Last year the Los Angeles Lakers were the powerhouse team in the NBA winning their third straight championship title. With high expectations of a four-peat the Lakers shot out of the gate with perhaps one of the biggest disappointing starts in recent history with a record of 12-19. To put that in perspective, the Lakers didn’t record their 19th loss last season until March 19th. But the Lakers aren‘t pessimistic in their outlook. One of the wile veterans Robert Horrey made a statement this past week after the Lakers went down in defeat to their arch rivals the Sacramento Kings on Christmas Day. He told a reporter that next day and I quote, "This one thing I guarantee. Before the end of January, we’ll be back above .500. With the New Year, we’re going to shake off everything and start like it’s a brand-new season."
You know there is just something about a New Years Day that is so appealing to us. Why is that? Is it because of the parties, the best of the year list, the all night movie marathons? No. I believe it is because it represents to many a chance at a new lease on life. In the movie Forrest Gump, Forrest is in a bar in New York City with Lt. Dan on New Year’s eve, and at the stroke of Midnight as the confetti comes down, one of the two prostitutes who are there with Lt Dan say to Forrest, “Don’t you just love New Year’s, it’s like a whole new beginning, a chance to start over again…a second chance.”
A second chance. You know, it’s not every day that you get a second chance. Ask the person who got the pink-slip when their factory was moved down to Mexico. Ask the mother whose husband ran off and left her with 4 hungry kids. It’s not everyday you come by a second chance. We live in a do or die world. A dog-eat-dog you might say. Hip hop Singer Eminem had a hit song that said, “You get one shot, don’t mess it up.”
It’s not every day that you find someone who will give you a second chance—much less someone who will give you a second chance every day. But in Jesus, Peter and others like him found both. And we can find it as well. Often the gospel is referred to as “The Gospel of Second Chances” because no matter how jaded your past may be, there is forgiveness offered in Christ Jesus who stands not only ready to forgive but also to restore.
In the movie, City Slickers, there are three life long friends discussing their lives. One of them is in tears. He has committed adultery with a young checkout clerk from the grocery store he manages. He has lost his wife. Because the store he manages belonged to his father in law, he has lost his job. His whole life is a disaster. He has nothing more to live for.
But one of his friends says, “No, that’s not true. Remember when we were kids and we would play ball, and someone would hit the ball and it would get stuck in a tree – we’d all yell ‘do over.’ And we’d get the ball out of the tree and do that play all over again. You’re life isn’t over. It’s a do-over. You have a chance to turn your life around.” Now some of you here may have made a mess of your lives and some of you need a “do-over“. Some here today need a second chance at life, and I dare say that all of us here today at one time or another have needed a second chance, or third of fourth or so on.
So why is it that we need a second chance? Mainly because we blew the first one. We made a mistake, a bad choice, a slip in morality and now we’ve had to live with it. A man and his wife were celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary when he broke into tears. His wife said, “What is wrong with you? Why are you so emotional?” He said, “On our honeymoon, I remember being so mad at you I said, ‘I could just kill you.’ You said, ‘If you do, you’ll go to jail for twenty-five years.’” His wife said, “Honey, I forgave you for that a long time ago.” He said, “I know. But if I had done it, today I would be a free man!
Past regrets. You know, Something in your past that you’ve done or something that you didn’t do that you are not proud of. A party got out of hand and you had a little to much to drink, and with your defenses weakened by the alcohol you gave into temptation and now you are at risk of losing your wife and family. Your goal in life was to make it to the top and you put your heart and soul sacrificing long hours at the office and cross country business trips…now that your there you look back and see that your kids are now grown and you missed something that you will never get back. You climbed up the ladder but when you got to the top you realized it was on the wrong building.
Perhaps it was an angry word that was said to someone you loved, something that was intended to harm and humiliate. When I was 15 years old, my mother caught me in a lie and grounded me because of it. I was prohibited from going to a dance with my girl friend at that time and I was so upset that I told my Mom that I hated her, and I knew that I didn’t mean it but I wanted to hurt my mother’s feelings. Looking back it was such an awful thing to say.
Perhaps you’ve done the same. You’ve made mistakes and now you think…if I could only go back in time…If you could you do it all over again, you’d do it differently. You’d be a different person. You’d be more patient. You’d control your tongue. You’d finish what you started. You’d turn the other cheek instead of slapping his. You’d get married first. You wouldn’t marry at all. You’d be honest. You’d resist the temptation. You’d run with a different crowd.
But you can’t. And as many times as you tell yourself, “What’s done is done,” what you did can’t be undone. You can’t unscramble eggs, and now your stuck with all these past regrets. Now the question is, what are you going to do with them?
The first option is to simply ignore them. Either repress them and pretend they didn’t happen, or worse try to reason them as being appropriate or even denying it was wrong in the first place. We say, they have more than they need, so they won’t miss just this one. I’m overtaxed in the first place, so if I cheat on them this one time God will understand. How can it be wrong when it feels so right and everybody else is doing it? Excuse after excuse, we simply ignore our past. But to simply ignore something doesn’t make it go away. It only makes it worse.
The second option to handle our past regrets is to go to the opposite end of the spectrum and that is to constantly beat ourselves over the head with them. To constantly remind ourselves of our past and put ourselves down day after day. Like a video recording, we replay the event in our mind over and over again, unable to release those feelings of guilt. There was a song a while back that said, “There’s always something there to remind me.” And there’s always something there to remind you. You see a family close together on Christmas Eve and you remind yourself that if you just would’ve walked away from temptation that night then your family could have been like that. But you didn’t and now your alone.
You see a friend going back to school and making something of her life, and you remind yourself if I just could stop drinking I could do that, I could do that! But you remind yourself of your failed attempts to stop, and instead of asking for help you find consolation in a bottle. This past week as I was watching a bowl game between Ole Miss and Nebraska, Ole Miss was ahead by four points with only 4 seconds to go in the game and Nebraska had to drive the ball over 70 yards to score and the commentator said, “Ole Miss can’t celebrate just quite yet, I’m thinking of one word…that is Kentucky.” I just looked down and almost cried. You beat yourself up, you feel guilty and worthless. With no joy what so ever, but John 10:10 says that Jesus came to give us life, and life to its fullest. And that is no way to live.
The third option is the best one and that is to bring those past regrets to Jesus and let Him forgive you and give you a fresh start. When we confess our sin to God, we are like a first grader standing before our teacher with a messy paper. “I colored outside the lines too many times. Could I start over on a clean sheet?” “Of course,” says the teacher. Happy is the first grader who gets a second chance, or as David wrote in Psalm 32:1 , “Happy is the person whose sin is forgiven, whose wrongs are pardoned” So we dash back to our seat and start over. You see, God has set for us certain boundaries, laws that are there to protect us but when we go outside those boundaries we call it sin, and when we confess those sins, we are saying can I start over? And God stands ready with a new sheet in hand, waiting to give you a second chance.
You see, God wants to forgive you, God wants to give you a fresh start. For some reason we have in our minds this image of a God who is anxious to punish us, clasping His hands just waiting for the chance to send us to Hell. But with all the second, third, fourth and sometimes 5th or more chances He gives us, it seems that God is looking more for ways to get us home than for ways to keep us out. I challenge you to find one soul who came to God seeking grace and did not find it. Search the pages. Read the stories. Envision the encounters. Find one person who came seeking a second chance from Jesus and left with a stern lecture. I dare you. Search. You won’t find it.
You will find a strayed sheep on the other side of the creek. He’s lost. He knows it. He’s stuck and embarrassed. What will the other sheep say? What will the shepherd say? You won’t find a shepherd who will forget about the disobedient sheep…You will find a shepherd who searches for and finds him.
Max Lucado wrote about a time when his daughter had disobeyed him. He wrote, “My oldest daughter, Jenna, is four years old. Some time ago she came to me with a confession. “Daddy, I took a crayon and drew on the wall.” I sat down and lifted her up into my lap and tried to be wise. “Is that a good thing to do?” I asked her. “No.” “What does Daddy do when you write on the wall?” “You spank me.” “What do you think Daddy should do this time?” “Love.”
Don’t we all want that? Don’t we all long for a father who, even though our mistakes are written all over the wall, will love us anyway? Don’t we want a father who cares for us in spite of our failures? Don‘t we want a Father who will give us a second chance? Well guess what…We do. And the bible is filled with people who came to God seeking a second chance, and God granted their request. There are so many, but I want to focus on just two this morning.
Now, look at the first man who turned away from God. His name is Jonah. You may think of Jonah as a man who just had a whale in his story. But, believe me, the story of Jonah isn’t about a fish. It’s about the God of the second chance.
Jonah, a prophet, had been commanded by God to preach to the citizens of Nineveh. Nineveh was the capital of the nation of Assyria. Jonah was to tell the Assyrians that judgment was coming. And he knew that if he did that, they could repent and they might be forgiven. That was hard for Jonah to deal with. You see, Jonah hated the Assyrians
Now nothing would have pleased Jonah more than to see the whole bunch of the Assyrians wiped off the earth. Those Assyrians may have mattered to God, but they didn’t matter to Jonah.
God had directed Jonah to travel east over land to Nineveh. But Jonah booked passage on a ship headed west toward Spain. During that journey, a tremendous storm arose, and Jonah ended up in the Mediterranean Sea.
That’s when the fish swallowed him. Within a short time of gulping down the prophet, Jonah was humbled and came to his senses. Now you might have thought that God would have given up on Jonah and drafted another prophet easier to work with.
But, in the middle of the book of Jonah there is a most interesting phrase. I think it’s the most interesting phrase in the book. It says, "The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time." Deliberately, consciously, stubbornly, Jonah had run away from God. Yet, God came to the prophet a second time and allowed him to carry on his ministry. That’s one important lesson from the story of Jonah ... God is the God of the second chance.
The second person who was given another chance is Peter. Jesus was wounded by Simon Peter, maybe not physically, but emotionally. On that chaotic, pressure-filled night when Jesus was arrested, everything came unraveled. Peter was loyal to Jesus for a while. Concealing his identity, Peter followed Jesus right into the courtyard of the high priest. But in that hostile environment, somebody looked at Peter and accused him of being a follower of Jesus, and Peter immediately said, “Oh no; not me!”
Three times Peter was accused. Three times every eye was on him, and three times he impulsively said, “I never heard of Jesus. I don’t know him!” The third time he underscored it with an oath. During the final denial, Jesus was being escorted away, and he overheard what Peter said. Luke 22:61 reads, “The Lord turned and looked straight at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word the Lord had spoken to him. ... And he went outside and wept bitterly.”
Peter felt terrible about his denial. But the denial hurt Jesus at a time when he needed the support of his friends. That emotional wound may have hurt more deeply than some of the physical wounds he was already beginning to experience. I want you to see how Jesus dealt with that hurt. He appeared to Peter personally after the resurrection and asked Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” I think he was subtly reminding Peter of his boast that he would never deny Jesus even when the others did.
Simon said, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.”
A little later Jesus asked a second time, “Simon, do you truly love me?” Peter said, “Yes, Lord. You know that I love you.” He said, “Feed my sheep.” A third time he said, “Simon, son of John, do you really love me?” I wonder if he asked him three times to give him an opportunity to affirm his love three times because he had denied him three times. But the Bible says that Peter was a little bit hurt because Jesus asked him a third time.
Peter said, “Lord, you know all things. You know that I love you.” Jesus said, “All right, feed my sheep. Follow me.” Jesus had told Peter he was going to give him the keys to the kingdom. Peter blew it big time. Jesus relinquished his right to retaliate, but he also gave back the keys of the kingdom and told Peter to feed his sheep. He knew Peter would preach the first gospel sermon to open the door to the church on the day of Pentecost. Jesus didn’t keep a record of wrongs.
Now if God can give Peter a second chance, and if He could give Jonah a second chance…He can give you a second chance as well. And it doesn’t matter how much you’ve sinned, or how bad your life may be right now…God stands waiting to forgive, ready to give you a second chance. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says “If anyone is in Christ He is a new creation. The old has gone and the new has come.” And you can start afresh this morning. How about it? Let’s pray.
