Finding Freedom: Letting Go of Guilt and Regret

Good morning! It's good to be in church today.

We get to do something incredibly special for us as believers, which is we get to take communion together as a family. Before we do this, I have a couple words of encouragement.

During this next song, the ushers are going to pass out the sacraments. I want you to remember and contemplate and reflect on what those represent. It's just juice and a cracker, but what they represent most certainly does. This is a time to very purposefully pause.

Let's do a very special thing today in church. How many have been busy lately? It just feels like the world is busy nowadays. Let's pause and remember what those sacraments represent. They have the power to do something. Come on, let's give God some praise in this place. Praise the Lord!

We're going to sing this church. I'm praising the valley, all praise on the mountain, all praise when I'm sure and I'll praise when I'm doubted. I'll praise when surrounded, 'cause praise is the water for my enemies. As long as I'm breathing, I've got a reason to pray. As long as I'm reading, I've got a reason to pray.

Let it rise, arise. We raise you, oh faith be the song that comes in the storm inside of me. Let it rise. We praise you, this is what freedom feels like in life. I don't feel good. God, we give you highest praise in this place.

Is the enemy like praise? Greatness, Jesus, you deserve the praise. Jesus, you deserve the praise. Earth is your name. Thank you and now my shame is gone. I stand amazed. Your grace goes on and on and I will sing of your goodness forever.

Jesus, you deserve the praise. In the heavens, as your glory fills this place, you alone deserve our praise. It's a place, Bible names. Jesus, what is your name? Jesus, you deserve the praise. Earth is your name.

Jesus, you deserve the praise. As your glory fills this place, you alone deserve our praise. Jesus, you deserve the praise. Earth is your name. Jesus, you deserve the praise.

And now, let us take communion together as a family. So this is our time to rebel against busyness and say no, I'm just gonna pause, I'm gonna reflect, I'm gonna take a minute to get calm in my spirit and think about and meditate on to connect with the Lord in this way to remember the sacrifice that Jesus made.

Some of you may even want to connect with the suffering that happened, suffering that Jesus went through to make this happen for us and just take a moment. As Brown and the team lead this next song, we'll pass out the sacrament ceiling and just hold on to those and then I'll come back up at the end and we'll take communion together as a church family. Sound good? All right, let's continue to worship.

Give life more love, bring light to the darkness, you restore every heart that is broken. Together, you give life, you are loved, you bring light to the darkness, every heart that is.

Your breath, your breath in our lives, everything that we have in this world you've given to us God, so with everything that we are we give you highest praise. God we lift up this praise together to you this morning, yes all the Earth will shout your praise.

God we don't grow tired of declaring your greatness, great on you God be gathered together to lift up your Holy Name we sing great. So with everything we give you highest praise, your praise, your eyes will rise, know the Earth will shout your praise.

My love we sing that again, it's your breath, your eyes, so let's never take this for granted right, let's never let this just become religious ritualism, it's more than just juice in a cracker. This represents business, a lot of pain and suffering, this represents a tremendous price that was paid.

It also represents healing, represents salvation, it represents forgiveness, it represents freedom, it represents New Life for eternity.

So Jesus said to the disciples, "This is my body, it was broken for you, so take and eat and do this in remembrance of me." Further, he said, "This is my blood that was shed for you, so take and drink and do this in remembrance of me."

Lord we are thankful, we are thankful for the sacrifice that you made. Lord thank you that this is not some fairy tale, did not come from a book of fables. Lord this is reality and we stand humbled and grateful and we say thank you today.

Say thank you for the blood that you shed, for your body that was broken, for the love that you displayed towards us Lord and you did it, you did it in advance, you did it before any one of us were ever born. And we say thank you, we say thank you.

We can sing that chorus again, it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our grace. All of us foreign, also to your father, we don't get tired of saying it Lord we sing. Things lost your breath on us, it's your bread, our loans, scripture says times of refreshing come from the presence of the Lord.

Times of refreshing come from the presence of the Lord, thank you for your presence Lord, thank you for your presence Lord. I don't know about you but I could just kind of hang here all day, but we do have a rest of a service to do.

But can you just for a minute just share your gratitude to God, can we just say thank you, we just say thank you. Come on church, can we say thank you to God for his goodness, come on we can do better than that, I think can we say thank you, can we say thanks to rayon and the worship team so great you guys, thank you guys so good, it's good to be in church today.

Yeah, we'll go ahead and have a seat. My name is Lincoln, I'm one of the pastors here, great to have all of you here this morning. And if you're new online, hope the couch is comfy.

We're going to move on to that time in the service where we take our tithes and offerings. Everybody yes, thank you, thank you for that. I think it's good when we are cheerful givers.

In fact, scripture says that God loves a cheerful giver and you might be like wait I thought God loves everybody. Nope, I'm kidding, just kidding. What it's talking about is God loves it when we give with a good attitude. Does that make sense?

He loves it when we give with a good attitude because how many realize that if you have anything good in your life, if you have any blessing in any way shape or form, it came from God. Yeah, and so when it comes to money he's like it's all mine, I'll let you keep 90 which I think is a pretty good deal and so I subscribe to that and I think it's good.

Um, and here's what's cool is because of the continued faithfulness of this church, we get to do really cool things around here. We just wrapped up our camp kids way whole week of kids getting ministered to for Jesus right here in this Worship Center, check this out! Look at that! Isn't that cool?

How many had kids that went to Kidsway? Yes, you're welcome! Hey, another thing to be thankful for. I didn't say this in any other services, I don't know if you noticed but it's not hot in here. Come on, can we get up? It's for air conditioning, everybody gets excited about air conditioning.

Well, listen, if you want to give you can text the word give to 855-475-8095 or you can always go to bridgeway.church/give. Those are a couple great ways to give. If you have a physical gift you can drop that in, there's a little box right as you're headed outside or you can bring it to the Connect Center.

And again, on behalf of our whole staff here, in all seriousness, really thank you guys so much. You are incredibly generous and it really blesses us week after week. And again, we could not do the ministry that we do here at Bridgeway without you guys, without your faithfulness.

So let me pray for the offering, then we got some fun announcements and then Pastor Judah is going to come up and bring the word of God. Are you guys ready? Okay, let's pray for the offering.

Lord, we thank you for this offering. Thank you for the generosity of this church. God, we pray that you would multiply this. Lord, give us wisdom in the best ways to use it and Lord, we pray that it would go on to accomplish your Kingdom's purposes in this world.

And we pray this and we trust you with it, we lift it to you in Jesus name and everybody said together, amen. Love you guys!

Hey Bridgeway, I'm Ashley and I'm Mike. Stay tuned to hear about events for our young families, women, and those who want to dive deep into theology this summer.

We will once again be having our Young Family Summer Heights. Join other families with kids Elementary aged and below for family-friendly hikes throughout the summer. It's a great way to meet other people from Bridgeway and help your kids get the Wiggles out. The first hike is coming up on July 15th. For more information go to bridgeway.church/events.

Our next Coffee and Theology is Tuesday evening July 18th. We'll discuss the Theology of Evangelism with Pastor Mark Talks as he tells us how we can strategically fulfill our mission to make disciples. The ultimate definable fruit of the Kingdom of God is to make disciples, so join us in learning about how to work towards our common goal together. This event is free to attend and our Cafe will be open. For more information go to bridgeway.church/events.

Join the ladies at Bridgeway for a wonderful night of live worship, connection, and prayer on Wednesday evening July 26th. For more information go to bridgeway.church/events.

We believe that God has something unique to say to you and our hope is that you know you are loved and have a place here. Have a great weekend Bridgeway, feel it!

That's definitely going to make the video, I can tell. Well, hey y'all. Oh, that was that was that would be all right if I were anywhere else other than Bridgeway. I said hey y'all. Thank you, thank you, thank.

I'm so glad to be here! My name is Judah and if we haven't met before, I always just take this moment to plug our Young Adult Ministry. That's the ministry that I get to be a part of. Young adult, yeah!

So listen, if you're between the ages of 18 and 25 and you have not connected with the ministry yet, today is the day to do that. Um, right after the service we're going to be all the young adults, we're going to be right down here in this front section until they kick us out. Come on down and we'd love to meet you and let's schedule some time, get some coffee or some Jamba Juice and get you connected into this family of BYA, yeah cool.

So I am excited because we are in the final week of our mini series on the power of freedom and I hope it has blessed you the way it has blessed me. We started off two weeks ago and I was talking and teaching about the power of Freedom from what happened to us, freedom from traumas and things that have happened to us that have harmed us and hurt us.

And then last week Pastor Jake Taylor from the Father's House was with us and he talked about freedom from anxiety and depression.

But so far in this series we've been talking a lot about freedom from things that happened to us, but what about those of us who need freedom from things done by us? What about those of us who need freedom from what we've done?

Most of us, if we're honest, are walking around with some level of regret. Most of us, if we're honest, are walking around with some water and some sugar and some coulda in our back pockets.

Today my heart is burdened for those of us in that camp. My heart is burdened for those who have pitched our tents and laid foundations and built homes in the land of regrets. Many of us look back over our lives and we realize that in both large and in small ways we have dropped the ball.

We have made choices, we have made decisions, we have made mistakes that have spawned consequences so catastrophic, so disastrous, so painful that the only response we thought we could have is to wear our humiliation and our guilt and our shame as a garment.

So everywhere we go, every room we walk into, we walk into it wearing our guilt and our shame. We let it ride in the car with us, we let it climb into the bed with us at night. We let it skew our perception of our worth and our identity and we deny ourselves the things that we need because we feel the need to punish ourselves for what we've done.

It's funny how comfortable we can get with bondage. You know, if you wear a chain long enough you won't even realize you're wearing it. So you may be here today and thinking why does it matter if I feel guilty, why does it matter if I've got some shame, why should I be concerned about being free from these feelings especially when I'm so used to them?

I think it matters to Jesus because what I know is that after that man had been falsely accused and lied on, after he had been arrested in the middle of the night and after they had taken him to an illegal trial and beat him with rods and whips within an inch of his life, after they had yanked his beard out of his face and placed the crown of thorns on his head and nailed him to a cross and pierced his side with a spear, he said three words: "It is finished."

He meant it, and some of us have been living lives that argue with that. Some of us, burdened by the weight of guilt and shame, have been living lives that say it's not finished; what I did was so bad, there's more suffering that needs to be had, more blood that needs to be shed.

We have spent far too long trying to climb up on the cross ourselves and nail ourselves there. But you know what? The cross is a one-seater; it doesn't have an extra seat for you. Jesus climbed on the cross so that you wouldn't have to. So it is inappropriate for us to be walking around chained by what we've done.

Your fill in the blank is going to be prophetic; that means that we're going to say it even if we can't see it as true right now, that we're going to say it believing that it's true, believing that it will come to be even if it's not where you are right now.

It's real easy. Say it with me: "I will be free from my failures." Yeah, I will be free from my failures. I will recognize that I made a mistake, but I'm not the mistake. That I may have failed, but I'm not a failure. That while I dropped the ball and I did some things that were wrong, it is not my identity; it is not who I am.

I will be free from my failures.

I know what it is to carry the weight of failure. One of the greatest failures in my life is around my relationship with my brother, his name is Khalil. I've talked on this very stage about how my brother and I have different fathers. My mother loved us so much, she gave us each our own Daddy.

My mother was married to my brother's father for a while, and my brother's father was an alcoholic. I've talked on the stage about how chaotic that was for our family, and eventually my mother realized that it was no longer safe for us to be in that relationship and she got us out.

We were so relieved and filled with joy and peace that we were getting out of that situation. My family was so excited and we were so wrapped up in our own feelings about it, we forgot that there was a little boy whose world was falling apart.

That little boy woke up one morning and his Daddy was gone, and his brother, his father's son, my stepbrother, his brother had gone. He woke up one morning and his older and favorite brother, me, I was gone because I was going off to college. He woke up one morning and his sister was gone because she had come to live in Florida with me.

He woke up one morning and he didn't live in the same house anymore because we had lost the home. One morning, he woke up and realized his world was falling apart. His body was changing as he was going through puberty, his mother had gotten remarried to a different guy, and his parents had adopted two more children.

He went from being the baby to the oldest almost overnight. His mental health got so bad that therapists didn't have language for what he had going on and things got chaotic. Eventually, he told his mom he needed to find someplace else to live.

His brother needed somebody to see him, somebody to hold space for all of the things he was feeling, and somebody to have compassion for him. Instead, he got a dictator who was on him all the time about everything.

This culminated in a terrible fight where his car got totaled and he ran away to LA. They didn't talk for almost five years and only started reconciliation work two years ago.

The guilt of the consequences weighed heavily on his brother. He sees his fingerprints all over his brother's struggles. He knows what it is to carry the guilt of things he's done and the choices he's made that had an impact.

He's walking out his own journey of freedom from it and hopes that the Lord's teachings can be helpful to others. He invites us to open our Bibles and look at a story of a man recovering from his failure.

David was a young boy when we first meet him, a servant with no clue of what he would become. One day, he said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the Lord." Nathan replied, "The Lord has taken away your sin, so you're not going to die. But because by doing this you have shown contempt for the Lord, the son born to you will die."

After Nathan had gone home, the Lord struck the child that Uriah's wife had born to David and he became ill. David pleaded with God for the child and he fasted and wept and spent nights lying in sackcloth on the ground.

The Elders of his household stood beside him to get up from the ground, but he refused and he would not eat any food with them. On the seventh day, the child died and David's attendants were afraid to tell him that the child was dead, for they thought, "While the child was still living he wouldn't listen to us when we spoke to him. How can we now tell him that the child is dead? He may do something desperate."

David noticed that his attendants were whispering amongst themselves and he realized that the child was dead. "Is the child dead?" he asked. "Yes," they replied, "he is dead."

Then David got up from the ground and after he had washed and put on lotions and changed his clothes, he went into the house of the Lord and worshiped. Then he went to his own house and at his request they served him food and he ate.

His attendants asked him, "Why are you acting this way? While the child was alive you fasted and wept, but now that the child is dead you get up and eat." He answered them, "While the child was still alive I fasted and wept. I thought, 'Who knows, the Lord may be gracious to me and let the child live.' But now that he is dead, why should I go on fasting? Can I bring him back again? I will go to him, but he will not return to me."

Then David comforted his wife Bathsheba and he went to her and made love to her. She gave birth to a son and they named him Solomon. The Lord loved him and because the Lord loved him, he sent word through Nathan the prophet to name him Jedediah.

The blessing in reading about David's life is that he is one of the few characters in the Bible that we get to travel with from his very early days all the way till the day he dies. Most people in the Bible we meet them in one particular season and we journey with them through a season or two, but then we don't hear from them anymore.

Right when we meet Peter in the Bible, we meet Peter as a grown man. Peter's a grown man already invested in his career. He's already buried a wife. That's a very specific season to meet somebody in, right? So we don't have a lot of information about the experiences of Peter the boy or Peter the adolescent, right.

But David we meet as a young boy. We watch him get to step into manhood and step into the career and learn to be a king. We meet him at various different times in his life when he's cowering in a cave scared of the government, then we meet him when he's at the head of the government.

David was a complex person with an intersectional, multifaceted identity. He wrote poetry, played music, liked to dance, and could rip the head off of a lion. He could also use his words to write scriptures that we read today, and cuss someone out fast.

Too often, we don't hold space for people or ourselves to be more than one thing. We want people to be one thing, and we want to put them in a box. We do this to ourselves too. The reality is that people are many things.

Last week, David was at the doctor's office and he went up to the window because his insurance card wouldn't scan in the machine. The man behind the counter told him to speak louder, and David felt the desire to leap over the counter. He didn't, and the man corrected his behavior.

We see David's complexity bloom when he struggles with a lust issue. He sees a woman in his neighbor's yard, Bathsheba, and decides to use his power and authority to bring her into his home and into his bed. When she becomes pregnant with his child, despite the fact that she is another man's wife, David is in trouble.

He calls the man, who is also one of his top generals, home from the battlefield and tells him to go home to his wife.

The benefit of seeing life as a whole and not just a season is that it reminds us how complex life is and how complex people are. We get to see in David's life that people are many things, and we should hold space for people and ourselves to be more than one thing.

Uriah is an honorable man who refuses to go home and enjoy the comforts of his wife's bed while his brothers are on the front line fighting for the country. David decides to put Uriah on the front lines of the battle so that Uriah dies and the scandal of it all is that he puts the instructions in writing and gives them to Uriah to give to his supervisor.

Uriah walks back to the camp carrying his own death certificate. Bathsheba has this baby and as the text tells us, the baby dies and now David is carrying the weight of what his actions have caused.

It is something that is so heavy it threatens to crush him. David has disrupted a lot of lives and now there is a dead baby, a dead husband, a grieving widow, and sin in his household. It is so much for David, but he models for us how to move through it and become free from it.

The first thing that is important to getting out from under the weight of guilt and shame is acceptance and responsibility. We have to accept the consequences and accept responsibility for our role in it.

We have to look in the face of the circumstances and say, "I did it." We have to avoid denying and minimizing our impact on others. Denial and defensiveness never actually help.

At the moment, Jacob sometimes messes up and the first step is to just say, "I messed up. I did it. I dropped it. I messed up."

What I want to be clear about is that accepting responsibility is not the same as self-punishment. What's the difference? Accepting responsibility is acknowledging and owning up to the fact that you played a role in creating the circumstances and the outcome.

Accepting responsibility is about personal growth, it's about learning from the mistake, and it's about looking for opportunities to make amends if possible. On the other hand, self-punishment is often a negative and self-destructive response to how we feel about the consequences.

This usually looks like excessively blaming ourselves. The difference between accepting responsibility and excessive blaming is that accepting responsibility is simply noticing how you participated.

Blame is attaching the outcome to your identity and then making broad brushstroke blanketed statements like, "I'm a terrible father," "I'm a terrible husband," "I'm a terrible friend," or "I'm a terrible Christian."

We have to avoid the ways that self-punishment can show up, such as isolation, self-deprivation, or trying to sabotage our own happiness and well-being as a means of punishing ourselves.

We can't atone for what we've done, but we can make amends. A tool that we need in our tool belt for accepting responsibility in a healthy way is self-compassion.

Self-compassion involves intentionally inviting kindness into the conversation that we are having with ourselves about what we have done. It involves intentionally using gentleness and inviting understanding and care into the face of our shortcomings.

It also involves acknowledging our own pain. Hurt people hurt people, so we must acknowledge that. Self-compassion is a healthy and constructive response and avoids self-punishment, which is counterproductive and hinders our growth.

The reason I wasn't able to do what my brother was able to do is because I had not been fathered. That's not an excuse, but I can invite understanding and compassion.

To find freedom from what you've done, you're going to have to practice self-kindness and offer yourself words of encouragement through the process. You have a Bible where Jesus says if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

Acceptance and responsibility require self-compassion and self-care. David immediately does this after accepting what has happened. He starts taking care of himself physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

He takes a bath, puts on lotion, and changes his clothes. This is a metaphor for transformation. At some point, David realizes he can't continue to wear what he's been wearing and he has to do something different.

To get out from under the weight of guilt and shame, you have to self-reflect so you can learn and change. You have to wash off things you can't do anymore and adopt a different way of communicating, parenting, being a grandparent, responding to conflict, and reorganizing your life.

When you can say you're a better parent, husband, wife, and more balanced and healthy, you will find freedom. David had learned that the weight of guilt doesn't sit on him the same way.

He had adopted a quote in his life that said, "I never lose, I either win or I learn." After accepting responsibility for his actions, David controlled what he could.

He realized he had dropped the ball and couldn't control where it went, but he could control himself. He couldn't control what happened to the baby, but he could control what happened next.

Part of this was his practice of self-care. He didn't do it alone. He went into the house of God and worshiped. In order to get through failure and move on, one must get in God's face about it.

This may look like more time in the Word, more time praying, and more time in Christian community. Failure is not the time to skip weekend service, it's the time to go to all four services and ask about Bible study on Wednesday.

One must draw more closely to God and push past the embarrassment. This can look like practicing gratitude even in grief. Worship is not to be attached to a feeling or scenario, it's to be attached to a person.

The Bible says to bless the Lord at all times and one's praise shall continually be. David had failed, but he still went to the Lord in worship. He asked for help and opened up his shame before people.

The Bible says, "I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ." To really say this, we must admit that we need the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We must admit that we are broken, wounded, and have failed many times.

The only way to fix this is for God to come down and take our place, take our punishment, and save us. To get out from under the guilt of failure, we must open up our shame to somebody.

When we do this, we realize that we are not alone and recognize our common humanity. There are many daddies and mothers who don't know if they are doing the right thing. We all need help and support.

There are lots of Christians struggling with the same things that you're struggling with, and that pushes out the devil's voice that says you are the only one and you're so evil and you're not worth anything.

Number two, you're gonna get the support that you need. Somebody just walk alongside you and who knows what kind of resources they have.

This is why I tell y'all to make sure you get you some older friends, some friends who are a generation or two ahead of you because they may have failed in areas that you're failing in right now and they may have some wisdom for you right so you get support and three you get accountability.

Now don't let that scare you, accountability is good for you. Accountability helps keep us safe right.

And so David realized that he could not control or change what happened, but that he had the opportunity to change what would happen going forward.

And so when David had done his work of accepting responsibility and embracing the consequences and he had done it with self-compassion and self-care and self-kindness and he had taken really good care of himself and opened up his shame before other people and he had worshiped God then he was able to provide that for somebody else.

Look at verse 24. Then David comforted his wife Bathsheba and he went to her and made love to her.

What's so powerful about this is that this is the second time we've seen David and Bathsheba come together, but there's such a difference in how he approaches her this time.

If you look at Second Samuel 11 and 4, the first time David and Bathsheba engage it says so David sent messengers to her and she came to him and he lay with her.

But look at how David has changed this time. It says verse 24 and 12. It says then David comforted his wife Bathsheba and he went to her and he made love to her.

David says this time I'm gonna do something different. This time he goes to her, he doesn't seek what he could gain. He goes to comfort her. He doesn't go to objectify her and reduce her down to her sexuality. He goes to love her.

And so his behavior is different because his motivations are different and therefore the outcome is different.

This is the power of changing. This is the power of learning from our mistakes and our failures is that we get to now come and do something different.

What we see is that one of the ways you get out from under the burden of guilt and shame is that we try to make amends.

We don't know the composition of the conversation that David has with Bathsheba that second time that he comes to her after the baby has died. We don't know how long that conversation is. It could have been a 12 month, 13 month, 19 month conversation. We don't know.

But what we can guess is that at some point David said, "Baby, I'm sorry. I apologize. I messed up. I brought some real grief." I am so sorry I dropped the ball.

One of the ways that you're gonna get free of what you've done is to go and make amends. I know that there are a lot of reasons why we don't take our time with this.

Some of us haven't tried to make amends because we assume that it won't be received. They don't text me back, they don't respond to my emails, they're gonna hang up the phone on me maybe, but you are not responsible for the reception.

You are responsible for the apology. You are responsible for asking for forgiveness, at least attempting to listen. Your failure is worth the try.

Some of us have not tried yet because we're scared because we know that it could be hard and painful and perhaps long, but what I want you to know is you may be scared but do it anyway.

You don't have to ask your emotions for permission to do something, do it anyway. You can deal with hard and painful and long.

And the reason you know that you can deal with hard and painful and long is because you've already been doing it. It's already been hard all these years of carrying that guilt. It's already been painful. It's already been long.

And what you know is that you have the Holy Spirit and guess what the fruit of the Holy Spirit is long suffering.

Jesus hung on a cross and it was hard, wasn't a soft cross. Jesus hung on the cross and it was painful and it was long and he did it to make amends for something he didn't even do.

And then Jesus said very truly I tell you whoever believes in me will do the works that I've been doing and they will do even greater things than these. You can deal with long and hard and painful.

The movie is called mission impossible, mission heart should be a walk in the park for you.

In Philippians Paul talks about all the ups and downs from his experiences and he ends and he says I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.

And this verse is often decontextualized and people try to say that it means I can do anything I want to do. That's not what it means, but what it does mean is that I can do anything that God has assigned me to do.

He's assigned you to be a reconciler because he's a reconciler.

Jesus said in Matthew in the sermon of the mouth he said leave your gift at the altar and go be reconciled. Leave on it praise and worship and all that hand leave it at the altar if you haven't tried to be reconciled go and fix it then come back we'll be here every Sunday 9 and 11.

There is so much power in the words I'm sorry.

Verse 24 says that David comforted his wife Bathsheba and he went into her and lay with her and she bore a son and he called his name Solomon and the Lord loved him.

And what we see is that if we can master recovering from failure well we have these opportunities to disrupt and break cycles and we have this opportunity to have greater outcomes than we would have had if we hadn't made the mistake in the first place.

That's what happens when we partner with God. Even in our failure. Solomon, David's son, was known for his wisdom. Where did he get it from? His daddy was able to teach him out of his own failures.

With God, failure can be a curriculum and a master class. To get freedom from failure, we must accept the consequences and take responsibility for our actions.

We can do this by practicing self-compassion, self-reflection, and self-care. We must also get in God's face about it by increasing the amount of time we spend with the Lord.

This could be done through reading the Bible, listening to the Bible, praying, coming to church, coming to Bible study, coming to small groups, listening to worship music, and practicing gratitude in the grief.

We must also get support from others by opening up and sharing our shame. We must also make amends and apologize for our mistakes.

Even if the other person does not accept our apology, it is still our responsibility to go and say we are sorry. As we work through these steps, the weight of the failure will become less and less until we are no longer carrying it.

Finally, we should pray and spend time with God. Folks who are carrying the weight of regret, the weight of failure, and so what I'm going to ask you to do is to be courageous and stand up so that I can pray for you.

If you're watching with us online, while the people in this room are getting their courage together, I'm going to encourage you to participate in this by just dropping in the chat and saying "It's me, it's me, it's me, it's me, come on, I just want to pray."

Father, with my family in this room, we're just repenting. We're beginning by saying Lord, we acknowledge to you, oh God, that we have fallen short and that none of those circumstances are simple and straightforward, but the reality is that we are broken and we got issues and some of those issues have shown up in the ways that we have lived our lives.

We have dropped the ball. God, we repent. We say Lord, we're sorry for the ways that we just don't always get it right.

And God, what we're so thankful for is that you offer forgiveness freely, that you just lavish us with a promiscuous grace. God, we receive it. We open our hands and we say thank you Daddy for the new mercies that you fashion every day and for the fact that you just never run out of grace, that we never run out of chances that we can come back to you over and over and over again and say God, it's me again and I did it again and I need you again.

God, thank you for your grace. We receive it.

And God, I pray that you would help us to walk out our journey through and from failure. That you would help us to notice what our role is, to notice the ways that we participated.

That you would help us, Jesus, to accept responsibility and accept the consequences, but to do so with self-compassion. God, you are the author of compassion. Help us to have that for ourselves, to have self-kindness to ourselves, to help us to practice self-care as we're navigating it.

Jesus, help us to change. Help us to identify the lessons, what is it that the failure was supposed to teach us. Father, you are our instructors to still teach us.

And then Father, help us to build community where we can open up our shame and our guilt and it's not something that lives at the back of the closet, but it's something that we can share with each other.

And who will lead with courage and who will lead with humility and Lord I pray that you would give him the courage to do what he needs to do and to make the amends that he needs to make and Lord I pray that you would give him the courage to say the words that he needs to say and Lord I pray that you would give him the courage to write the letters that he needs to write and Lord I pray that you would give him the courage to send the text messages that he needs to send and Lord I pray that you would give him the courage to do whatever it is that he needs to do to make amends and Lord I pray that you would give him the courage to model something different and Lord I pray that you would give him the courage to help others recover and Lord I pray that you would prepare the hearts of those who will be receiving letters and text messages and phone calls this week to receive his heart and Lord I pray that by the time we are done today that we will be able to walk out of here without the weight on us and that we would be able to walk out of here with our heads a little higher and our chests stuck out and that we would leave the weight of our failure at the feet of Jesus where it belongs.

We need help to find the supports that we need to make amends. This may look different for different people, but for many of us, it looks like simply saying we are sorry.

Father, give us the courage to say it, write the letter, and send the text message. If there are other ways to make amends that are unique to our circumstances, help us to identify it so that we can model something different.

This way, not only can we recover, but we can help others recover. Father, prepare the hearts of those who will be receiving letters, text messages, and phone calls this week to receive our hearts.

Give us the courage to do what we need to do and to make the amends that we need to make. With the testimony of this church, let us be able to walk out of here encouraged, empowered for this hard work, and without the weight on us.

Father, let us leave the weight of our failure at the feet of Jesus where it belongs.

We are thankful to be in church today and we thank the Lord for his courage and transparency. We pray for Khalil right now, that the Lord would go before him and Judah and pave the way for them.

We pray that the true intentions of Judah's heart would lead and that they would find ready soil. We pray for healing, restoration, and that they would have the best season of their relationship that they've ever had.

We love this guy and we lift him to the Lord, praying for blessings in his life and for his hopes and dreams in the future. We speak fresh encouragement and strength for the mission that the Lord has for him.

We love the Lord and we thank Him. If anyone needs extra prayer, our prayer team will be up at the front afterwards and would love to pray for you.

Have a great rest of your weekend and enjoy the Fourth of July. We love you and we'll see you next week.