What To Do When... Things Go Wrong Series

What to Do When… part 2 “When things go wrong”

Story – the summer before my sophomore year we had a really big summer camp planned up in the mountains of Tennessee. We were supposed to have repelling, mountain climbing, mountain bike riding, nature walks, and a lot of other cool things. I had looked forward to this trip so much, and I could not wait to get there on the bus ride up. We arrived and spent the first day on one of two trips, one went on a 12-mile bike ride with repelling, and the other went to the Chimney Mountains for climbing. I was on the bike trip and it was a blast, we got covered in mud up to our necks!!! Then when we were on the side of a mountain to repel, it began to sprinkle just a tiny bit… then a worker that was doing the camp came and got us and told us we had to go back to camp right then! As I rode in the back of that old beat up pick up truck the light rain turned into a summer down pour and I was so confused as to what was going on. We got back to camp and they told us that, that summer shower had been at the Chimney Mountains right before it hit us and one of the students on our trip had slipped and fallen to his death… as I sat there it was plain to see on peoples faces that we all had been hit with something that had gone very wrong.

Tonight we will be looking at the second part of our series on what to do when…

Last week we said that life is full of all different kinds of situations and all to often we get caught up in all this and lose our focus on God, So our focus for this series was to try to handle these times in a way that forces us to become more God focused, and less me focused. The first situation we looked at was, “What to Do When… we are confused.” In this message we looked at Jesus example from the garden of Gethsemane and said there were 3 things we should do:

 Stop, and trust that God is with us, and will not

leave us confused

 Seek, God in a proper manner in our situation

 Submit, to God’s will and his desires…

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This week we will be taking a look at what to do when things go wrong. Before we dive into tonight’s topic, I want to describe a day to you and see if you can relate to it, You go to bed way to late the night before and somehow in your sleepless state of existence set the alarm clock to 6:00pm instead of 6:00am. When you wake up the next morning you realize that it is 7:05am and you have to be somewhere at 7:30… you have just slept in past the point I like to call stinkin’ late, Why do I call it stinkin’ late??? Well it is because you realize that there is no way possible for you to take a shower and get to wherever it is your going in even a little late fashion. So you throw on some clean clothes, on top of your dirty underwear, in hopes that no one will notice your smell. You have missed your ride so you know have to walk to your destination which makes you even later!!! On they way it begins to rain so hard that you look like you just jumped out of the shower with your clothes on. Of course you now find out that you had to turn something in and you forgot it in your hurried condition and as you stand outside holding back the tears, a truck flies by and splashes muddy water all over you…

You know life has a way of just throwing things at us that just don’t seem fair sometimes.

Sometimes we are hit by things that are really just nasty, ugly, and down right tough situations. It seems like if one more thing goes wrong we will crawl up in a ball and die.

On a more serious note, things can go wrong in this life in some really tragic ways. We can lose a friend or loved one to death, or someone we know may lose a person to divorce, or people may be disabled by emotional trauma or depression. Part of life is times when things go wrong. In the Old Testament there is a man named Job who had some similar times of everything going wrong. Lets read a few sections from his story:

Job 1:13-21 & 2:7-8

Here is a guy that I think we can relate to today. Maybe some of us can relate to exactly the same kind of things he went through, but all of us can at least see the suffering he went through and recognize that in our own lives. So what can we learn from Job that might help us handle our times when things go wrong in a Godly manner, one that is more God focused and less me focused? I think there are 4 things we can take from the story of Job and together with some New Testament passages we can come up with a Biblical formula for “What to Do When… things go wrong”