What do you do when you mess up as a Christian?

                This is a letter of encouragement to my fellow believers whom have made a mistake or stumbled in their walk with Christ. If you are like me, then you have this attitude about being a Christian that you cannot make a mistake because a mistake could ruin your testimony. Something that God has been working on me during this summer is that it is ok to make mistakes. When you think about it, a lot of the leaders in the Old Testament made mistakes during their service to God. What I would like to do is to run through a few examples of these and show how these mistakes are actually used in ministry to bring people to God.
                We can look at the first people Adam and Eve. God forbade them from eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent convinced Eve to eat of it, then Eve convinced Adam, introducing sin and death into the world. God found out and kicked them out of the garden. That could have been the end, but God had a plan to redeem all of mankind from that point on in the person of Jesus. So through a mistake that ultimately separated us from God, he showed ultimate mercy and justice by carrying out the punishment for us all on his own son!
                We can also look at the story of Jonah. God had commanded Jonah to go and preach to the people of Nineveh, but Jonah was selfish because he was afraid of what the wicked people of Nineveh would do so he ran as far from Nineveh as he could. God called up a great storm that was only quelled when the crewman of the ship threw Jonah over board. Then a great fish came up and swallowed Jonah. Now this could have been the end of Jonah, and he could have become fish excrement. Instead God sustained Jonah and willed the fish to vomit him up on the beach after 3 days. From there Jonah went to Nineveh and preached and the city repented of their sins. Jonah also watched the city hoping for destruction, instead he sees the city being spared and repenting. God gives Jonah a lesson in God’s sovereignty.
                The third and last person I want to look at in this post is Peter. When Jesus was about to be arrested, he told Peter that before the rooster crows that Peter would deny Jesus three times. Sure enough, when Jesus was arrested, Peter was accused three times that he was with Jesus as one of his disciples. When the rooster crowed, Jesus looked at Peter and he remembered the words Jesus said to him. He went outside and wept bitterly. After the resurrection Jesus reinstated Peter after asking him three times if Peter loved him. He said yes all three times.

                So what do these examples tell us? We all make mistakes, even the leaders with a very direct connection with God. God will allow the consequences of our actions to come to us as a means to bring us back to Him! While we should try our hardest, we should not allow the enemy to stomp us into the ground when we do slip up in our walks with God. We need to get back up, repent, and forgive ourselves. I will pray that if you are struggling with mistakes tonight, that you would give them up to God and allow yourself to not dwell on them and to try again. May God bless you and have a good rest of your day. 

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