God's Mercy and My Failures — Part 2

Hello and thanks for joining us today on Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. This is the Bible teaching ministry of Rick Warren and today we are continuing in a series called The Miracle of Mercy. Rick will show us how God's mercy can lift your guilt, heal your wounds and transform the way you live. Alright we'll pick up where we left off with part two of a message called God's Mercy and My Failures. Now just think the crisis that's going on. Jesus Christ has been arrested. He's back behind this wall going through mock trials and being tortured and I, Peter, am on the other side of the wall out on the cart yard wondering what's going on and then all of a sudden a stranger comes up and says, hey, you're with that guy. And he says, no, no, no, I'm not. He's worried about what other people think. And now his anger comes out and the Bible says this in verse 71 of Matthew 26. Then Peter went out to the entrance of the courtyard and there another woman saw him and said to those standing there, this man, this guy pointing at Peter, this man was with Jesus of Nazareth. Now again, Peter denied it. And this time he swore. Okay, now he's cussing. He swore an oath and said, I don't even know the man. Okay, but after a while it says the men who had been standing there, evidently a bunch of people milling around just bystanders. The men who were standing there came over to Peter and said, we know that you are one of them. Don't you hate being called one of them? That's like the kiss of death at the office. You're one of them. We all want to be one of us. We all want to be one of the in crowd. And one of the reasons why you never talk about your faith to anybody else is because you don't want to be one of them. You want to be one of us, one of the guys, one of the boys, one of the girls. And he said, hey, we know you're one of them. Again, that's the fear of disapproval. Okay, Peter's getting up tight here. We know that you're one of them because your Galilean accent gives you away. Now, Jesus was from Galilee. The 12 disciples in his small group were all from Galilee. So the accent gave him away. Just like in America, in the South, people from the South have a Southern accent. People from the North have a North, East have a North Eastern accent. People from the Midwest have a Midwestern accent. Only Californians speak English perfectly. The Canadians speak with a Canadian accent. And so he said, we understand. We know who you are. You're one of them because you have the Galilean accent. It gives you away. He says, Peter, the Bible says, Peter lost his temper. I started cursing and swearing. And he shouted, I don't know the man. And immediately he heard the rooster crow. Now, swearing is always a sign of frustration. Swearing is always a sign of fear. When you get afraid, you go emotional. And you're not thinking rational. You're not thinking logical. You're not thinking reasonable. You're thinking emotional. And when people swear, it's because they've given up on their logic and they have to resort to emotion. He's not thinking. He's speaking without thinking. The Bible says this causes so many problems in our lives. James chapter three, verse five and six. The tongue is a small thing. But what enormous damage it can do. Everybody agree with that? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Anybody want to give an example of today? Just today? Driving in the car to church? Okay. You said the wrong thing and it lit a fire. Okay. The tongue is a small thing, but what enormous damage it can do. Just as a tiny spark can burn up a great forest, your tongue, your tiny little petite tongue is a flame of fire. That part of your body, this is God talking. That part of your body is full of wickedness and it can poison everything else in your life. And we all know that's true. You've seen relationships poisoned. You've seen deals poisoned. You've seen future dreams poisoned all because of a misplaced word. And the Bible says it is set on fire. Your tongue is set on fire by hell itself and it can turn our whole lives into a blazing flame of destruction and disaster. So we have overestimate our strengths. We fear the disapproval of others and we speak without thinking. Peter did all three and he had the biggest failure of his life and we do all three and we have failures in our life. Now that's what Peter did wrong. What did he do right? What did he do right? Peter actually did three things right. Once he failed, he actually did several things right. And these are actually some of the steps to recovering from a financial failure, a marriage failure, a relational failure, a career failure, or any other failure in your life. What do you do? You do these three things. Number one, first thing you do, grieve. You grieve. You grieve the failure. You don't minimize the failure. You don't pretend it didn't happen. You don't justify the failure. You don't rationalize the failure. You don't make excuses for the failure. You grieve it. You feel the pain. You don't brush it off. You don't downplay it. You feel the pain and you don't rush to feel better. Now listen, this is the principle of life I'm about to tell you. To get past it, you got to go through it. That's true in so many areas, but it's particularly true with failure. To get past your failure, that failure in your life, you got to go through it. You can't go around your failure. You can't go over your failure. You can't go under your failure. You can't ignore your failure. You need to grieve the failure. You need to feel the pain. Now we don't like feeling bad, but grief is a good thing. Grief is the way we get through the failure and grief is the way we learn the lessons so often we want to just, when we fail, we want to just forget it, push it aside, stuff our emotions, and then immediately go to the next thing. When you stuff your emotions, when you swallow your emotions, your stomach keeps score. It's kind of like, what if you took a can of coke and you shook it up for a long time and then you put it in the freezer? What's going to happen to it? It's going to explode eventually. It's going to come out sideways. And this happens in your life when you don't deal with your emotions properly. This is why sometimes six months after failure, a marriage falls apart. Or six months after somebody gets laid off work, there's another problem. There's a physical health problem, things like this, because you've shaken up the can and you've got all these emotions feeling inside of shame and regret and fear and insecurity and all the things that come with failure and you're not dealing with them. And so you shake it up and you say, we're just going to put this in refrigerator and try to forget about it and we're going to freeze it and it's going to explode and it's going to come out sideways in an affair or in wrong behavior or in impulsivity or in addiction or all kinds of other things. I've seen this thousands of times in people's lives. You don't minimize it. You don't rush to feel better. To get past your failure, you've got to go through the failure and you got to grieve. In Matthew 26, 75, when Peter heard the rooster crow, he remembered that Jesus had said, before the rooster crows, you'll deny me three times. Then Peter went outside and wept bitterly, circled the wept bitterly. That's grieving. Now imagine how disappointed Peter must have felt in himself. He goes, man, I've just lived with the Son of God for three and a half years. I watched him do miracles. I watched him heal people. I watched him raise the dead. I watched him teach like no one has ever taught. I watched him offer mercy and forgiveness to me, dozens and dozens and dozens of times. I watched him never do anything wrong. And yet the first time that I'm put to test about my commitment, my faithfulness, my trust in Jesus, I deny him three times in a row because I'm worried about what three strangers think. Are you more worried about what strangers think about your faith than God? Are you more embarrassed to let people know that you're a believer? That's that fear. And he's disappointed. But Peter, I love the fact that he owns up to his failure. He doesn't go, well, there was a good reason I did this. You know, they might have killed me or he didn't do. No, he just goes out and he grieves and he's humbled by this and he's regretful of it. Grief, as I said, is a good thing. It is the key to healing. A lot of people want to take shortcuts when they have a failure. They want to bypass a failure. They want to just put it out of sight, out of mind and go on and say, yeah, I had a failed business here. I'm going to go start another one right now, the next day. Yeah, I just had a marriage fail, but I'm going to turn around. I'm going to find somebody immediately. I got to find somebody else immediately. And they rebound into another relationship. And they never learn the lesson. The problem is if you don't go through the grief, you don't learn what God wants you to learn in that failure, and then you take the same old you into the new marriage, into the new job, into the new goal, into the new dream, and nothing's changed. Because you didn't learn anything because you weren't willing to feel bad for just a little bit. And you're afraid of negative feelings. You're afraid of feeling bad. It's okay to feel bad. Grief is the way we get through transitions and losses and failures in life. The greater the failure in your life, the more time it's going to take. The greater the loss in your life, the greater it's going to take. You have to let God work in your heart, and you have to let time work in your heart. You cannot force healing. You cannot rush healing. You cannot will it. By sheer willpower, I'm going to be different now. You can't do it. Recovery is an act of God's mercy. Healing is an act of mercy. And it comes slowly with time, and recovery and growth come in stages. And all God wants you to do is just be honest. I blew it. To be humble. The Bible says this in Psalm 51. And by the way, this is from Psalm 51 as the prayer David wrote after he committed adultery. The whole prayer is this prayer of confession. And in verse 17 he says, The sacrifice God wants is a broken and contrite spirit. And God will not reject a humble and repentant heart. Now he's saying, God is looking for humility, contriteness. Just, just you're right, God. I blew it. And when you come to God and say, God, I'm brokenhearted over this. I had all my hopes pinned on this, but it didn't work. It failed. It failed. The business failed. The dream failed. The relationship failed. God, it failed. And I'm brokenhearted over it. And I'm, I'm a little bit more humble than I was. I don't think I'm the captain of my soul anymore. I don't think I'm the manager of the universe. I don't think I've got it all figured out. I'm coming with a humble spirit and a contrite heart and a repentant attitude. God goes, that's the person who's going to recover. So he does the first thing right is simply by grieving. Now the Bible says there that when Peter heard the rooster crow, he wept bitterly. He ate crow. He went out and he, he said, Oh, I have really messed up. And he felt the pain. And you know what? I imagine that every time for the rest of Peter's life, when he heard a rooster crow, what do you think it reminded him of? Every time he heard a rooster crow, probably reminded me of my biggest failure in life. It was a trigger. And by the way, you have triggers in your life. And there's certain things that when you hear them or smell them or think them or listen to them or whatever, you see them, it triggers the memory of your failures. Now you can't stop the triggers. Sorry, can't do that. I can't even tell you how to even stop those triggers, but you can stop what they do to you. And you, you do have a choice. You don't have a choice over your triggers. There are some things that are going to happen in your life. When that happens, it reminds you of the painful failure in your life. But your choice then is, will I choose to focus on the mistake, the failure, the pain, or am I going to choose to focus on God's forgiveness, God's mercy, and God's grace? That's choice. And that's what you can do. And here's what's going to happen. When you start changing your focus, Satan is going to stop passing you. Satan is going to stop hassling you about this. Satan knows your triggers and he wants to condemn you. And here's what happens. You see, before you fail in some area or before you commit a sin, Satan always minimizes the sin. He minimizes it. He goes, this is no big deal. Go ahead and do it. I mean, everybody does this. Times have changed. Things are different. We're in a different culture. Doesn't matter what God has said. This is okay. Times have changed. Everybody does it. Go ahead. It's no big deal. He minimizes the sin. The moment you commit that sin, Satan changes his strategy to the exact opposite, and he starts maximizing it. And he starts going, are you kidding me? That's the biggest sin I've ever heard of. God will never use you. You're never going to be blessed. You're never going to have an answered prayer. Who do you think you are? You may as well just chuck it in. You may as well just give up, because you are used material. You're wasted. You're wrong. You're in the dust heap. You're going to sit on the bench the rest of your life. Forget it. It's over. This is so big God could not possibly ever use you. See how he switched? He starts saying, it's no big deal before you do it. And then afterwards he goes, it's the biggest deal in your life, because he does not want you focused on the mercy of God. He wants you focused on your pain. You see, when you don't understand who you are, you don't have that, when you still have that soul pain, you don't know your identity. You've given to these kinds of fears over and over and over. And Satan and other people can just whip you around and manipulate you with all kinds of memory triggers. You need to say, you know what? Every time that trigger brings the thought that memory, that painful mistake, I'm just going to go, yep, it was wrong. And then we're going to go, thank God for his grace. Thank God for his mercy. Thank God for his love. Thank God for his forgiveness. And I just, oh, thank you God. I am a trophy of grace. Now here's the interesting thing. If Satan figures out that every time he uses that trigger, you're going to praise God, he's going to stop bugging you about it. Because he certainly doesn't want you to do it. He certainly doesn't want you. All of a sudden it's not working anymore. If he can pull a trigger and you get into depression, he's going to keep pulling it. But if he can pull a trigger and it causes you to praise God for his mercy and forgiveness and grace, focus on God, he goes, oh, I don't want him to do that. So he will stop. In a couple of weeks ago, we sang that song, I'm no longer a slave to fear. I am a child of God. This is what we're talking about here. Understanding the deeper pain, that causes you to give in, to overestimate your strength, to speak when you shouldn't, and to live for the approval of other people. When you know who you are and who's you are, you know God's mercy and God's grace is going to be there. I'm a child of God. So even though I've just really messed up, God's going to still love me. He's not going to change. That's the miracle of mercy. Now the second thing Peter did right, and this is going to sound funny to you, but it's what it says right here in scripture, let my small group support me. And that's exactly what Peter did. The very first thing Jesus did when he started his ministry is he formed a small group, and he chose 12 people to be a part of that small group. This is why we make such a big deal about small groups at Saddleback Church, because Jesus did it, and for 300 years, all Christianity was done in small groups. They didn't have big gatherings like this. All Christianity for 300 years was done in small groups. Let me just show you some example of Peter getting support from his small group after his biggest failure. Matthew, excuse me, Mark 16 verse 10, Easter morning. You know that Mary Magdalene and the other Mary had gone up to the tomb of Jesus, and the angel said he's not here. He's gone, go tell the disciples. And so it said Mary Magdalene went and found the disciples together, grieving and weeping. Circle the word together. I want you to listen very close. When you go through a major failure in your life, you must resist the urge to isolate yourself. When you go through a major failure in life, you must resist the urge to insulate yourself. When you get laid off from work, you don't want anybody to know about it. When you have a bankruptcy, you don't want anybody to know about it. When you have a failure in your life, you don't want, you want to keep it a secret. That's the worst thing you could do. You need, you don't need to tell everybody that you need to tell a few people who love you, who are going to pray for you and who will support you. Because when you share a problem in your life, it's cut in half. The burden is cut in half. When you share a joy in your small group, it's doubled. You were never meant to go through life on your own. You were never meant to go through life by yourself. We were better together. We're meant for community. And the basic unit of life is the small group. Jesus formed this small group. And where does Peter go instantly after he's had his biggest failure? He didn't go hide in a cave. He goes to a small group. The disciples were together, grieving and weeping. Now you need Godly support more than ever. Hey, did you know that the number one attribute of God in Scripture is His mercy? It is. And He wants to be merciful too. Jesus said, blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Matthew 5-7. Now you can dive deeper into our current study with Pastor Rick's miracle of mercy study kit. Through his sixth session video and workbook study, he'll show you the five marks of mercy. You'll discover how mercy forgives the fallen, helps the hurting, is patient with difficult people, is kind to its enemies, and cares for the loss. And as you grow in mercy, you'll experience the blessing God promises to the merciful. The miracle of mercy sixth session video study kit is perfect for both personal and small group study time. So please, be sure to request your copy today. When you give a gift to help daily hope, share the certain hope of Jesus with people everywhere. That's our way of saying thanks. Just go to pastorrick.com to get your copy of this great resource. That's pastorrick.com, or you can just text the word hope to 70309. Again, that's the word hope to 70309. Be sure to join us next time, as we look into God's word for our daily hope. 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