Hanging in There Through Mistakes
apr1998p
Psalm 31
One of the strangest phenomena of our time is that of the bumper sticker. It tells you so much about so many different people. It communicates a message. I have been a little wary of Christians who wear their mottos or their slogans or their philosophies on a bumper sticker. When you choose to do that, you have to live up to what you are suggesting you believe.
“Honk if you love Jesus!” I bet you haven’t seen that one lately. A fellow I worked for years ago saw one of those on the back of a car. He was sitting behind the car at a traffic light. So he decided to give the guy a shot on the horn. The man leaned out the window, shook his fist and yelled, “All right! ‘?#@*&%(&#_*’ I can’t go till the light turns green!”
I saw one in the parking lot at Walmart that said, “Keep honking, I’m reloading.” That made me nervous. How about the one that says, “Follow me to XYZ Church.” Follow me to Shady Shores Baptist Church and then we drive like crazy. A real good testimony. “Christians are not perfect, just forgiven.” That is probably one of the better ones.
“Christians are not perfect, just forgiven.” Have you ever seen a perfect person? That question was asked of an audience once and there was no response. Finally, one man stood up and said, “I haven’t seen one but I have heard of one.” “Tell us about it, sir.” “Well, I have heard that my wife’s first husband was perfect.”
This evening we want to look at the subject: Hanging in There Through Mistakes.
We Christians suffer from a common ailment; making honest mistakes. I am not talking about intentional, willful, sin. Honest mistakes can lead into sin.
Webster says: To make a mistake means to choose wrongly, to make a wrong judgment. Webster amplified this in a second definition: a wrong attitude, a wrong action or statement proceeding from faulty judgment, inadequate knowledge or intention.
Remember we are not talking about direct rebellion. We are also not talking about demonic deception. We are talking about honest to goodness mistakes. And no one is immune. But, simple mistakes, as I hope we will see this evening, can often lead to some tragic consequences and sinful activity.
I believe there are five categories of mistakes illustrated in the Bible which I want us to consider. You may want to take a pencil and write these down because in all likelihood, your mistakes and my mistakes fall into one of these categories. All of them are from the Bible.
1. Panic Prompted Mistakes
These are mistakes we make out of fear or from being in a hurry or as a result of worry.
We panic and make a wrong decision. Look at the book of Genesis 12:10. We will be looking at several passages so you want to keep your Bible handy. Genesis 12:10: “Now there was a famine in the land; so Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land.”
Immediately before this passage you read that God had made some promises to Abraham. Abraham came to Bethel, a special place where he met God. As he communicated with God, God made some vital promises to him:
• From you will spring many nations.
• You will possess this land.
• I am going to bless you.
You hang with me Abram and I will meet your need. He is still hearing the echo of God’s words when we come to verse 10. “Now there was a famine in the land...” And note the mistake—“...Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there.”
Abram was in a hurry. He panicked. God had made some promises to him but he quickly forgot. In his own fear and in his own hurry he panicked and he went down into Egypt. That was a mistake. It wasn’t God’s plan for him.
Now often following a mistake, there is another mistake. And often it is a sin. Look at verses 11-12. “And it came about when he came near to Egypt, that he said to Sarai his wife, ‘See now, I know that you are a beautiful woman; and it will come about when the Egyptians see you, that they will say, “This is his wife;” and they will kill me, but they will let you live. Please say that you are my sister ...” He concocts a lie with Sarai to mislead the Egyptians. One mistake leads to another.
In the book of Numbers chapter 13 and 14 we have another mistake prompted by panic.
In this occasion we have the twelve spies going into the land of Canaan. Ten spies came back and said we can’t go into Canaan. This was the Promised Land. It had been the place God had wanted them to go. But in their fear, in their panic, they said we can’t go in because there are giants there. We are as grasshoppers. Only two of those spies came back and said, “We can go in. Let’s do what God asked us to do, let’s take the promise He has placed in our hands.”
But they chose not to do that. They chose to listen to the wrong advice. They chose to listen to the ten and not to the two. And because of that they made a mistake. It grew out of fear and panic.
At first there is no sin involved. But sin followed and in their disobedience they spent forty years in the wilderness. Panic prompted mistake.
Now in modern times for you and for me I think panic prompted mistakes are most obvious. First in the area of romance. Second in the area of finance.
We get in a hurry about romance, don’t we. Haven’t you heard young women in their mid to late twenties say, “Man, I am twenty something. Life is passing me by. I am frightened whether I will ever find a mate.” In our panic we make a wrong choice. A mistake. I think the same is true of guys. We get in too much of a hurry. We cease waiting on God and we take things into our own hands.
The same thing is true in the area of finance. We often panic. We are prompted in our hurry to run ahead of God. We rush out and do things that maybe we should not have done. We make a gross mistake. We take the first way out to solve our financial problems and we only fall deeper into it. It is a mistake.
When have we done this in either romance or finances we want to say, “Lord, where are you?” We go down and drown in the midst of our problem. Sit tight. God’s word suggests that we sit tight. Stand fast. God knows what He is doing in our lives. Often God has a plan for us, and we in our panic rush right past God’s provision, because we just don’t trust God ... or we are too impatient to allow Him to work. For Abraham and for Israel He knew that they were impatient and they panicked. Panic prompted mistakes.
2. Good Intentioned Mistakes
Now in a sense, all mistakes are like this if they are genuine mistakes. But let’s categorize this one by itself: “good intentioned” mistakes. This is a mistake that is made ignorantly with an absolutely pure motive. Have you ever made a mistake like that? You have good intentions, but you use the wrong planning or the wrong method.
Consider Moses, in Exodus 2. He’s forty years old. (You never get to the place, even in the Bible, where you’re too old to make mistakes.) Middle-aged Moses realizes that he is potentially able to deliver His people from the bondage of Egypt. So he rolls up his sleeves and, preempting Frank Sinatra by some 3,500 years, says, “I’ll do it my way.”
“Now it came about in those days, when Moses had grown up, that he went out to his brethren and looked on their hard labors; and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his brethren. So he looked this way and that, and when he saw there was no one around, he struck the Egyptian and hid him in the sand” (Ex. 2:11-12).
What he has done is, in his hurry, with a right motive, he moved ahead of God and he committed a great sin. It was the sin of murder. In Acts 7, you will see that in reflection on what had happened, Moses assumed that his brethren would understand that God was granting them deliverance through him; but they did not understand.
I think so often when our motive is right we assume that everyone will understand, everyone will follow suit, everyone will appreciate what we do even if what we do is wrong. Moses thought that. He had good intentions, but it was a mistake. And what a mistake is was.
Let me just suggest as one who has made many mistakes; I am about ready to declare I am an expert on this subject: It is easy for us, especially in faith, to run ahead of God.
To roll up our sleeves in God’s service, wanting to do God’s will, wanting to do God’s purpose, but we run ahead of Him. In our own strength, in our own fleshly ways, we take the matter in our own hands. And we always reap a painful crop, or consequence. When we do things ahead of God, when we rush in ahead of Him we find these things we seek to do with good intentions, we find they come back to haunt us.
3. Negligent Mistakes
Men, we especially suffer from this one ... passive, negligent mistakes. They occur in Scripture rather often, relating to the home, to the role of a father. Negligent mistakes are a result of laziness or oversight or inconsistency or just a plain lack of discipline.
Let me illustrate what I’m talking about, and maybe you’ll be shocked. If I were just getting started in the Scripture, I’d be shocked. The man is David. In 1 Kings 1:5-6, we read: “Now Adonijah the son of Haggith exalted himself” [Haggith was David’s wife ... one of many. If you study the genealogy of David, you’ll discover that this man was grossly guilty of polygamy. The best count seems to be 18, but there may well be more. Some of those are not even named, but one of them was Haggith, the mother of Adonijah] “Now Adonijah the son of Haggith exalted himself, saying, ‘I will be king.’ So he prepared himself chariots and horsemen with fifty men to run before him. And his father had never crossed him at any time asking, ‘Why have you done so?’”
Passive negligence. Adonijah was born a rebel, grew up a rebel, and when he reached the “age of accountability” he refused to be accountable! He rebelled saying, “I’ll become king.” Part of the problem was a father who never crossed the son. David never said to his son, “Son, you’ve got a bent toward rebellion. As your father, I am responsible before God to curb that bent, to deal with it until you yourself can get it under control.” No David was like many dads. Too busy. Preoccupied. And therefore, negligent.
Benjamin Franklin once wrote these insightful words:
A little neglect may breed mischief:
for want of a nail the shoe was lost;
for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and
for want of a horse the rider was lost.
And how often in our neglect, in our busyness, in our preoccupation we make the negligent mistake.
4. Unrestrained-Curiosity Mistakes
Of all the five categories of mistakes, this is probably the most attractive to young people, although it is not exclusively their problem. Young people who are on the edge of life and they want to dare, to experiment, to try things out, they want to know. May I suggest that unrestrained curiosity can be marvelous. It helps us to make new discoveries. It helps us to be creative. But unrestrained curiosity usually relates to the sensational or the demonic.
In 1 Samuel 28 we have the story of Saul developing after the prophet Samuel had died. Suddenly, Samuel the prophet is not there and Saul feels isolated. He loses confidence. He no longer is able to get the word from God he so desperately needs. That is what Samuel had done for him. Do you know what he does? Out of his curiosity and out of his need he goes to a spiritualist, to a medium. He disguised himself and, taking two other men with him, he paid a visit to a woman seer by night. They wanted her to bring Samuel back so they could talk to the man of God.
He was dabbling in something that was alien to a walk with God. It still happens. There are some of you dabbling in things out of your curiosity. And you are making a mistake from which you may never break loose. In fact, if you want to know the whole story you can look at 1 Chronicles 10:10-13 and you will read that this sin is responsible for Saul’s death. “So Saul died for his trespass which he committed against the Lord, because of the word of the Lord which he did not keep; and also because he asked counsel of a medium, making inquiry of it” (1 Chronicles 10:13).
Unrestrained curiosity could get you involved with alcohol or drugs or sex or any number of other things. And once you are involved you may never get untangled.
5. Blind Spot Mistakes
These are the ones we repeat most often, the ones we commit out of ignorance or habit or even poor parental influence. We’re blinded to the truth and we stumble into this kind of thing time after time.
The last part of Acts 15 is the account of a conflict between two godly men, Paul and Barnabas. On their first missionary journey they had taken along a young man by the name of John Mark. He blew it. At the first opportunity he ducked out of the missionary journey and make his way back home. He had all of that he wanted. He essentially failed at his first test.
Now Paul and Barnabas are going on a second journey and Barnabas says, “I want to take John Mark along because I think we need him and he needs to make it this time.” Paul says, “Not on your life. I don’t want him going.”
This is a blind spot for the Apostle Paul. Paul expected a lot from a lot of people. When they didn’t measure up he could write them off rather quickly. We tend to do that sometimes. He wrote off John Mark. Later he would be man enough to say, “Only Luke is with me. Pick up Mark and bring him with you, for he is useful to me for service” (2 Tim. 4:11). He is useful for me. But now he is saying I don’t want him. He made a mistake and I am writing him off. And two good men had a conflict.
On another occasion in Gal 2:11-15 we find Paul and Peter having conflict. This time Paul is pointing out Peter’s blind spot. Do you have a blind spot? Do you have a blind spot that Is tripping you up? Causing you to make mistakes over and over again? Do you know the interesting things about blind spots? We will swear before a lie detector test we are doing it out of a pure motive. Yet it is a blind spot catching us.
What is happening in Gal. 2 is Peter was being a hypocrite. He was acting hypocritically. When he was with the Gentiles he was saying bring on the ham sandwiches and the pigs feet. I like ‘em. But when the Jews showed up he moved away from the Gentiles. He forgot about grace. He was acting one way with the Gentiles and then when the Jews showed up he was acting another. Isn’t that what being a hypocrite is all about?
I think about how many people I have heard say, “I am not going down to that church where all those hypocrites are.” And they have said it about every church I have ever been to. Yet they will literally look on Peter as a Saint. He was a hypocrite, too. What better place for a hypocrite? At least here they stand a chance of hearing the truth and getting a chance to repent and learn a different and better way. There are those who use hypocrites for an excuse to stay out of church and go to hell because they think a church is a place for saints.
Look at what Paul said: “But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned” (Gal 2:11). So Peter’s blind spot was that he was speaking out of both sides of his mouth. I think we probably rationalize this kind of mistake the most. We all have our blind spots.
A Psalm of Balm For the Mistaken
Now let’s turn over to Psalm 31. Just a statement or two to conclude. What do we do when we make mistakes? I think Psalm 31 was written after a mistake that David had made. It might have been a blind spot that tripped him up. It might have been related to his family. It might have been a mistake he made out of panic. But now in the aftermath, on the heels of some mistake, he is writing out of some pain. If you make a mistake and it was a critical one—you know the pain of that experience. We are talking about how to live through it.
How do we hang in there in spite of our mistakes?
Let me begin in verse 1: “In Thee, O LORD, I have taken refuge; Let me never be ashamed; In Thy righteousness deliver me.” Sometimes our mistake causes us to be ashamed. We are ashamed we did it. We are ashamed of our poor judgment.
“Incline Thine ear to me, rescue me quickly; Be Thou to me a rock of strength, A stronghold to save me. For Thou art my rock and my fortress; For Thy name’s sake Thou wilt lead me and guide me. Thou wilt pull me out of the net which they have secretly laid for me” (Ps. 31:2-4a).
It wasn’t so much that they had laid it. He laid it for himself.
“For Thou art my strength. Into Thy hand I commit my spirit” (Ps. 31:4b-5a).
Does that sound familiar? That is what Jesus said on the cross isn’t it? I think in this instance David is saying, “You are my strength because I have no other way out of this mistake I have made. There is no one else who is going to listen. There is no one else who is going to console me. There is no one else who is going to help me.
That’s what we all need to do. When you have made a mistake, go immediately to your knees. Go immediately to the Lord and say, “Into Thy hand I commit my spirit. I commit all that I am to You” (31:5). Because it is there you are going to get some help. Now note how God views our coming to Him in such an hour.
First of all, God views us realistically. “I hate those who regard vain idols; But I trust in the LORD” (31:6). God is so honest. And we need to be honest with Him. We don’t have to tell God how good we are. We don’t have to put on a face that makes us think we are impressing God. In fact, I think that is where we are tripping up in our prayer.
Now when we trust in the Lord not only does He see us realistically, but He sees all of us. He knows everything. “I will rejoice and be glad in Thy lovingkindness, Because Thou hast seen my affliction” (31:7a). The Lord has considered every part of it. There is nothing you have done that He doesn’t know about. Do you recall the passage in Hebrews about our having a high priest who has been tempted in all things as we are? Do you remember that passage? Just two verses before it speaks of the fact that nothing is hidden before God. Everything is open to Him. We need to remember that. Because in that openness God understands us. And even more amazing He accepts us. Not only does He give us knowledge about ourselves, but, He accepts us.
“And Thou hast not given me over into the hand of the enemy; Thou hast set my feet in a large place” (31:8). Was this because David had big feet? No. It was because David needed space and God gave it to him in His mercy. People hem you in, back you into a corner. But space you need. He set my feet in a large place. He doesn’t reject us. But rather He makes room for us. Sometimes we forget that we are dust, but God doesn’t.
Now out of this: “But as for me, I trust in Thee, O LORD, I say, ‘Thou art my God’" (31:14). What is it that God does? He instructs us in our mistakes, in the aftermath of our mistakes, in a context of trust and not in the context of suspicion. He instructs us in all of our life—not just in the pleasant part. Sometimes I think it is just the pleasant times God is interested in—but he is working with all of us at all times.
God instructs us in the secret places, not in the public places. “How great is Thy goodness, Which Thou hast stored up for those who fear Thee, Which Thou hast wrought for those who take refuge in Thee, Before the sons of men! Thou dost hide them in the secret place of Thy presence …” (31:19-20a).
Isn’t it marvelous that when God reprimands us, when God deals with us it is in the private place? Sometimes we as people want to say I told you so and we want to say it publicly. But God doesn’t do that.
“Thou dost keep them secretly in a shelter from the strife of tongues” (31:20c). When God speaks to us He does say it loudly and He does say it strongly, but “Praise God!” He says it privately. You don’t have to worry about Him saying, “I told you so.” Because God will drive that truth home more strongly than you can.
The best thing we can learn from our mistakes we learn in secret. For there He tells us His secrets. An in doing so He covers us with His love and understanding.
Christians are not perfect, just forgiven. And what do we do when we blow it, when we make a mistake? Carry it to God. Don’t try to hide it. Don’t try to put a mask over it. Carry it to God. And on your knees say, “God, I need You. I need Your help. Take my mistake, take my foolishness, take my failure and turn it into something that will be a blessing not only to me but to You.”
And the one who learns to do that, hangs in there through the mistakes he or she makes.
This series is strongly based on the book: Three Steps Forward, Two Back, by Charles Swindoll.
