In my son’s first wrestling tournament, he was dominant. His preparation and good coaching were evident, as he pinned every opponent and won every match — that is, with one exception: a forfeiture.

The brackets were established by dividing the wrestlers on the basis of weight and age, with even some consideration given to experience. But one criterion considered inconsequential or nonexistent was that of biological sex. So, when my son was assigned to wrestle a girl, he forfeited the match. My wife and I had determined this course of action before the occasion arose. Even though, in the moment, my heart was inclined just to let him wrestle her, I gently explained to my young and highly competitive son why the nobler course of action was forfeiture.

Since that time, I have been burdened to explain my rationale to other brothers and sisters who might be facing some of the same pressures. In a world that is very confused regarding gender, sex, athletics, and fairness, I want to share the reasons I gave my son for why boys don’t wrestle against girls. Ultimately, it’s not because we think less of girls or their ability — it’s because we are committed to a way of life that honors women and seeks to develop reflexes of protection rather than dominance.

Because Boys and Girls Are Different

Though controversial these days, the truth that boys and girls are different is on the very first pages of Genesis, and that assumption runs throughout the Bible. Yes, boys and girls are equally made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) and equally in need of salvation in Jesus Christ (Romans 3:23–25; Galatians 3:28). That equality, however, does not erase the fundamental created distinctions between boys and girls.

I don’t think most parents who allow their girls to wrestle boys have erased the idea of sexual differences in their minds. They know that girls are different from boys. But some parents seem to have subtly bought into and thus propagated the modern lie that “you can be anything that you want to be.” Against this claim, we assert, “In the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

Because Boys Should Relate Differently to Girls

Scripture and biology make the physical differences between boys and girls obvious. Less obvious — and sometimes less convenient — are the distinct ways we should relate to one another as a consequence of our sex. Some Christians acknowledge the seemingly undeniable differences between boys and girls, but then they hesitate to extend those distinctions into actions and relationships. While it might raise the ire of many, I am teaching my son (and my daughters) that God created them to relate differently to the opposite sex.

At the wrestling meet, another father shared the advice he gave to his son in preparation for wrestling a girl: “Son, you can’t treat her like a girl. You’ve got to think of her like a boy, and go out there and be aggressive.” I don’t think this father was operating from ill will or a deliberate attempt to deny distinctions of sex, but his advice illustrates the problem of confusing those distinctions. He counseled his son to act contrary to reality, as if the girl were someone she is not. He counseled his son to unthink his right understanding of sex distinctions.

As Christians, we know that male and female are more than just a box checked on a birth certificate or marriage license. In God’s wisdom, he created differences of sex to be relational in nature, helping us to interact with one another rightly. But what are some of those distinctions in relationships?

Because Boys Should Honor and Protect Girls

A commonly implied and often explicit command in Scripture is for men to honor and protect women in their spheres, beginning with the family (Ephesians 5:25–33) and extending to the nation (Joshua 1:14). Abraham’s cowardice is on display when he exploits his wife rather than protecting her. To some degree, his sin of deception pales in comparison to his abandonment of protection. Shockingly, Isaac repeats this abandonment a generation later. In contrast, the men of Israel march off to war to protect their nation and families. It would have been unthinkable for them to send their wives, sisters, and daughters into battle.

“When we deny the distinctions between boys and girls, we exploit rather than protect women.”

The disposition to protect is both ingrained and nurtured in our sons’ minds and actions. They need our help to cultivate the mature manhood that calls them to prize and honor the women they encounter. When we deny the distinctions between boys and girls, we exploit rather than protect women.

Many people today wave the yellow flag that acknowledging any difference between boys and girls will lead to girls being mistreated and oppressed. The assumption is that acknowledging differences undermines equality. On the contrary, I am teaching my son that a boy’s physical strength is not for dominating a girl, but rather for protecting her. In fact, this emphasis seems truly countercultural in an environment rampant with abuse: one’s strength is for elevating, not suppressing, others.

Wrestling with Objections

When I went to the scorer’s table to report that my son would be forfeiting the match, I anticipated some anger and frustration. What surprised me was the surprise. Those at the table were puzzled, as if they thought, Haven’t we moved beyond that? Then the objections started flowing.

But they are prepubescent kids.

My argument is not primarily about sexual arousal, although that would strengthen my position as kids mature. My argument is about a fundamental created distinction and a biblical call to treat women with dignity and honor. The need to instill appropriate patterns of relationship does not begin at puberty, although it does become more obvious at that stage.

What about other sports?

The position I’m describing does have implications for other sports, but perhaps we could recognize a few clear distinctions. There is a difference between the physical dominance expressed in wrestling and racing someone to the finish line in track. The expression of physical dominance and the danger to the other contestant are not present in track. So I might not object as strongly to some co-ed athletics.

But your son is the one who loses, not you.

“My goal is to train my son to stand with conviction, even when it’s costly.”

It is true and regrettable that my son is the one who has the loss on his record, and his peers might look at him differently. But my goal is to train my son to stand with conviction, even when it’s costly. While he’s still in our home, I can gently shepherd, comfort, and train him for the larger sacrifices that will inevitably come his way.

Prizing Honor Over Victory

I do not intend to come across as judgmental toward parents who would allow their girls to wrestle boys or their boys to wrestle girls. I simply want to call us all to live in light of Scripture. As Christian parents, we cannot affirm the erosion of distinctions between boys and girls. We must not teach our daughters that it is normal to be subdued by a boy, nor teach our boys that it is normal to subdue a girl.

Rather, we should affirm God’s good purposes by teaching that he created humans in his image, either male or female, and his design has implications for how we relate to one another. I think most parents who register their girls to wrestle boys are acting with a genuine desire for their girls’ good, but they have a flawed and misguided sense of good. In that sense, their actions and consciences need to be recalibrated in line with biblical authority.

So, what might we say to our sons for why boys don’t wrestle girls? “We don’t wrestle girls because God calls men to honor and protect women, and I am raising you to be a man. Yes, it will cost you to act with conviction. And I am so thankful that I get to walk alongside you as you grow into manhood.”

Audio Transcript

Well, we start the week with a weighty question: Will God judge a person for being born into a Muslim family and nation? A very real question for global listeners, like one young woman who sent us today’s question. “Hello, Pastor John! I love listening to episodes of Ask Pastor John. They are helping me grow in the faith. Keep pressing on! My story is a long one, but I’ll keep it short. I was born into a Muslim family in an Islamic country in North Africa. I still live here. Unlike my family, I became a Christian and accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior and treasure.

“My question for you is this: Will my unbelieving family go to hell? They don’t know anything about the good news of Jesus Christ! And I can’t tell them about him because they will not listen. They call me crazy. And it’s not safe to tell anybody in my country. You may get killed for that. Leaving Islam to become a Christian is illegal here! So, will my family go to hell because they’re Muslim? And how is that their fault since they were born that way? And will God judge me for not sharing the gospel with them? And if all things go by God’s plan, does that mean it was meant for them to be Muslims? Or is this by chance? What should I do? I know God is just, but I am deeply worried for my family. Thank you.”

I hear six questions, which is overwhelming.

Will my unbelieving family go to hell?
Will my family go to hell because they’re Muslim?
Is it their fault since they were born Muslim?
Will God judge me for not sharing the gospel with them?
Is their Muslim situation God’s purpose or by chance?
What should I do?

And we have ten minutes.

So, at the risk of oversimplification, I will try to say something biblical and, I hope, helpful about each of those questions.

1. Will my unbelieving family go to hell?

John said, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him” (John 3:36). Peter put it like this: “There is salvation in no one else [but Jesus], for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Paul put it like this: “[Christ will return] in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not . . . obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus” (2 Thessalonians 1:8).

There is a principle in the Bible that human beings will be punished by God in accord with the knowledge that they have access to. We see this in Romans 1:19–20:

What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived . . . in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

And that word so is really crucial because it shows the ground of accountability. His argument is that everybody has sufficient knowledge to be held accountable to respond with worship and trust toward God, but nobody does. We’re all such sinners that we suppress truth apart from the saving work of the Holy Spirit in the hearing of the gospel of Jesus.

2. Will my family go to hell because they’re Muslim?

Since, for millions of people, the word Muslim encompasses so much that is cultural and political and ethnic, I think a proper way to answer that question is to say this: to the degree that the word Muslim signifies the rejection of Jesus Christ as the eternal Son of God, crucified for sinners, raised from the dead — to that degree will the word Muslim imply lostness. People who reject Christ’s offer of himself as God’s crucified sacrifice and substitute for sinners as a way to be reconciled with God will go to hell.

3. Is it their fault since they were born Muslim?

Nobody is born Muslim or Hindu or Christian; we are born sinners. We have a corrupt nature that, without salvation and transformation through Christ, is in rebellion against God. We become Muslim, we become Christian, we become Hindu or Buddhist by the truth or error that our hearts embrace or reject as we grow up.

“Nobody is born Muslim or Hindu or Christian; we are born sinners.”

At the final judgment day, God will not say to anybody, “You perish because you were born Muslim.” Nor will he say, “You are saved because you were born Christian.” We will give an account of how we have responded to the truth of God as we have access to it. Jesus Christ, crucified and risen for sinners, is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6).

4. Will God judge me for not sharing the gospel with them?

The reason this question is difficult, not only for this woman in her situation but for all of us in all of our situations, is that there are always more people that we could talk to about Jesus. We can talk to people instead of sleeping — stay up another hour, get up another hour early. We can talk to people instead of eating — skipping meals. We can talk to people instead of reading a book at night. Love wants to share the gospel. Faith trusts Jesus for the power to share the gospel. But the path of love and the path of faith have limits.

What are they? God said through Ezekiel,

If the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand [who didn’t blow the trumpet]. (Ezekiel 33:6)

So, there is a kind of lovelessness, a kind of indifference to people’s lostness, that will receive God’s judgment. But whom we should talk to and how many times we should talk to them and how many of them we should talk to is a matter of genuine love and God’s guidance.

5. Is their Muslim situation God’s purpose or by chance?

At this point, I think it’s fair to say that Muslims and I believe the same thing, or at least similar things — namely, nothing happens by chance. Muslims believe that; I believe that. There’s no such thing as chance given the sovereignty of God, not ultimately. From our human perspective, given the limits of what we can see, there are coincidences and flukes and random acts and accidents and luck. But in relation to God, nothing is by chance. “[God] works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11) — all things.

6. What should I do?

The apostle Paul prayed the way he did in Philippians 1:9–11, I think, precisely because of some of the ambiguities that this woman lives with and, in some measure, we all live with. He didn’t just pray that we would be loving people — he did pray that, taught that — but also that our love would have a Spirit-given discernment and insight to know how to love, how love should act.

Here’s what he prays, and this is what I think you should do. She said, “What should I do?” I think you should pray this earnestly and expect God to answer it for you. “[I pray] that your love may abound more and more . . .” So, you pray, “God, help my love for my family to abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that I may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.”

That’s the only way that I know how to walk in such difficult situations with a heart of obedience and peace.

The ache comes unexpected. The random sight of a yellow door turns a handle in your memory. A restaurant song plays a tune that returns you to former times. The passing smell of a backyard meal takes you to a table long ago. For a few moments, you grow quiet and thoughtful — remembering, reliving, perhaps reaching for something once loved, now lost.

We name it nostalgia. The wistful backward glance. The photo album of the mind. The string that tugs the heart from years gone by. The yearning to find a bridge across the gap of canyon time.

For many, nostalgia comes as infrequently as a stranger at the door, and leaves just as quickly. But others know the ache more intimately. Perhaps because they have lost more than most, perhaps because they have a sentimental bent, perhaps because their present life holds little pleasure, the past lives vividly before them. Nostalgia is no stranger.

Backward glances, even backward longings, have their good purposes in the lives of God’s children. If we allow it, nostalgia itself can become a prophet of the Lord. But nostalgia can also take a darker turn, can tell a sadder tale. As the winds of memory blow from yesterday to today, they can carry a whisper barely heard but deeply felt: “Your best days are behind you.”

Best Days Behind

The Greeks of old spoke of a Golden Age, a lost time of peace and prosperity, happiness and wholeness. Many of us, without pretending the past was perfect, likewise discern a golden glow in former days. The walls of our heart, if not of our home, hold pictures of better times, of youthful laughter and young romance, of beginning ambitions and a body less broken. Once, we lived in a land without shadow, or at least without these shadows.

We walk today in the Age of Bronze, it seems, or Iron. The pages of the present lie rough and plain; the golden days are gone. Even for those with happy lives, today may seem more sorrowful than yesterday. Amid present joys, many can still hear the soft sounds of children grown, of loves lost, of dreams that never took flight. Autumn comes to every life. The leaves fall from our happiest days.

And the future? We recite by creed “the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting,” but for many the light of such days shines dimly. The eye of memory often sees clearer than the eye of faith. Heaven will be a happy place, no doubt, and Jesus’s face a sight to cure all sorrow. But today, what was weighs more heavily than what will be.

So speaks nostalgia’s bleaker voice. But in the midst of such remembrances, we may hear another speak: “Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (Ecclesiastes 7:10). The pangs of nostalgia can lead us into folly if we let them. They can force past, present, and future into a familiar story often told but largely untrue. “Your best days are behind you,” we may hear nostalgia say. But wisdom says otherwise.

Ungild the Past

When the wise look backward, they do indeed see good days — even glorious days. To David, the past held the “wondrous deeds” of God, far “more than can be told” (Psalm 40:5). Past years are chapters in God’s own book (Psalm 139:16), and God knows how to write good stories. And yet, for all the wonders of yesterday, the past is not always what we remember.

Human memory does not tell objective history, though we often assume otherwise. Like even the best historians, it selects and emphasizes — and like even of the worst, it distorts and embellishes. Consider, for example, what the wilderness-wandering Israelites remembered of their stay in Egypt:

Oh that we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at. (Numbers 11:4–6)

O dear and dangerous memory: faithful reporter and seditious scribe, beloved witness and bold perjurer! Egypt, the house of slavery; Egypt, the furnace of Pharaoh; Egypt, the land of forced labor — now Egypt, the oasis of the Lord? The mind, when distressed, can remember the melons and forget the misery.

Our own distortions may be less extreme. But the Preacher’s warning not to glorify the past (Ecclesiastes 7:10) suggests that we too can gild the pages of former days. Especially when the present feels unpleasant, we can fail to remember the more painful parts of the past. Then, as now, we dealt with apathy and discontent. Yesterday, as today, we carried wounds. The past indeed holds a Golden Age, but that garden was lost long before our lifetime.

Remember, dear saint, that even the happiest past grew not only flowers but thorns. If we could travel backward, we would indeed find many good gifts — perhaps even more than we now have — but we would not find all that we are looking for. Nostalgia’s longing leads us elsewhere.

Undim the Present

If the past is not always what we remember, we may then ask whether the present is more than we perceive. Might the backward glance, indulged too often, make us blind to present blessings?

However dim our days may seem when compared to the past, we still live beneath “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). Every past glory was a gift from his own hand, and though many years have perhaps rolled on, that hand remains open and unchanged. His gifts may differ between then and now, but he has not stopped giving.

Look around. Pause and consider. Stand like Elisha’s servant and ask for eyes to see (2 Kings 6:16–17). However bitter your cup, does it not hold some sweetness as well? Has God not surrounded your sorrows with comforts, or filled ordinary days with lawful pleasures, or given you some sphere of usefulness for Christ, however small? Has he not given you his words and his church — a song in the night and a choir of voices?

But more than that, more than all of God’s gifts combined and multiplied, has he not given you himself? If you find yourself in a wilderness, has not the pillar of fire and cloud gone with you? “Behold, I am with you always,” says our Lord (Matthew 28:20). Does not his always include today as well as yesterday?

The pastor John Newton once wrote to a woman recently widowed, “Though every stream must fail, the fountain is still full and still flowing. All the comfort you ever received in your dear friend was from the Lord, who is abundantly able to comfort you still” (Letters of John Newton, 225). In Christ, our comfort comes not mainly from a where or a when, but from a who. And though time has changed life, has changed us, it has not changed him. The eternal God is still our dwelling place, and underneath remain the everlasting arms (Deuteronomy 33:27).

Unveil the Future

So then, a golden thread connects our past and our present. And if we continue to follow this thread, we will find ourselves facing not backward, but forward — looking now not for a lost Eden, but for the New Jerusalem.

Here lies the secret of holy nostalgia. If we heed the whisper that our best days lie behind us, if we allow a gilded past to dim the present and abolish the future, then nostalgia will prove a persecutor, imprisoning our joy. But if we follow the longing to the land that lies not behind but beyond, nostalgia will turn prophet and apostle, a preacher of the coming glory.

David Gibson writes, “Wise people who understand how God has made us to long for him and for heaven don’t look backward when they get nostalgic. They allow the feeling to point forward. They look up to heaven and to home” (Living Life Backward, 103). We traced nostalgia’s faded letters and thought they read here, but all the while they were telling us of heaven.

Past gifts, however wonderful, were only a taste, a whisper, a window, a trail — “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited,” as C.S. Lewis puts it (The Weight of Glory, 31). They were firstfruits promising a harvest, olive branches heralding a new earth, the grapes of Canaan bidding us to look beyond the Jordan of death to the land of our inheritance.

As God once said to his backward-looking people, “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old” (Isaiah 43:18). Behold, the God of wonders does a new thing, dawns a new day. From the grave he has “brought life and immortality to light” (2 Timothy 1:10), and now he waits to receive us. Soon and very soon, we will dwell in a world where sadness cannot live (Revelation 21:4). Soon and very soon, we will see the Person behind all our past joys (Revelation 22:4).

Our past may hold the happiest life this world has ever seen. But compared to the future God holds for his people, even that past becomes shadow and mist, broken tune and burnt image. So, when nostalgia visits, by all means ache and long, crave and thirst, pine and yearn — but not for the past. Rather, hunger for heaven and for home.

In Christ, our best days always and forever lie ahead.