Hi, thank you for joining me today.  I’m Debbie Wallace, and this is Girl Church.  I want to talk to you today about something that concerns everybody… MISTAKES AND FAILURES.  Do you have any mistakes and failures on your resume?  Well if you’re human, you do.  I do!  I can tell you I’ve got quite a few.  We don’t like it when we fail.  We don’t like it when we drop the ball, when we make mistakes.

But you know, sometimes we make mistakes — deliberately, lot of times.  Have you ever just said, “Ok, I want what I want, and I don’t really care what the repercussions are, I’ll deal with it later”… Have you ever done that?… Or maybe you look back at something you did years ago, and you think “Omigosh, I was trying to do the right thing!  I thought I was doing the right thing, but I did the wrong thing — And what was I thinking at that time?”  I’ve done that!  

I have spent years in regret.  And I want to just talk to you about regret for a minute, too.  Because REGRET is something that is a dangerous place to go.  I want to read to you a dictionary description of regret:

          To feel sorrow or remorse, or to think of it with a sense of loss. 

Hmmm…. a sense of loss.  Do you have that sense of loss?  Do you look back at your failures, and — … It’s one thing to trip up on something that didn’t really cost you — but what did it cost you?  Did you make some LIFE MISTAKES?  Some really big mistakes that you regret now, and you feel like, My chances are over…My opportunities are gone… I’ve destroyed those relationships, I’ve destroyed whatever kind of happiness I could have….because you know, that’s the kind of voices that we kind of hear.  Isn’t it?  We kind of hear these voices in our ears — or in our heart, rather, that condemn us.  And I think women are the worst about that.  Women are bad about condemning theirselves.  

Whatever you’re hearing, if it is a condemnation message, if it is a message that says, 

          You can’t go forward because of what you did back there…

          It’s over because of the decisions you made back there… 

          You don’t have another chance, and you can never be happy, and… 

          Nobody will ever trust you again, because of what you did back there…  

Listen, that is not God speaking!  That is not God speaking.  You are condemning yourself, and you are also allowing the devil to come in and speak his dark message into your heart, and that’s exactly what he wants you to think…

So I just want to talk today about how God looks at failure.  We look at failure as something bad, but God looks at failure entirely differently than we do.  

#1 — God knew what you were gonna do long before you did it.  You know, God created us all individually.  And I believe that God put kind of an assignment on our lives.  We call it a PURPOSE or a DESTINY, we call it different things.  But however God created you, He did it with a purpose in mind.  You’re serving a purposeful God.  And God decided that you were going to be built to accomplish a certain thing in your life.  And it might be multiple things — as a matter of fact, it is multiple things.  But when God created you, He gave you the gifts and the talents and the mind that you would need to accomplish that thing.  

But guess what… He also knew the mistakes you were gonna make, on the way.  So my point is, that God decided to endow you with that purpose anyway.  God decided to endow you with an assignment anyway!  He knew you were gonna do it!  So it’s no big deal to God.  You’re making a big deal out of it.  If you’re saying, “I can’t go on” — it’s YOU that are condemning yourself.  God isn’t gonna do that.  He isn’t gonna say, Well, I was gonna give her this much purpose and this much destiny, but now because she’s screwed up so bad, I’m just gonna give her this much.  No, God is not gonna say that.  God is an all-the-way God.  He’s a forgiving God.  He will forgive you, you need to forgive yourself and go forward.  

#2 — God has a way of working things out.  This is great!  Because, we don’t!  And this is like, we say, life is like … God has the map.  He has the big picture.  We don’t have the big picture.  But I can just assure you of this much… God is not gonna let you get into anything that He doesn’t know how to get you out of.  So no matter what the mess is, no matter how bad you’ve failed, God — #1 again — He knew you were gonna do it, it didn’t surprise Him — and #2 — He has a way of working it out.  God is not gonna change His mind just because you messed up.  See, if you think He is, you don’t know God very well.  You don’t understand the magnitude of God.  If you think God is gonna get tripped up over your decisions and your mistakes and the things that you did, you don’t understand the purpose and the mind and the will and the greatness of God.  

#3 — God can use your failures and mistakes to advance you.  I want to say that again…God can use your mistakes, your failures, your screw-ups — everytime you dropped the ball — He can actually use that to advance you.  Now, this is amazing.  I’m gonna read you a scripture to back up this message today:

ROMANS 8:28 — And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good for those who are called according to His purpose.  

Now I want to highlight two little words in this scripture.  Sometimes when I read scripture there’ll be like a word or a phrase that’ll kinda jump up at me.  And what I see in this scripture is… ALL THINGS.

All things. 

          Not just the things that you’re happy about…  

          Not just the things that you did right…  

          Not just the things that your parents did right…  

          Not just the things that society approves of…  

But all things.  

          Even the things that you have been despondent about… 

          Even the things that you regret…

          The things that you could do over, and wish you had a do over…  

          The things that you consider lost, forgotten, broken, and estranged from you…

All things!

Now, don’t ask me how God does what He does.  I can’t tell you how He does it.  I just know that He does it.  He’s God, you know, we’re not!  We’re not God, He’s God, and He can do whatever He wants to do whenever He wants to do it.  He has a magnificent way of getting things done.  And the way He looks at failure is not how we look at it, like it’s something bad.  To Him it’s an opportunity, I think, to show up big in our life.  Because when we fail, that’s when God can be big.  

See, God doesn’t do what He’s gonna do in your life through YOUR greatness.  It’s not because you’re so awesome and so magnificent and you’re so perfect.  We know now that you aren’t, right?  I know that I’m not!  I’m not perfect.  But God is great, God is good, God is perfect, and it’s because of HIS GRACE and His magnitude that any of this stuff in my life can get done.  

You know, someone said that the more mistakes in a person’s life, the more interesting that person’s life will be.  Now that kinda caught my attention because I thought, Well gee, I’ve got some mistakes!  You know, I’ve got some things that I really regret and look back on.  But considering that God can turn that bad thing into a good thing, it might mean that He can take my life from being uninteresting to being interesting.

Think of it like… A RECIPE.  And let’s just say there’s this big pot.  And in this pot is YOU — it’s your life.  You’ve got your personality going in there, and you’ve got your gifts and talents going in there, and you got your accomplishments going in there, and all your relationships are going in there….and all your mistakes and failures going in there.  Well see, where you might think they would give it a bitter taste,…no!  God can make them taste good.  God can give them a wonderful savoring flavor to your life.  So like, when you’re stirring this recipe, and you’re just stirring it — and it’s who you are, and it’s savoring you.  And it’s actually making you a better person because it’s like a seasoning.  It’s like a seasoning in your life, and in your person.  Just let God — with His hand — turn those things into good.

Know that God is faithful.  God is faithful.  Listen, no matter what happens in your life, God is there for you.  I want you to know that.  I want you to be absolutely certain that you know that.  You know, sometimes we say these nice things about God, but we get it in our head, but we don’t really have it in our heart.  I want you to get it in your heart.  I want you to look back on your life and think, When was it that God was never there?  I promise you, it might have felt like God wasn’t there —  GOD WAS THERE every moment.  God will never forsake you, He will never leave you.  He’s faithful. 

I know in times in my life, I haven’t been faithful to God always.  There’ve been times when I didn’t serve Him like I should have served Him.  I went through a long five-year dry period one time, it was for a five-year season, when I was really pouting.  I was pouting, it was my spiritual pout.  I was not faithful to God, I didn’t serve God during that time, didn’t pray much.  I was just angry about a lot of things, and I was angry with a lot of people, and I had so many questions.  And I wanted answers and I didn’t have them, so I was pouting and I was not faithful, but you know what, God was faithful!  He never left me during that time.

God will never give up on you.  He’s never gonna say, It’s over.  He’s never gonna say, I’m done with you.  He’s never gonna say, Well you’ve screwed up so bad now, you’ve blown it so bad I just can’t do anything with you now.  He’s not gonna do that.  You’re not gonna change God’s mind.  Ever.  

Thank you for joining me today.  I look forward to seeing you next week.

May 2, 2019