Pastor Rick's Daily Hope

Guest (Male): 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. All right, we'll pick up where we left off with part two of a message called "God's Mercy and My Failures."

Rick Warren: Just think, the crisis has gone 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 in the courtyard wondering what's going on.

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 was with Jesus of Nazareth.'"

Again Peter denied it. And this time he swore. Now he's cussing. He swore an oath and said, "I don't even know the man." 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 with 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 they said, "Hey, we know you're one of them." Again, that's the fear of disapproval. Peter's getting uptight 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 Northeast have a northeastern accent. People from the Midwest have midwestern accents. Only Californians speak English perfectly.

The Canadians speak with a Canadian accent. And so he said, "We know who you are. You're one of them because you have the Galilean accent. It gives you away." And the Bible says Peter lost his temper and started cursing and swearing, and he shouted, "I don't know the man!" And immediately he heard the rooster crow.

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 rationally. You're not thinking logically. You're not thinking reasonably. You're thinking emotionally. And when people swear, it's because they've given up on their logic and they have to resort to emotion. He's speaking without thinking.

The Bible says this causes so many problems in our lives. James chapter 3, verses 5 and 6: "The tongue is a small thing, but what enormous damage it can do." Everybody agree with that? Oh yeah. Anyone want to give an example of today, just today, driving in the car to church? You said the wrong thing and it lit a fire.

"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 tiny little petite tongue is a flame of fire. 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. The Bible says it is set on fire by hell itself, and it can turn our whole lives into a blazing flame of destruction and disaster.

So we 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?

Peter actually did three things right. Once he failed, he actually did several things right. And these are 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.

First thing you do: 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 a principle of life I'm about to tell you. To get past it, you've got to go through it. That's true in so many areas, but it's particularly true with failure. To get past your failure, you've 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.

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, 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? 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 a failure, a marriage falls apart. Or six months after somebody gets laid off work, there's a physical health problem. This is because you've shaken up the can, and you've got all these emotions of shame and regret and fear and insecurity filling inside you, and you're not dealing with them.

You say, "We're just going to put this in the 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 an addiction. I have seen this thousands of times in people's lives.

To get past your failure, you've got to go through the failure and you've 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." Circle the wept bitterly. That's grieving.

Imagine how disappointed Peter must have felt in himself. He thinks, "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. They might have killed me." 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 out and say, "Yeah, I had a failed business here, so I'm going to go start another one right now."

Or they say, "I just had a marriage fail, but I'm going to find somebody 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 dream.

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 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. Recovery is an act of God's mercy.

Healing is an act of mercy, and it comes slowly with time. 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 a prayer David wrote after he committed adultery. 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."

He's saying God is looking for humility and contriteness. When you come to God and say, "God, I'm broken-hearted over this. I had all my hopes pinned on this, but it didn't work. The business failed. The relationship failed. And I'm broken-hearted over it, and I'm a little bit more humble than I was. I don't think I'm the manager of the universe. I'm coming with a humble spirit and a repentant attitude." God goes, "That's the person who's going to recover."

So he does the first thing right 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 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, it reminded him of his biggest failure in life. It was a trigger.

You have triggers in your life. There are certain things that when you hear them or smell them or think them, it triggers the memory of your failures. You can't stop the triggers. But you can stop what they do to you. And you do have a choice.

Your choice then is, will I choose to focus on the mistake and 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's going to stop hassling you about this.

Satan knows your triggers, and he wants to condemn you. Before you fail or before you commit a sin, Satan always minimizes the sin. He goes, "This is no big deal. Go ahead and do it. I mean, everybody does this. Times have changed. We're in a different culture. This is okay." 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. Who do you think you are? You might as well just give up because you are used material. It's over. This is so big, God could not possibly ever use you."

See how he switched? He starts saying it is no big deal before you do it, and then afterwards he says it is 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.

When you don't understand who you are—when you still have that soul pain and you don't know your identity—you give in to these kinds of fears. And Satan and other people can just whip you around and manipulate you with memory triggers.

You need to say, "Every time that trigger brings that painful mistake, I'm just going to go, 'Yep, it was wrong,' and then I'm going to go, 'Thank God for his grace. Thank God for his mercy, for his love, and for his forgiveness.' I am a trophy of grace."

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 doing that. 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, he will stop.

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 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 whose 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: let my small group support me. And that's exactly what Peter did. The very first thing Jesus did when he started his ministry was form a small group, and he chose 12 people to be part of that 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. Let me just show you some examples of Peter getting support from his small group after his biggest failure.

Mark 16, verse 10, Easter morning. Mary Magdalene went and found the disciples together, grieving and weeping. Circle the word "together." I want you to listen very closely. 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 failure in your life, you want to keep it a secret. That's the worst thing you could do.

You don't need to tell everybody, but 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 or by yourself. We're 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 doesn't go hide in a cave. He goes to his small group. The disciples were together grieving and weeping. Now you need godly support more than ever.

Guest (Male): Hey, did you know that the number one attribute of God in Scripture is his mercy? It is, and he wants to be merciful to you. 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 six-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 lost.

As you grow in mercy, you'll experience the blessing God promises to the merciful. The *Miracle of Mercy* six-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. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick's Daily Hope and your generous financial support.