Did you ever start something and then find that it was going so badly, it was such a mess, you just wished you could just start all over again? You started down some path, you knew it was a mistake, but you got so invested in it you felt you had to see it through, even though it was getting worse and worse!
I dare say, for example, that every one of us who drives a car has on occasion taken a wrong turn. When you did that, when you took that wrong turn, what did you do? Did you turn around and go back the way you came? Or did you make the mistake of going and going and going, figuring out the way as you went?
Several weeks ago I went over to visit with Charles and Rosalind Gray. I’d been there before. I knew my way; I felt confident. Even so, I consulted the map before I went, just to make sure I knew the twists and turns of the streets. I found their house easily. All was well.
But after the visit, I thought, well, I’ll just go out of the subdivision another way. No problem. I’ll navigate by the stars. I’ll be fine. Well, it wasn’t fine. It wasn’t that easy. Do you know how many of your streets are named "No Outlet"? Did you notice me passing your house four times that night?!
There are times when we get started on something, and we just keep on going and going and going, when we really ought to start over. But our problem is that we get so invested in trying to muddle though the mess we’ve made that we don’t give ourselves permission to start over.
Have I ever told you about my first sermon? The very first time I attempted to preach, I was about twenty years old, and my pastor told me that the best way for me to learn to preach was simply to go and preach. He set a date for a Sunday evening on which I was to bring my first message.
Now my pastor, bless his perfectionist heart, had some advice for this fledgling preacher. He said, "First of all, use the classical three-point outline. Don’t try to get fancy until you have mastered the basics. So create three main headings to communicate what you want to say."
And then he had some delivery advice. "Memorize. Memorize. Do not bring your notes into this pulpit. Memorize." Well, I followed his advice. I wrote my three points and I memorized. I practiced that message over and over, every day for two weeks. I knew every syllable of it down cold. My brother had heard it so often he could lip-synch it with me!
But, of course you can guess what happened on that fateful Sunday evening when I stood to preach, without a shred of paper in front of me! Point number one went fine. Point number two escaped me completely. I stammered, I stuttered, I stopped. I looked over at my brother in the choir and said, "You’ve heard this thing. What comes next?" And then, in desperation, I plunged on into the third point, leaving out the second.
Well, somewhere in the middle of the third point the second point came to my mind, so I tried to blend them and put it all back together. It was a disaster. A total disaster. What had I have done? I tried to keep going and going when I should have abandoned everything and started all over.
There are times when we get started on something, and we just keep on going, when we really ought to start over. But our problem is that we get so invested in trying to muddle through the mess we’ve made that we don’t give ourselves permission to start over.
Have you ever considered the possibility that even God sometimes gets down the road and feels caught in something that He would like to scrub and start over? Did you ever think about God’s being so disappointed with something He has started that He feels like starting over?
Hosea the prophet discovered this in God’s life. Hosea had been through such an agonizing time in his own home, wanting to be married to Gomer and then not wanting to be married to Gomer, wanting the children and then rejecting them because some of them were fathered by another man. Hosea the prophet had been in profound personal agony about his marriage. But in the crucible of that painful experience he discovered something about God that few had ever seen before. Hosea discovered that God wants to start over with us.
The eleventh chapter is the most poignant passage of Hosea’s prophecy. In it he senses the depth and power of God’s love-anger relationship with His people. In the chapters prior to this 11th chapter, God ventilates His anger at the people because of their unfaithfulness. The God of these early chapters of Hosea’s prophecy is an angry God, a God of wrath and of judgment. But the tone changes at chapter 11.
I
Did you notice how much God is a feeling God1 The God whom Hosea knew has feelings. He is not just hard bedrock principles. He is feeling. He is personal. He has a rich emotional life. The God who wants to start over wants this because He loves and cares for His creation. He is profoundly compassionate because He is profoundly personal.
And most of all, He gives Himself permission to feel for His people. Let me repeat that. That’s important. God gives Himself permission to feel for His people.
"When Israel was I child, I loved him ... I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, 0 Israel? ... My compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger."
If God had kept on on the road He was traveling, you see, He would have destroyed His people. They were such a disappointment, they were so wrongheaded. They were so out of joint with each other, God and Israel, that it seemed that they were on a collision course in which the nation would be destroyed. But Hosea heard God’s heart. And God’s heart was a heart for change. God may have wanted to judge Israel, but more than that, God wanted to start over.
This God, this God of the tender heart that overrules His fierce anger ... the more He changes, the more He becomes Himself. The more that God works at starting over with His people, the more He goes back to His original intent. God remembers that He has invested so much of Himself in us. As Hosea sees it, when God searches His heart to discern what He really wants to do to these rebellious, stubborn people, the more He remembers how much He has already done. How can He give up on His investment?
"It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms ... I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love."
When God gives Himself permission to start over, He is really giving Himself permission to become Himself! He wants to become again what He started out to be in the first place, the redeemer and lover of His people. He finds Himself running down the road of wrath and anger, but He remembers all that He has done. He wants to start over. When God starts over, He becomes again what He really was in the first place, a loving Creator.
II
But as for us, our problem is that we do not give ourselves permission to start over. We get stuck in the ruts we have carved out for ourselves. We don’t seem to know any better than to keep on doing the destructive things we’ve chosen. Hosea sees this in us. Hosea understands how we do not give ourselves permission to start over.
"The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and offering incense to idols ... they did not know that I healed them … they have refused to return to me. My people are bent on turning away from me." We just keep going, even though we know we’re headed in the wrong direction.
Friends, on this New Year’s Day, I’m not worried about people who make resolutions and then break them. I’m not worried about those of us who have high-minded ideals but who do not live up to our ideals. I’m not worried about people who will try to do something new, though they may fail. No, I’m worried about the folks who do nothing with the new year ... who attempt nothing, resolve nothing, change nothing, risk nothing. I’m frightened for those of us who will not even consider starting over.
There are two kinds of people who choose not to start over. There are those who don’t think they need to change, who cannot envision improving on perfection. But there are those who feel as though they are so far gone that there is no hope to change, no hope for starting over. Either way, there is profound sin. Profound sin.
For the heart and core of sin is to reject the leadership of a loving God who wants to start over, who wants to change His relationship with us. If you and I tell God that we are settled and we don’t want to change, then we have committed a profound sin.
I’ve been working over the last two or three weeks with a man who has been brought to a starting-over place. It has been an astounding journey. Now this man has more problems to deal with all at once than most of us will accumulate in a lifetime. Job, marriage, finances, drug abuse, you name it, it’s all a mess. But over these few weeks I’ve seen amazing things happen. First I saw this man stripped of everything: stripped of self-esteem, bereft of his family, a couple of days later losing his job. Shorn of everything, except one thing, one key element. He has kept a sense of the presence of God. He has believed that it was the living God who was dealing with him. Now this man already knew that he needed to change. But by the time these two or three weeks were over, he knew it was more profound than that. He knew that he needed more than to change just a little. He knew he needed to start over. Scrub everything and start over.
When I last talked with him on Friday, I heard a changed man. Things are different. There is hope. There is possibility. Why? He gave himself permission to start over; and thus he gave God room in which to work.
I’m concerned, I say, about those of us who just keep on plodding along on the wrong roads, or maybe even on the right roads, when we should turn around and start over. But we just can’t seem to give ourselves permission to start over. Think of it: our God gives Himself permission to start over: "my compassion grows warm and tender, I will not execute my fierce anger"; but we don’t give ourselves room to change: "the more I called them, the more they went from me, they have refused to return to me ... my people are bent on turning away from me."
If God gives Himself permission to start over, but we won’t, isn’t that arrogance? Isn’t that an incredible stubbornness?
III
In front of us on this first Lord’s Day of the new year are the symbols of a God who is willing to start over. Our God who will bear any burden and pay any price to make it possible to start over. How do I know this?
Over here are the images of a God who started over one starry night in Bethlehem, and came into our world as a fragile, vulnerable infant, hoping so to identify with us and our problems that we would turn to Him. The infant Jesus is God starting over.
Up behind me is the symbol of a God who started over one terrible afternoon on a hill just outside the city walls of Jerusalem. He gave permission for His body to be ravaged and His blood to be spilled out like some worthless waste, all in order to reach us. The cross of Jesus Christ is God’s way of starting over. The cross is God taking hold of the whole sorry drama of human history to turn it around, because we have been so intent on going on our own way, even when we knew it was the wrong way. The cross is God starting over.
And down here on this table are other signs. What do they mean? This bread and this wine are not the pictures of failure and futility. They are not the images of a God who wants badly to start over but who cannot quite bring it off. On this table you see not the relics of a well-intentioned but defeated God. You see instead the trophies of His victory. The symbols of His success. The signs of His resurrection life. You and I were headed down the road to death and destruction, but Christ has risen and has brought life and light to possibility. You and I were bent on turning away from Him, but He is alive and He can turn us around and bring us back to Himself.
He breaks His very life for us, but He starts over from an empty tomb. God is starting over!
Hosea has it right: "I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy [you]; for I am God and not mortal, I am the Holy One in your midst."
The Holy One is in our midst. He has walked where we walk and lived where we live. He gives us permission to start over. He has already started over Himself. What except our own stubbornness is keeping us from starting over with God?
