I blew it - now what?

            New Christians are often amazed at the kinds of changes that take place instantly in their lives the moment they give their lives to Jesus. Then they are usually amazed at what hasn’t changed, and how often they blow it, doing, saying and thinking things that they know are wrong.

            The burning question then becomes: What must God think of me? After all He has done for me, even sending His Son to die for me, here I am doing this! What kind of witness am I about how great it is to be a Christian?

If those kinds of questions arise and they are never answered, there is then a danger that the new believer will become discouraged and perhaps even entertain thoughts like: 

Maybe I’m not a Christian after all.
This is too hard; maybe I should just give up.
I’ll never get this; I’ll never measure up. 

            To make matters worse, one of the first things people are taught about God is that He has total power over everything (He is omnipotent), He knows everything (He is omniscient), and He is present everywhere at the same time (He is omnipresent). That makes Him a very scary God when you’re talking about blowing it. Because if He knows everything, then He knows all my deepest, darkest, dirtiest secrets. If He is everywhere at once, then He has witnessed all the bad things I’ve ever done, and there is nowhere I can go to escape Him. (If you want to read about someone who tried to get away from God, read the book of Jonah in the Bible, and see how successful he was.) And if God is all-powerful, then He could really stick it to me if He wanted to.

            So we need to know more about God. We need to know what kind of person He is. Is He the kind who will get mad at me if I blow it and do some terrible thing? Will He come looking for me to “take me to the woodshed”? Because we all blow it – some of us more than others. Should we be afraid of God when we do?

            The Bible is clear that God disciplines His children (Hebrews 12:5-11).[1] It is equally clear that He never blows His stack and comes looking for us to teach us a lesson we won’t soon forget. He never loses His temper and takes it out on His wayward child. All that He does with us and allows into our lives comes to us out of His love.

            So when we blow it – either in little ways or big time – how exactly does God feel about us?

            First of all, know that God never, ever turns His back on one of His own. Ever. Even when we sin big time, He sticks with us. Psalm 139:5, 7-10 says it this way: 

5  You [God] hem me in - behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me.
. . . . .
7  Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
8  If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9  If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10  even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.
11  If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,”
12  even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. 

When we sin, we tend to think that we have distanced ourselves from God, that He becomes offended and aloof. Nothing could be further from the truth. The passage just quoted tells us that He is tenderly present all the time, even when we make our bed “in the depths” or wander into darkness (both pictures of falling into sin). He is always with us, with His protective hand on us, wanting to help us in this, our time of need. And so the Bible tells us to come to God without fear when we are weak and sin, and we will find Him more than ready to have mercy on us and to help us (Hebrews 4): 

14  Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess.
15  For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are - yet was without sin.
16  Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. 

This passage teaches that God sympathizes with us in our weakness. He knows the power of temptation, and He is always there to help us. He is always on our side.

            The Bible also teaches that God is moved with compassion for us in our failures. When the Bible talks about God’s compassion, it means that God has the same tender feelings for us as a parent has for a helpless child, that He wants to help make things better, that He feels very deeply for us, and that He has nothing but kindness and good will for us in His heart. God has compassion on us when we sin (Psalm 78): 

37  their hearts were not loyal to him, they were not faithful to his covenant.
38  Yet he was merciful [full of compassion]; he forgave their iniquities and did not destroy them. Time after time he restrained his anger and did not stir up his full wrath.
39  He remembered that they were but flesh, a passing breeze that does not return. 

He has compassion on us when we make mistakes out of our ignorance (Hebrews 5:2): “He is able to deal gently [compassionately] with those who are ignorant and are going astray”. He has compassion when we are in distress, even if that distress is the result of our sin, as in Lamentations 3: 

19  I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall.
20  I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me.
21  Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:
22  Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.
23  They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
24  I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.”
25  The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him;
26  it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. 

            Is God really that merciful? Actually, He is even more merciful than that. Jesus once taught about God’s great mercy using a story about a shepherd who finds he is missing one sheep that has wandered off (Luke 15): 

4  Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?
5  And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders
6  and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’
7  I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent. 

People usually say this story is about God reaching out to unbelievers; God is the shepherd who goes looking for those who are not yet His. However, it is quite clear that the missing sheep already belongs to the shepherd. He is one of the 100, but has wandered off and got lost. He’s the Christian who blows it. What this story says is that God comes looking for us to help us while we are still in our mess. He doesn’t wait for us to get our act back together and find our own way home. He meets us right where we’re at, picks us up, and gets us out of danger.

            But how often will God do that for us? Doesn’t He ever run out of patience with us? Jesus told one of His followers, Peter, how often Peter was expected to forgive (Matthew 18): 

21  Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?”
22  Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” 

What Jesus actually said was “seventy times seven” times, an expression meaning “indefinitely”. You keep forgiving no matter how many times a person sins against you. If that is how God would like us to behave, is it not logical that He would do the same – forgive us over and over and over, as many times as we sin? God’s compassions “never fail” (Lamentations 3:22). He loves us “with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3). And nothing can separate us from that love (Romans 8): 

38  For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,
39  neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

            Have you blown it? The invitation God gives is to come to Him to “receive mercy and find grace to help us” (Hebrews 4:16). How do we come? Just as we are. Psalm 145:18 says: “The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.” Some Christians make the mistake of thinking that they have to get their temper under control first, they have to fix the mess they made first, they have to make up with whoever they just had a fight with first, before they come and talk with God in prayer. But God says to call on Him “in truth”. In other words, we can call a spade a spade. So, if we are mad at someone and want more than anything to put our hands around their throat and throttle them, we can come to God and say outright: “I wish that person were dead!” Want proof? This prayer is in the Bible (Psalm 137):  

9  Remember, O Lord, what the Edomites did on the day Jerusalem fell. “Tear it down,” they cried, “tear it down to its foundations!”
8  O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us -
9  he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. 

The prayer ends right there. No apologies to God for its violence or the hatred behind it. And God made sure it was written in His Word, about which He later said (2 Timothy 3): 

16  All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,
17  so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. 

Now what could we possibly learn from a prayer like that? Perhaps, that it is OK to be honest with God.

            One of the most disturbing passages of Scripture is also one of the most beautiful and the most comforting. It is in Lamentations 3. It says this about God: 

1  I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of his wrath.
2  He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light;
3  indeed, he has turned his hand against me again and again, all day long.
4  He has made my skin and my flesh grow old and has broken my bones.
5  He has besieged me and surrounded me with bitterness and hardship.
6  He has made me dwell in darkness like those long dead.
7  He has walled me in so I cannot escape; he has weighed me down with chains.
8  Even when I call out or cry for help, he shuts out my prayer.
9  He has barred my way with blocks of stone; he has made my paths crooked.
10  Like a bear lying in wait, like a lion in hiding,
11  he dragged me from the path and mangled me and left me without help.
12  He drew his bow and made me the target for his arrows.
13  He pierced my heart with arrows from his quiver.
14  I became the laughingstock of all my people; they mock me in song all day long.
15  He has filled me with bitter herbs and sated me with gall.
16  He has broken my teeth with gravel; he has trampled me in the dust.
17  I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is.
18  So I say, “My splendor is gone and all that I had hoped from the Lord.”
19  I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall.
20  I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. 

            It’s sometimes hard for new believers to understand how any of God’s children could possible be this angry with Him. But many who have been in God’s family for a while can honestly say that they’ve been there, done that. What many of those same people have never understood is that God gives them permission to let Him have it with all their anger and bitterness and disappointment in Him. So they stuff it and it never gets dealt with, meaning they stay stuck in that place. But the writer of Lamentations had no problem letting it all hit the fan, and this is what his next words are: 

21  Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:
22  Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.
23  They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
24  I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.”
25  The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him;
26  it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. 

What happened? God happened. Remember, God says to come to Him in our time of need, and we will find “mercy and find grace to help us” (Hebrews 4:16). But He also says to come “in truth” (Psalm 145:18). The writer of Lamentations came in truth, and God gave him mercy and grace that turned his whole outlook around. As a result, the church also has a wonderful hymn based on this man’s writing. It’s called “Great Is Thy Faithfulness”.

            Remember, when you came to Jesus to receive forgiveness for your sins, He really and truly forgave you all your sins. That means all the sins you had committed up to that point and all the sins you would commit from that point on. All means all. So yes, the sin you just did is new to you, but it’s not new to God. He knew all about it before you even did it. And He sent Jesus, who died for that sin as well. God’s children are free. Free of guilt, condemnation and judgment. Romans 8:1 says: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”. You are free. So come to God with your mess. You won’t be setting yourself up for a trip to the woodshed. You will be met with compassion, mercy, grace and all the help you need.

Sharon Currens