Elder M. Edmunds
Co-Pastor of United Ordained Church
June 2002
My foundational scripture will come from verse eight, which says, “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.”
This is a companion of Psalm 51:8, which reads, “Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee.”
This terminology inked by David in this penitential psalm and verse, which I will elucidate and build from, applies to biblical or spiritual wisdom imparted to him after he suffered from a bad decision concerning Bathsheba and her husband Uriah.
For when he recognized fully how horrendous his decision affected his life and those connected to him, he took full responsibility for his actions and begged for divine forgiveness, moral cleanness, renewed relational service with God, and national restoration.
For deep within the recesses of David’s heart, he knew that if God, whose holiness and justice is motivated or guided by His love and mercy, would afford him another opportunity by raising him out of the ashes of his behavior, he would than teach and instruct those who continually capitulate their will to damnable things that effect their future.
I believe many today are experiencing the anxiety, the pain, and the excessive burden of a bad decision. You feel like your locked in an invisible prison…recriminating about the mistakes you made.
Within the corridors of your mind, you’re wondering how you got stuck in the mess your in. You did not expect the result of your decision to unfold this way; and now secretly you are plotting how you can extricate yourself from your situation.
However, with no avail the misery and the guilt of your actions want release you. You remain stuck in a clandestine pit of pain and agony.
You come to church every time the doors open, trying to sing yourself out of your pit of a bad decision; trying to praise God out of your pit of a bad decision. Trying to dance and shout out of your pit of a bad decision.
Yet, you remain smack dead in your situation. What is the problem you wondering; God do you care, for I am trying to serve you? Why will you not remove this thing? Or, why wont you change this situation around?
The situation can be your employment, your marriage, your children, or your finances. Were ever the disappointment rest or the difficulty exist, your asking God to turn it around, but for some reason its getting worse and not better.
Why won’t He intervene you wonder. You’re on the verge of throwing in the towel. You are on the verge of quitting that job, severing that relationship, abandoning those children, or declaring bankruptcy. Why won’t you deliver me from this situation; for I read in Isaiah the fifty ninth chapter that “Your hand is not shorten, that it cannot save, neither Your ear heavy, that it cannot hear.” So why are You allowing me to experience this ongoing pain of my predicament?
Well I come, by the unction of the Holy Spirit, to make clear to you, who are suffering from a bad decision, how to get over it as David did and to get on with you’re life: and to move to the next level in God.
For the pain and the regret of your mistakes is design by God to lead you towards repentance. For God still has purpose for your life even in your mess.
You are broken. You are perplexed. You are hard pressed on every side due to your own decisions. Yet, God still has purpose for your life.
If you really think about it and be honest with your self, some of your bad decisions should have been the death of you. However, God’s love withheld the hand of His justice and afforded you an opportunity to amend your ways because He still has purpose for you.
Therefore, you must first be transformed by the renewing of your mind to be used of God effectively and walk in the newness of life to teach and instruct others in the way of Godliness.
The Greek word, from which the English word “metamorphosis” or transformation comes, connotes change of condition. Before your outward condition can change, God will manipulate your situation to cause you to bend your knee and reexamine your inward condition in light of His revealed Word. Then, help you to make those corrections within your thinking (were decisions are made and habits are formed), so that you can outwardly manifest your inner change and stop making bad decisions that affect your growth, affect your life, and affect those around you.
Let me simply put it this way, “your outward situation is just an indication of your inner condition.”
This is why we remain in our condition. We refuse to recognize our own weaknesses and confront them by making the right modifications that are required by God’s standard in His revealed Word.
For if God extracts you from your predicament before you learn from the hand of your own consequence, you will eventually revert into the situation again, but only in a worse state than before. Therefore, He loves you so much, that he keeps you within your situation until you recognize your own weaknesses.
He allows us to suffer a while, because He alone knows the condition of our hearts and mind. For our hearts, our passion, our inner desires, if not guided by God will lead us back into our pits of despair if we don’t learn from our previous mistakes.
For Jeremiah 17:9&10 asserts, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.”
God desires you to walk in freedom, walk in victory, and walk in power.
However, if you do not learn the things you need to learn, change the things you need to change, His hand according to our psalm, will be heavy upon you until you acknowledge your sin so you can become the person He desires you to become, and use you for His purpose.
Therefore, stop recriminating about the mistakes you made within that marriage, within your occupation, or concerning your finances. For the sorrow of the world produces death.
Death to His intended blessing He has for you; death to your design purpose and destiny.
However, take an introspective look of why you made the decision in the first place.
Are there any dark areas in your life: any frailties or impediments that you refuse to address or confess that is leading you to the decisions you are making with your life?
For we all make bad decisions because of the darkness that resides in our life. Regardless of your position, your intelligence, or your skill, there is darkness, un-repented areas, in all of our lives.
Therefore, before God can deliver us or turn our situation around, we must reexamine our life to see if our issue that plaques us is truly us.
Is my situation and indication of my inner condition?
Is my issue, the difficulty, the plaguing predicament of my problem, really just me?
Let me see, where’s my Bible? Were is the mirror which I can behold the condition of my soul?
I am tired of being sick in tired of this mess. I can’t go around this mountain any longer. Days have passed to months. Months have passed to years. What is it? Is it I Lord? Have I created this prison due to my own propensity?
If so, I’ll stop projecting my problem on others. I will take full responsibility and own up to my own faults.
I am tired of “groping for the wall like the blind and stumbling at noon day” due to the darkness of my deeds.
For we all stumble in the dark grouping for the walls because, we have not learned from our own errors in certain areas of our life.
The only way you can rise out of the ashes of your behavior, the difficulties of your decisions, or the plight of your pain, is to first change your mind set.
Touch somebody and say, “You got to change your mind before your situation changes.”
This is why David was a man after God’s own heart. Though he found himself in an inextricable situation due to his horrific decision concerning the affair with Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah, when God became actively involved, by confronting David through the prophet Nathan, David did not attempt to rationalize or justify his behavior.
When confronted with the facts of his darkness, David realized his issue resided within himself, and immediately confessed and repented of His doings.
In the same light of God’s holiness and love that is revealed in His Word, we must remain in our situation until our guilt, our sorrow, our remorse drives us to repentance.
There are all kinds of guilt or sorrow, which burdens the soul.
There is legal guilt, which comes from the laws of this land being broken. There is social guilt, which is a break in a custom or unwritten law. There is personal or subjectional guilt, which comes from a violation of your own standard. However, these guilt’s or sorrows are worldly and produces no significant change.
However, there is a guilt produced from are mistakes that I refer to as a Theological guilt or a godly sorrow, which Paul refers to in 2 Corinthians the seventh chapter and tenth verse. For he said, “For only godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted or repented of.”
This theological guilt, which is the only true guilt that drives a man to reevaluate his own doings and turn away or repent of his own deviant actions so that he can become the person God design him to be, is intended for his good.
For it has a soul purpose in changing his mind. And if his mind-set changes, his outward situation will be able to change. And he will begin to walk in victory, walk in power, and walk in freedom; operating in a more effective manner to defeat the machinations and motivations of the Prince of Darkness.
Therefore, if you suffer a while, and learn from your mistakes and have the right disposition, God will raise you up out of the ashes of your behavior; and you will be able to effectively teach and instruct others how God deals with repentant sinners.
Touch somebody and tell them, “God still has a purpose for you.”
