Stay 20 😀

I like my 20-year-old self. Maybe I’d tell him to stay 20 forever. Hopefully, I’ll be around 20 in heaven, or 18. I think of that as my proper age.

Maybe I’d be more keen to listen to him than have him listen to me. 1982/1983 were happy years for me.

I could tell him to appreciate life more, but I don’t think he’d like someone telling him that this is gonna be the best part of his life. But every part of our lives has its joys and trials. You tend to remember the joys more than the trials, or at least I do. At the time, I’d have been wondering about where my career was going and who I might end up marrying. That all worked out reasonably well, so I could tell him that.

Regarding the evangelical scene, when I was 20, I’d been a believer for a couple of years and I was getting to know the various opinions within evangelical churches. I liked both traditional churches and the new charismatic churches. There was much debate surrounding the issue of whether the New Testament spiritual gifts still apply today and whether the baptism of the Holy Spirit comes at or after conversion. And we’d be trying to decide who was right and who was wrong. But these are secondary matters. Growing in grace means loving God and loving others more and never forgetting that we always fall short, and we depend on Jesus and His death on the cross for salvation. That’s all more significant than trying to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong about secondary issues.

I could tell my 20-year-old self about the web, YouTube, and all the wonderful things that’ll emerge over the next 44 years. He’d be amazed at the resources available nowadays. For example, back then I was a big fan of David Pawson, who was a charismatic Baptist preacher. He said some silly thing from time to time, but by and large, I enjoyed his teaching. I also liked Peter Masters, from the Metropolitan Tabernacle, who was decidedly anti-charismatic. And R.T. Kendall from Westminster Chapel was somewhere in between. But I enjoyed listening to them all – and still do.

Back then, you’d need to buy or borrow teaching tapes. Nowadays, much if it is on the web. And of course, there’s a huge amount of modern preachers. I list some of my favourite resources on my Recommended Audio Resources. page.

I sometimes think of meeting my younger selves as an analogy for the Trinity. The Trinity is beyond human understanding, but people sometimes use weak analogies. They key thing is to recognize how they fall short. Anyway, one thing that I thought of is meeting myself when I was 20 and when I was 40. The three of us would meet and have coffee. I’d be one “me” and three “me’s” at the same time. 😀 In the early centuries of Christian history, when people were trying to figure out the Trinity, one mistaken view was modalism, which claimed that God appeared in three different modes, in the way that H₂O appears as water, ice, and steam. But a key point is that in the New Testament, the three persons interact with each other, particularly the Father and the Son. And Jesus clearly states that the Holy Spirit is separate from Him even though the term Spirit can be applied to them all because God is a spiritual being. You also get verses that mention all three. Here they are:

Matthew 28:19
¹⁹ Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,

2 Corinthians 13:14
¹⁴ May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

John 14:16-17
¹⁶ And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— ¹⁷ the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.

We shouldn’t be surprised that God is beyond our understanding. After all, there’s still much in science that’s beyond our understanding. And I don’t understand why my computer keeps randomly locking up 😀.

Anyway, here are a couple of songs that I used to like as a 20-year-old:

Cliff Richard has a couple of Christian songs in the charts in 1982:

And here a couple of hymns about the Trinity: