog. So this is what I want to say today.

But I'm at my favorite voice notes spot, sitting in my car with the AC running because it's hot out—but it's still beautiful, still green, still sunny. The weather says it's going to be cloudy and rainy all week.

And I'd just like to point out that that corn was way higher than knee high by the 4th of July.

So let's get to it: nostalgia.

I think I'm probably thinking about nostalgia because I was listening to some of the old Chariots of Fire movie soundtrack. That's what got me thinking about nostalgia.

I think that movie came out around 1980. I don’t remember the exact year, but it was around then that I saw it. And I was highly impacted by that movie when I was a boy—very young.

I was inspired by the pursuit of excellence and inspired by the Christian faith of Eric Liddell. Eric Liddell became one of my childhood heroes. He's a good guy to have as a childhood hero.

In addition to being a rugby athlete—a top-notch one—and an Olympic gold medal runner, he eventually became a missionary to China. He died there, and when people were being evacuated (I think it was due to World War II stuff), he gave his evacuation seat to a local lady and did not leave. He himself died in China.

I think he was too young when he died, but he was one of my childhood heroes.

But what I'm really thinking about today is nostalgia.

When I was listening to some of these songs, I felt kind of sad. And I was realizing—I associate nostalgia with sadness.

I don’t know why, because I have many warm, good, positive memories from my life. A lot of good things have happened to me over the years—both when I was a child and when I was in Youth with a Mission.

It was a bit of a dark season in the late 80s, but there were lots of good memories. So it's not that my memories are bad.

I just thought—for some reason, even when I was a kid, I remember finding things that were “old” to me then, things from the past, and feeling nostalgia and feeling sad.

So I think somehow I just learned to associate nostalgia with sadness. And sometimes, when I listen to music that could be considered nostalgic, I feel sad.

What do you feel? Do you like nostalgia? Do you like the warm memories?

And I don’t know which way it is. I don’t know if it's because I am a forward-focused person—because I am a future-focused, visionary-type person. If it’s because of that, then nostalgia makes me feel sad.

Or what if it's the other way around?

Diving deep into the psychology of Jon Davis here. What if I feel sad with nostalgia? Or what if I'm a forward-facing person because even happy memories and nostalgic memories make me feel a little bit sad?

I don’t know.

I know this is a very different sort of voice note today. But I don’t know—does God want us to be forward-focused or backward-focused?

When I read my Bible, it seems to me that he wants both. He wants us to remember his mighty deeds. There's a lot about that.

There's not a lot about remembering your favorite childhood playground-type thing. I'm not saying you shouldn’t. I'm just saying there's not a lot about that.

But God set up a whole religion—we would call it a religion anyway—and a lot of it was about remembering what God did. Remembering what Yahweh did with Israel among the nations.

It's interesting to read the Psalms from the perspective of realizing what the psalmist was thinking. Because we usually bring it into a contemporary kind of idea about, you know, “what would this mean to me today?” And I suppose there's a place for that.

But a lot of times, when they were talking about, you know, a fire comes out and burns up all his enemies—well, they had in their history moments where literally the enemies of Moses, those who were opposing Moses, were consumed by fire and swallowed into the ground.

So a lot of these things—“he led us through the barren land”—these are memories of things right out of Israel's ancient history. And a lot of it was even a long time ago for the author.

But it does seem that God has a thing about remembering.

When Jesus established the Lord's Supper, he said, “Do this in remembrance of me until I come.”

So it was both backwards-focused and forwards-focused.

If we want to have any hope for forgiveness of our sins when we see our own failures, we have to remember something that happened 2,000 years ago: the cross, the resurrection, the ascension of Jesus into heaven. His presentation to the Father and his subsequent ruling of heaven and earth from heaven, which he's doing right now.

We look to the past to remember these things.

So looking to the past is good.

So is looking to the future—the glorious things that God is doing.

Even in the Old Testament, you often read that they had to remember the past—but there were also prophecies about the future.

One of the whole points of recording Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, the Chronicles, the Kings—all of it—was to record what had happened so that we could learn from it.

So learning from the past is good. Remembering the great things God has done. Remembering the failures of Israel.

The apostle Paul took remembering those failures as a warning: branches that were cut off from their own vine, and Gentiles grafted in.

But don’t get arrogant, he said. Don’t become prideful about it—because remember, you could be cut off too.

I don’t know what the theological implications of that are, but it's all about remembering.

But then there's also this hope of the future.

Paul talks about a hope of being absent from the body and present with the Lord. He had a hope for his eternal future when he exited this life—this stage of his being—and went on into the next, which we know precious little about.

We have all sorts of speculations. But there is a future that Paul was looking forward to.

He also was looking forward to the coming of Jesus. And as far as I can tell, at the very least, the coming of Jesus in the judgment of Jerusalem in 70 AD was very real. The enemies of God were judged ferociously.

The enemies in the Jewish nation that were actually the enemies of Jesus were judged and punished severely. The whole old covenant system was destroyed. The temple was literally dismantled.

So there was that. Not that they would be delighting in the destruction of their nation, but there was a day that came when the old system passed away and the new covenant was manifestly in force from that time.

But there's also the vision: “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

That’s a future vision—not only for eternity, but here on earth.

This is a vision that has to be fulfilled through multiple generations, because I don’t know that you and I can cause that to fully happen in our lifetime.

But the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

There’s the hope of Christ’s bodily return. There's a lot to say and debate and discuss about that, but we have a hope for the future.

So there's a hope for an eternal future, but there's also this hope for our temporary, temporal future—even before we depart into eternity.

There's a hope for the world—that the earth will be filled. That's going to happen.

Think about Daniel, the book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar's dream.

In the time of the fourth kingdom, which most of us believe was Rome—and I believe that's an accurate belief—the kingdom that was legs of iron with feet of iron and clay. That was one kingdom. It’s not a kingdom 2,000 years later. It was a kingdom back then.

At that time, a rock was going to strike Nebuchadnezzar's statue and shatter it into chaff that the wind blows away. But the rock itself would become a mountain that fills the whole earth.

Since then, the mountain has been filling the earth.

So the old kingdoms were destroyed back then when Jesus came, but the manifestation of that destruction is taking time. The replacement with God's ways is taking time. But we have a hope for the future.

So I guess this turned out to be—I always wonder where I'm going to go—it turned out to be about how the past matters and the future matters.

All started by me thinking about how nostalgia makes me sad.

But when I say nostalgia, I don’t really mean just remembering the good things in the past or the bad things in the past. I mean more like remembering the feelings of my youth and the feelings of family vacations.

And maybe it makes me sad because it's over. It's past. My parents are both in heaven. My brother and sister—they're far from me. Life is different. Those are seasons that will not return.

So maybe I need to work on gratitude for some of those memories. I don’t know.

Or maybe it's okay to feel sad. Maybe. Maybe. I don’t know.

But I prefer to be looking to the future in general. I like to look to the future and focus my life on the future.

Even as I'm getting older, I don’t ever want to become an elderly person who's just got memories of what has happened and has no vision for the future.

I know I mentioned this before, but one of my heroes who has graduated to heaven now—he was on my first board, one of the first members—when he was in his 80s, he used to tell me, when I was talking on the phone with him, “Just on the wall over there, I have my 10-year goals that I can see them every day.”

And I've always thought, I want to be like that when I'm in my 80s. I want to have 10-year goals.

I think I want to have 10-year goals until I graduate to heaven. Always looking ahead. Always wondering—what's God going to do next? How can I pursue the kingdom? How can I pursue building and manifesting the glory of God's kingdom in my life and on the earth?

So I prefer, in general, forward thinking. Maybe I need to work on gratitude for the past. Let's deal with sadness about nostalgia—or just accept it.

What do you think?

gospelofeverything.com/contact —send me a message and tell me what you think. I'm really curious.

But I am going to go back to listening to my Chariots of Fire and drive home, because I don’t want to burn up all my gasoline in the car.

But thank you so much for listening today.

This is Jon and Jon's Voice Notes.

Until next time, signing off.