WOULDA COULDA SHOULDA
Set for Life
Part 2 of 3 03-13-11 Sermon
Last time we talked about how God could make a difference in our present. How we can meet Him, how we can encounter Him, be forgiven by Him, be assured of heaven with Him.
Next week we’re going to look at how we go into the future. How we can go into the future God’s way. That’s going to be fun.
But today we’re going to talk about our past. How do we deal with the regrets of our past? How can God help us in that arena of our life? We all have regrets. We all have things we wish we hadn’t done but we did. Sometimes they’re big things. Sometimes they’re little things. Sometimes they’re petty things. Sometimes they’re dumb things.
There’s a book about cowboy wisdom with a great title, Don’t Squat When You’re Wearing Spurs. That’s so true. So many of our wounds in life are self-inflicted. That’s basically what the book was talking about.
We just turned the clocks forward for daylight savings time, but many people have deep and profound regrets and they want to just turn the clock back. “If I could just go back to that one moment, that one decision, to that one episode in my life. If I could just go back and do it differently, do it again.” And it gnaws at them.
It was true of Regina Green. She lived a storybook life. She had it all. She was beautiful. She was talented. She was brilliant. She ended up in the finals of America’s Junior Miss competition. She started to do television commercials and television programs and started to get some parts in some movies. Her photograph was featured in People magazine and Glamour magazine. She earned a college scholarship from a prestigious university to study chemistry. She had it all. And she credited her strong southern values with keeping her out of Hollywood’s fast lane of sex and drugs. She wanted to do life right.
Then she fell in love with a famous racecar driver. One day he invited her to come to New York City to visit him. So she did. He wined her and he dined her and he proposed marriage to her. That weekend, despite her strong convictions against sex outside of marriage she had her first sexual encounter. And that’s how she got AIDS. If she could only go back. Just if she could go back and relive that one weekend and make a different decision. Just do it differently next time. Those kind of deep and profound regrets can haunt us and they can hound us.
Or we regret things we should have done but we didn’t do. “If I’d only spent more time with my daughter or my son when they were younger… If only I’d spent more time with my mom or dad before they died… If I’d only swallowed my pride and apologized and not let such a huge rift come between me and my best friend… If I’d only taken better care of my health when I was younger…”
Or we kick ourselves over missed opportunities of life. “If I’d only married my high school sweetheart… If I’d only stayed at my first job then by now I’d be vice president of the company… If I’d just finished college then maybe I’d have a better paying job by now…” Missed opportunities of life.
Maybe you have a missed opportunity in your life. You may feel like you’ve squandered the one and only life that you’ve been given. You can never set things right. You can never repair the damage. You’re doomed to never reach your potential. You’ll never find happiness. You took a wrong turn in life and now there’s no way out.
A psychologist by the name of Dr. Arthur Freeman has studied this kind of thinking that goes on. He wrote a book called Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda in which he states that this kind of thinking is continuing fruitless thoughts about what would have been, what could have been, what should have been if only things had been done differently. This kind of thinking is immobilizing. People who feel caught in the quagmire of the past have a tendency to give up on the future. They find it difficult to galvanize themselves to take an action that might change their lives for the better. They may not even be able to enjoy the good things they do have in their lives right now because of that kind of thinking.
Do you know somebody like that?
So what do you do? Just wallow in the past? No. There are steps that you can take. The ABC’s and Ds of how you can cooperate with God to get past the regrets that you have in your life. Whether it’s big things or little things. Four ways the Bible tells us we can deal with regret from our past.
And it’s all built on a familiar story many of you know. The story that Jesus told of the prodigal son. It’s found in Luke 15. Fundamentally this is a story about deep and profound regrets. It’s a tale about a wealthy man who had two sons. The younger son decides he’s had enough of work around the farm, enough of hard labor. He comes to his dad one day and says, “Dad, I want you to cash in your 401K. I want you to get all the retirement money and give me my inheritance early. I'm still young. At least I can enjoy it when I'm young. Give it to me now.” So his dad does.
Luke 15:13 says, “Not long after that the younger son got together all he had and set off for a distant land and there he squandered his wealth in wild living.” Wine, women and song and boom! All of his inheritance is gone. All the money his dad had slaved for so long to accumulate was gone. And to make matters worse a famine hits the land where this young son had relocated. He’s starving. He finally manages to find a job as a hired hand to slop the pigs, which is a most degrading job for a nice Jewish boy. You can’t sink much lower in that culture. So he finds himself jealous of the pigs. The pigs are getting something to eat. He doesn’t have anything to fill his stomach. You can imagine. Here he is wallowing in a pigpen literally with such deep regrets over his life. You can imagine his remorse. You can imagine him saying, “I didn’t just do a stupid thing. I'm a stupid person. I was selfish. I was cocky. I was foolish. I'm sinking so low in the muck of this pig pen that I can never set my life straight. I could never go home. I could never start over. I’ve messed up my life beyond repair. I’ve made my bed with the pigs and now I’ve got to sleep in it.”
Imagine the resignation and the despair that he would have felt. This is the point at which people begin to give up hope. That’s why the first letter of the ABCD’s of dealing with regrets of our past is…
Assess
Assess your situation to gain the right perspective. The Bible goes on to say that at a later point the son came to his senses. What that means is that for a while he lost his senses. The Bible is saying he lost his perspective. And that often happens when people become depressed or immobilized or weighed down because they think the regrets over the things that they’ve done or failed to do are so great that they can never be overcome.
An example that Dr. Freeman likes to use is about a fictional guy named John. John has a big regret in his life. His regret is, “If I’d only gone to law school then I could have been president of the company today instead of having this lousy, lower paying job.” That's his regret. As John ruminates and focuses on this regret he lets it gnaw at him and eat away at him until it begins to loom larger and larger in his mind and his perspective begins to get distorted and skewed. He begins to fall into one of several traps that often await you at that moment. See if one of these traps might be one that you’re in.
One trap that John might fall victim to is all or nothing thinking. It’s where he would say, “There’s only one way to success. Since I didn’t choose it, I’ll never be a success.” In other words, since he didn’t do one thing he can never do anything. While that’s not true, that’s what can happen when we lose our perspective.
Or John might over generalize. He might say, “Since I made the wrong decision once, I'm doomed to always make bad career choices.” And even though that’s an over generalization it can cause him to stop trying. It may even cause him to subconsciously sabotage his own career to fulfill this picture he has of himself as being a failure.
Or he might fall victim to emotionalism where he says, “I'm finished now. I feel it. I'm never going to be happy. I'm never going to be successful.” He’s allowing his feelings to not just rule his life but ruin his life.
Or he might fall victim to perfectionism. He says, “If I can’t be president of this company nothing else can make me happy.” He summarily rules out a whole bunch of other options that very well might bring happiness but he’s ruling them out because it’s not the perfect scenario that he’s always envisioned for himself.
Or he might try to rewrite history. He might say, “The fact that I was never interested in law school when I was young, the fact that I didn’t have the money to go to law school, the fact that I wasn’t even interested in law that shouldn’t have stood in my way.” He’s rewriting history. He’s not giving himself credit for making the right decision at the right time when he wasn’t interested in law and didn’t have the money to go to law school anyway. But you begin to rewrite history. “I should have done it. I could have overcome that problem.”
Or he might begin catastrophizing. He’d say, “I’ll always be an also-ran. I’ll never succeed at anything. People will always look down their noses at me.” Catastrophizing is when we imagine our circumstances cascading out of control. We imagine the worst possible scenario and we think that’s what’s going to happen to me.
It’s like you’re in the elevator and your boss gets in the elevator. You’re riding down the elevator with him and your boss doesn’t smile at you. Catastrophizing is when you get off the elevator and say to yourself, “That’s it! My boss hates me. I'm going to get fired. I'm not going to be able to pay my mortgage. I'm going to lose my house. I'm going to become homeless. I’ll be on the streets. I'm going to catch a disease. I'm going to die!” That’s catastrophizing.
See how your perspective can get skewed? That’s why it’s important when you’re haunted by regrets to accurately access your situation. How do you do that? Here are two steps you can take.
1. Write down exactly what it is that you regret. Put it down on a piece of paper. You will be absolutely amazed how quickly you can cut through the overgeneralization and the catastrophizing and the emotionalism when you force yourself to put it down on a piece of paper. “This is what I regret…” Write down one sentence that summarizes what it is. You’ll be amazed at how that will begin to bring perspective to the situation.
2. Talk this over with a godly individual. Not just with anybody but with a godly individual. They’d say, “Yeah, you messed up. You did something you should not have done. But you’re not a worthless person. You failed at something. But you’re not a failure. Failure is an event not a person. You haven’t erased the image of God that’s etched on your soul. We still love you. God still loves you.” You begin to get perspective and they help you to do the right thing, to make right what you’ve done that’s wrong and they encourage you and they pray for you. And most of all they remind you that you have not lost the love of God and that they’re there for you to encourage you through it all.
There’s an old African proverb “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. And the second best time to plant the tree is today.” You may wish you’d planted that tree a long time ago. The second best thing is to do it today. Find out how you can become involved with the kind of people who think that way. It will change your life and it will help you deal with your past.
So that could take you part of the way in dealing with your regrets. But often it’s not enough. Sometimes we have trouble overcoming regrets because they become magnified by the way that we compare ourselves with other people.
For instance in the case of the prodigal son he had an older brother. This guy was a play-by-the-rules, straight-as-an-arrow, honor roll, daddy-pleasing kind of a guy. From Luke 15:28-29 we can see that the prodigal son’s brother was conscientious and hardworking and he was obedient. So, I'm sure that this younger brother compared himself to his older brother. And he came out with the short end of the stick. I'm sure he found himself greatly lacking in comparison with his brother and that just made him deeper and deeper into regret and depression. “If I’d only followed my dad’s directions like my brother did… If I’d only lived like my brother had and done the right thing and done what dad said, I wouldn’t be living in this pigpen today. I’ll never be as good as my brother. Look at him! He’s smart. He’s always done the right thing. He’s always on dad’s good side. I’ll never be as good as him. I might as well not trying.” That’s why the “B” in the ABCD’s of dealing with regret stands for…
BE YOURSELF
Comparisons amplify your regret. Be yourself.
Competitiveness is ingrained in us from the earliest days. Remember in elementary school how they chose sides for kick ball. They had two captains and they’d always pick the best players first until it was down to just a few kids that nobody wanted on their team. Then finally it was just little Billy left and they’d say, “Don’t touch the ball and don’t drool on it.” Then you get into high school and you’ve got class rankings. You’ve got those on the honor roll and those not on the honor roll. The varsity team and the junior varsity team. And when your dad says to you, “Hey I hear that John Smith’s son got a full scholarship to Stanford,” you imagine the unspoken words where he said, “I wish you were as smart as he was.”
On the positive side competition can be good. It can sharpen us. It can strengthen us. It can mature us. It can be good. But it can also crush our spirit. It can also leave us wallowing in the woulda’s and the coulda’s and shoulda’s of life. So what do you do? The truth is that on this side of heaven there’s always going to be competition. There’s always going to be comparisons. We can’t get away from it completely. But when they threaten to bog us down with regrets and the woulda-coulda-shoulda’s it helps when we remember two things about God’s attitude toward us.
First is this, you don’t have to compete for God’s love. In other words, the most precious commodity in the universe, in the cosmos, is not material success, it’s not a promotion, it’s not a job with a high tech firm. The most precious commodity in the universe is the love of God. And the love of God is not in short supply. It’s not a scarce commodity that we have to compete for it – if you get some I don’t get any. No. It’s available to all who open their hearts to receive it. There is nothing that you can do in your life, there is no accomplishment that you can achieve that’s going to cause God to love you one iota more than He already loves you. He loves you already with a perfect love and it’s offered to you completely. Psalm 86:5, “You are forgiving and good, O Lord, abounding in love to all who call on You.” In the biggest race in the universe, in the most important arena of all, I’ve won. I won not because I had to compete but because I just opened my heart to this free offer of grace and love offered by Jesus Christ. That helps to diffuse the competitiveness I feel towards others.
Second, remember that God celebrates your uniqueness. Psalm 139, “God knit you together in your mother’s womb. You are fearfully and you are wonderfully made.” The great thing about that is that God does not want you to be somebody else. He wants you to be you. He wants you to be fully you. Someday God is not going to hold you accountable for not being somebody else. He’s not going to say to me someday, “Hey, Frank. I know you tried to preach but you were no Billy Graham or Joel Osteen!” He’s not going to say that. Why? He’s going to hold me accountable for who I became with the gifts, the opportunities, the personality, that He put into my life.
The same is true for you. He wants you to take who He’s created you to be and maximize that. Forget what anybody else does. He wants you to be you. The yardstick by which you want to measure your life is not what other people do. The yardstick you need to measure your life by is “How can I become more of me, the way God intended me to be?” That’s the question.
So when I think of these most important arenas in my life, these spiritual arenas where I know I'm loved by God and I know that He’s just going to hold me accountable just for being me and not somebody else, that He loves me and celebrates who I uniquely am with all my quirks, with all my goofiness, it tends to diffuse this competitiveness which otherwise would amplify and magnify regrets in my life.
The A stands for Assess your situation. The B stands for Be yourself.
Confess your regrets to God and if possible TOTHOSE YOU’VE HURT.
The prodigal son said in Luke 15:18, “I know what I'm going to do. I will say to my dad, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and I’ve sinned against you.’” The Bible explicitly links confession with feeling. When we’re feeling profound regrets because of something wrong that we did toward another person, the healing will never begin and the regrets will never dissipate unless you first confess it to God and if possible admit it and apologize to the person your hurt.
Why confess it to God? If you hurt a person why confess it to God? Because the Bible says that whenever we commit a wrong against another human being we’re offending God because that human being is made in God’s image and we’ve done something to hurt them. When David committed adultery with Bathsheba and then arranged for Bathsheba’s husband to be killed, he knew that he had sinned against God. He said in Psalm 51, “God, it is against You, only You, have I sinned and done what is evil in Your sight.” We need God’s forgiveness to begin to heal the regrets from our past. We have to have that to heal the regrets.
The good news that we talked about last time is that it’s available. It’s freely offered to anyone who goes to God and asks for His forgiveness. 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” That is His promise.
But then there’s a problem. The problem is that you may not feel forgiven. You hear that God forgave you but you don’t feel it so you continue to live in your regrets. Why? I think there are two things we have to keep in mind when we’re wrestling with that problem. I know it’s a very common problem.
1. God’s forgiveness is not like human forgiveness. That is so important. When I tell you that God is willing to forgive you, the first thing that comes in your mind is, “I know what forgiveness is about. People forgive people. I’ve forgiven other people.” No. It’s not like that! The forgiveness that I offer to other people and other people offer you is different than God’s forgiveness.
The forgiveness we offer is often incomplete. It’s often lacking in one way or the other but God’s forgiveness is total. It is complete. The cleansing that He offers is absolute.
People are often reluctant to forgive. That’s not true of God. Proverbs 28:13, “God is anxious to forgive anybody who will confess and renounce their sin.”
People forgive but they don’t forget. They harbor it in the back of their minds. They say they forgave you but you know if you get in an argument with them they’re going to dredge up this thing that you did and throw it in your face. That’s how people are. But that’s not how God is. Isaiah 43:25, “God remembers your sin no more.”
People forgive minor annoyances but with something really bad they draw the line. They won’t forgive you for that. But Isaiah 1:18, “Though your sins are like scarlet, God can make them white as snow.”
People put conditions on forgiveness. “Yes, I’ll forgive you but you have to do X, Y, and Z first. Isaiah 55:7 “God will freely pardon you.”
People may forgive a mistake you make once, maybe twice but if you keep doing something wrong they’re going to draw a line. “I already forgave you but you keep doing it. Forget it! I'm not going to forgive you again.” God’s not like that. Lamentations 3:23, “God’s compassion is new and fresh every morning. His mercy is fresh every day.”
People forgive but they hold a grudge. Not God. The Lord says in Jeremiah 31:34 “I will forgive their wickedness and I will remember their sins no more.”
When you understand the scope and the totality and the finality with which God can forgive your sin it’s a huge step towards finally feeling forgiven. But then there’s a second point that’s important to remember.
2. Being forgiven does not depend on your feelings. When you turn your sin over to Jesus Christ, you’re forgiven because God says you are forgiven whether you feel anything or not. So our attitude should not be, “I’ll believe I'm forgiven when I feel forgiven.” Our attitude should be, “I believe I'm forgiven because God tells me I am. The Bible tells me I'm forgiven. That’s why I believe it. Not because I have an emotion one way or the other. I believe it because the Bible is true and the Bible tells me that God forgives and it is complete and total.” Over time as we increasingly see ourselves as a forgiven person that sense of being forgiven, that sense of feeling forgiven, will often follow. But even if it never does, you’re still forgiven completely, totally. Let that sink into your mind first. See yourself as a forgiven person. And just see if over time the feelings don’t come.
Often our regrets get eased when we go to the person we’ve wronged and apologize to them. We confess to them what we’ve done. I know that can be hard. I know that can be difficult. Sometimes it’s not even possible. But the Bible says in Romans 12:18, “If it is possible as far as it depends on you live at peace with everyone.” The power of confession and the power of reconciliation can heal regrets and heal relationships.
Develop a plan for the future and build it around God.
That’s what the prodigal son did. He knew that reconciliation is God’s way. He developed a plan to return home and confess his sin, “I’ve sinned against heaven and I’ve sinned against you.” And he didn’t want to be taken back as a son. He went on to say to his dad, “Take me back as a hired hand. I’ll slop your pigs. At least I’ll be home.” But we know what happened instead.
Luke 15:20, “So he got up and went to his father. While he was still a long way off his father saw him and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him and welcomed him home.” He welcomed him back in the family. Romans 8:28 says if you are committed to building a plan for your future, building it around God, that He can even take the circumstances that led to your biggest regret and He can cause good to emerge. It may not be the way you envisioned it but that’s His promise. Develop a plan into the future and build it around God. God will take those circumstances and cause good to emerge.
Did you miss an opportunity? Your life is not over. Jesus said in John 10:10, “My purpose is to give life in all of its fullness.” God can use you wherever you’re at regardless of what you’ve done. He can use you into the future if you’ll let Him. You didn’t blow your one and only opportunity. If you commit some wrong that you knew you shouldn’t have done, God will forgive you. He will heal your wounds. And He will show you you’ve not been disqualified from His kingdom. He will show you, “I can take your life regardless of where you are and where you picture yourself wallowing in the mud of your past, I can take you into the future and I can do things in and through your life that you can’t even imagine.”
That was true with Regina Green the young woman who contracted AIDS from the man she slept with in New York City. It was true in her life. She could have stayed in her past. When she got that word that she had AIDS it was like a death sentence. Like “that’s it”! Your life is over. She could have stayed and wallowed in that past but she didn’t. She confessed her sins to God, she received forgiveness and eternal life through Jesus Christ. She entered in relationship with Jesus Christ and let it change her life. She said, “God, if You can use whatever days, weeks, months or years I have left to make a difference, please do it.” God always answers that prayer.
He began to do that in her life. He gave her years of life far beyond what her doctors ever said she would live. God gave her a godly husband to love her unconditionally and to bathe her in joy and grace and love. That’s just like God. He opened up opportunities for her. He said, “I can use your life. It’s not over. I can make good come from it.” He opened up opportunities for her to travel the country to talk to young people and to tell her story. We don’t know how many thousands of people – young people – have decided, because of her story, to take God’s path in life. And most important God has given her a joy and the confident assurance that she has that when she does die that’s not the end of her life. That is just the beginning of a whole new existence where her relationship with Jesus Christ will be magnified, will go to heights she can’t even imagine. She can’t even imagine what it will be like in the perfection of heaven.
She did not stay stuck in her regrets. She moved ahead and you can do it too. Assess your situation accurately. Be yourself. Stop comparing yourself to other people and where they’re at. Confess your sins to God and to those you’ve hurt and then develop a plan into the future. You will have regrets in life, but God can take you to the place where the sting and the hurt is gone.
It’s like the story that Frank Perretti tells about a man driving down a highway with his little daughter sitting in the seat next to him. There was a lot of traffic and there was no shoulder to pull off on. A bee got in the car. It’s buzzing around the car and the little girl freaks out. She’s afraid. “Daddy! Do something!” He’s driving the car and there’s not much he can do. He holds the wheel with one hand and with the other hand he reaches out and grabs the bee. He holds the bee in his hand. That calms down his little girl. The bee’s been captured. It’s not flying around anymore. She calms down. But then after a few minutes he opens his hand again and the bee starts buzzing around the car once more. The girl freaks out again, “Do something!” The daddy reaches out his hand and he says, “Honey, do you see the wound on my palm? I took the sting. And even though that bee can buzz around you and pester you and bother you it can’t sting you any more. It can’t hurt you any more.”
This is what Jesus does. He has a wound in the palm of his hand where they pounded the nail when He was attached to a cross. He died for your sin so you can be forgiven completely and fully for all the regrets of your past. If you receive this free gift of forgiveness that He offers, your regrets are going to come up and they’re going to bother you from time to time, but the key thing is the sting is gone. They cannot hurt you any more. God has taken it away. He’s taken the sting away.
What a great God we have.
Prayer:
Father, thank You for being that kind of a God who loves us with that kind of a love. A God who can look into our lives and see the pain that many of us feel because of things that we’ve done, things we should have done but we didn’t. Things we should never have done but we did. Opportunities that we missed and we think our lives are never going to amount to anything. God, You see all that and You offer the exact things that we need. You offer forgiveness. You offer hope. You offer redemption. You offer eternal life. What a great God You are. We are humbled and honored and privileged to know You. We thank You for the promises You make and that You will fulfill in our lives as we get over our past and move into our future and go down the road that You want us to go. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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