The Grace To Regret
I’m Joni Eareckson Tada and I wonder if you have as many regrets as I do.
Welcome to Joni and Friends, and you will admit, regrets about the past can get you sidetracked. It happens to me all the time. There I am lying in bed and reflecting on a meeting earlier in the day with co–workers. And I will lie there and, in the dark, berate myself thinking: man, Joni, if you’d only given your idea more thought, more prayer, you would’ve seen how stupid it was. Sometimes, I’ll dig way back into the past and start rehearsing the big sins, the awful things I said to Ken Tada, or stuff I did as a teenager at a high school party on a Friday night, or the big lie I told and was humiliated when I was exposed. As an author, I have regrets for not having properly footnoted a paragraph, or even omitted the footnote. Then I get a letter from someone who tells me, calls me out on taking credit for someone else’s material. I hate that. And when it happens I stew over it, turning the thing over in my head and feeling the pain of regret and shame.
We’re all sinners and I’m certain you have regrets, too. But I have learned something that’ll help you deal with your regrets. Way back in April – in fact it was on April 19, my caregiver sat with me after getting me up and, as is our usual practice, we cracked open the devotional “New Morning Mercies;” it’s a book by Paul David Tripp. His insights that day about regrets blessed me so much; I made a copy of the page. So, let me share a couple of thoughts from it. Because, as Paul Tripp says, “It is a grace to regret. Grace allows you to face your sin, to own it and not shift the blame. But it is also grace that forgives what has been exposed. Grace forces you to feel the pain of your regrets, but never asks you to pay for them, because the price has already been paid by Jesus. Colossians 2:14 talks about how ‘the record of debt that stood against us’ has been canceled by the sacrifice of Jesus. So, you can look back, with your burden lifted by forgiving grace.” Man, I love those words. And so, now when I look back and dig up some former transgression, I can celebrate how grace rescued me. And I can also mourn over that regret in a proper way, like saying, “Oh, God, you were so merciful in not only exposing my sin back then, but forgiving me and then providing the help to move beyond it. So, I’m not going to allow that sin to paralyze me; uh-uh. I’m going to make that sin a memorial of how gracious and merciful and forgiving you really are.”
Oh, friend, you know how I’m always talking about my physical weaknesses. You know how I am boasting in them. But I’ve got spiritual weaknesses in which I can boast, too. Because I do not have to rewrite my past to try to make myself look more righteous than I was. I can stare the truth about myself in the face and I can enjoy the cleansing grace of God. Oh, to be clean before God and to celebrate those terrible times in my past when I needed to be cleansed through and through.
Okay, so, here – a few final words from Paul David Tripp. He concludes by saying, “The same grace that forgives your past empowers you to live in a new way into the future. So look backward and look forward. God’s grace enables you to do both.…only God’s grace leaves you with peace regarding your past and hope for your future.” Is that great or what? Hey, share this program with someone today who has been focusing too much on past regrets; give them hope for the future. Share these healing words today on my Facebook page or at joniradio.org.
© Joni and Friends
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