Starting Over Again: 3 Lies and Truth

[podcast]http://www.revkwon.com/podcast/starting_over-three_lies_truth.mp3[/podcast] Many of us don’t like to follow directions. But there’s a price to pay for rushing into a situation without knowing what we’re doing. We get things wrong. And by the time we go back into a situation, undo everything we messed up, and then do it correctly, we’ve wasted more time than if we’d just followed the directions to begin with. Case in point: anything you buy out of Ikea. I hate how that Swedish store gives you instructions with ubiquitous pictures of screws and pieces that all look alike. So you go without the instructions and just kind of go with it. A project that should’ve taken a few hours, takes a few days. The work product that looked sleeky and sexy in the showroom, looks worn and tattered. The consequences are usually mild when we ignore the directions for assembling furniture or even repairing a computer. But the price of rushing into a life situation is steep. What if there were directions for the choices we make in life? What if we could avoid repeating past mistakes when we find ourselves starting over? That’s exactly what we’re going to be talking about in the month of November—Starting Over. Today I want to talk about three lies and a truth about starting over. When they come up on the screen, you’re going to understand right away what I mean. Experience makes me wiser. This is a lie. Experience doesn’t make me or you wiser. It just makes you more experienced. If you don’t learn anything from the experience, you’re going to make the same mistakes you’ve already made. I see this all the time when people ask me for advice that I don’t want to give. I ask myself, why give it, it’s not like you’re going to listen. I see it when people ask me about finance, relationships, and leadership. The errors are so obvious to me. I see the situation so clearly. It’s why I don’t counsel. I want to make it clear to everybody in this room that just because you experienced failure the first time around in whatever you were doing, math class, relationships, marriage, work, just because you know what it looks like to fail doesn’t mean you’ll succeed later. Moreover, it definitely doesn’t mean you learned anything from that experience except that you are failure. Let’s get that straight. When we start over, we’re not starting over with a wiser perspective because of our previous experience. It’s most evident when you see a friend date the same type of guy over and over and over again. Or you see somebody trying something over and over and over again without changing their approach and hoping it will be better when nothing suggests that it would be better. Knowing better doesn’t make me do better. I love this one. People who supposedly know better make better choices. This is absolutely a lie. Knowing better and choosing to do better are two separate things. A lot of us know better than to play with fire, we’ve known better since we were kids, but guess what, whenever we go have a fire open, we throw sticks in it and play with the fire, despite the fact we know better. We act up and act out even though we know better. We can’t control our temper or anger. We may know better, but we can’t help ourselves. We’re totally stupid. We’d really be dumb to believe that knowing better will lead to making us do better. Just think about the last time you knew better than to put yourself in a situation, but you did it anyways. Maybe it has to do with drinking or hanging out with a certain crowd, or watching a certain type of movie. We know better, but when it hits your fanny, we make the choice that doesn’t indicate we know any better. There is not enough time. I thought about this one long and hard because this one is a societal truism. It seems like it’s true, but it’s a lie. People often say that starting again requires us to do things faster the second time. Or that the second time around we have to make up for time lost from messing up the first time. Have you ever played Super Mario World or Donkey Kong Country on SNES? I remember my brother and I had this thing. We would take turns playing the game because essentially it was a one player game, and we had this strange obsession with beating games. But whenever one of us would die, it would be the other person’s turn. It’s great and all in theory, except when you get to a level you shouldn’t have died in, then we have these mulligan type do-overs. Where the person who died could play the level again, but then would hand the controls over to the other person at the onset of the next level. Obviously, when you are one of those levels, you need to make up for precious lost time and beat the level faster than you played the first time around. The pressure would be on, and then because you are playing like you don’t have enough time, you die the second time around. We just talked about three lies about starting over. These three lies often dictate the terms of our decisions and the results of those terms end up being costly because we jump into starting over the wrong way. There is a right way to start over. I’m going to share that with you. But you have to understand why I’m preaching this series. The reason we’re talking about this in 2015, and a lot of you have heard, on our one on ones that this is the year, we’re going to bring your life into hyperdrive and get you kickstarted in the right track. Well, you’ve heard nine consecutive series about getting your life together, but I realized that a lot of you may not have been starting to do anything because you don’t know how to start over. Or many of you have started over and what remains are the results of mistakes you’ve made that petrifies you from starting over again. Perhaps it is the hopelessness that forebodes your thoughts because you know that starting over will only produce what it did previously: failure. When we look at the Bible, we see lots of people who have to start over. Most memorable of these Bible heroes would be Moses. He walks like an Egyptian, talks like an Egyptian, but at the end of the day, he realizes he isn’t an Egyptian. So he tries to make the lives of his Hebrew people better, because he’s Hebrew. He fails. He murders somebody and then has to leave the country. He becomes an exile. Then he comes back and starts over and becomes the liberator of Israel. Then there’s David, he is anointed king, then has to flee. Then he becomes the greatest of all Israelite kings. In the Bible, when people start over, they start over and become better for it. In the New Testament, the most notable person starting over would be a guy name Saul, or better known as Paul. Saul started out as a persecutor, then ended up being a martyr. Let’s look at his story, Acts 7:54-8:1. I want to paint the circumstances for you. The Sanhedrin, which was the ruling body of Israel back in the first century decides that they will need to make an example of the Christians who are starting actually do good things for the city of Jerusalem, like feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, healing the sick, etc. They find this man name Stephen and decide they need to martyr him. Here’s the beauty of it: Stephen doesn’t go down quietly. He preaches his last sermon and it infuriates the Sanhedrin. Then he is stoned to death. ^7:54 When the members of the Sanhedrin heard this, they were furious and gnashed their teeth at him. ⁵⁵ But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. ⁵⁶ “Look,” he said, “I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” ⁵⁷ At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, ⁵⁸ dragged him out of the city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. ⁵⁹ While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” ⁶⁰ Then he fell on his knees and cried out, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he fell asleep. ^8:1 And Saul approved of their killing him. I want you to look at verse 57 and 58 again. The witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. He didn’t participate in the killing. He was watching the clothes of the people who were guilty. I always thought this verse to be interesting. The reason I thought it was interesting was because back in the day, a person’s coat was the person’s clothes, as in, it was the only thing that covered a person’s underwear. The only reason you would strip off your clothes, would be if you were taking a bath, which makes sense, and the people back then hardly did that anyways; or, if they were guilty and the Romans were shaming him or her—case in point—Jesus before he hangs on the cross. He is stripped to his undergarments and the Roman soldiers gamble for his coat. Jesus was stripped because he was supposedly guilty and deserved no covering for their shame. The people who were supposedly accusing a man for being guilty were the ones acting guilty. They were acting guilty by taking off their coats. They laid those coats at the feet of a young man named Saul, who wasn’t guilty of murder, just of approving their murderous act. I don’t know which is worse, but needless to say, the reputation of Saul is not so great when we read this passage. It is from this point where Saul actually becomes Paul and gets a second chance and can start over. Later in the book of Acts, we find out that despite the fact that people didn’t want to give him a second chance, he is given a second chance by God. I want you to write this down if you’ve ever failed miserably a first time or a second time or even a third time: Our past can be redeemed if we allow God to do so. Saul became Paul and ended up writing half the New Testament. We are not limited by our past. We are redeemed from it. Just because we made the same mistakes over and over again doesn’t mean that the limits of our lives will be those mistakes and missteps. Paul writes the church in Rome about this very idea in chapter 8, verse 18. ¹⁸ For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. ¹⁹ For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. ²⁰ For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope ²¹ that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. ²² For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. We were all meant to fail. There is no doubt about it. We were never going to succeed the first time around. Yes, some of us may have been blessed with not failing as epically as others, but we’re still all failures. Those failures do not dictate who we are, they never did. That’s what’s important.  ²³ And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴ For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? ²⁵ But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. You can underline or circle or highlight those two verses: 24 and 25. We have hope. Our hope is that there is something more for our lives. We need to believe that there is something more. Where we are now isn’t the end, there’s something more. Our failures now, this isn’t the end, there’s something more. Jesus came to this earth and walked the earth and died for the earth to ensure that this isn’t our end. That was God’s infallible plan, that even if we failed, knowing that we will eventually fail, He wouldn’t fail us. That’s what salvation is. Let’s continue to read, verse 26. ²⁶ Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. ²⁷ And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. ²⁸ And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. ²⁹ For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. ³⁰ And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified. I want you just dwell on verses-30 for a moment. Next time can be better than last time—not because you want it to be, but because you plan for it to be. It will take more than experience and knowing better. You can’t rush things. But if you let him, God will bring good from the failure of round one whether it was your doing or not. The truth of the matter is that when we start over with God’s purpose, nothing we did previously will weigh us down the next time around. Give your heavenly Father an opportunity to redeem your past. We need to start over wanting God to do what He does best: redeem with purpose. Let’s pray.