Facing our Regrets

Even with a mask on! It's great! Thank you. It's beautiful to have such inspiring music, a message all in itself. Well, today I'd like to talk about a topic that I discussed at the Feast of Tabernacles in France this year. So if you were in French, you're going to hear a little bit about this again. I'm looking over Felicia Navon, or others. I think you were there. Yep, the Breitenwald. Some variations, so don't go to sleep yet. I'd like to start out by asking you a question. As you think about what it will mean when all humanity is resurrected. We call this kind of shorthand the second resurrection. That's Church of God speak. But the Bible calls it the rest of the dead resurrection. It's in Revelation 20. What all people who have never heard the name of Jesus Christ, who may be an atheist or Muslim, may be that they were born thousands of years ago, when all mankind, apart from the first roots who were in the first resurrection, the first resurrection is named the first resurrection. That's how we know there's more than one because it's named first. When everybody comes up, what will be the predominant emotion? What will people be thinking and feeling at that moment? Joy, amazement, relief, anticipation. What will it be?

And again, I'm not talking about you because hopefully you will be in the first resurrection named, right? This is everybody else, most people. What will it be? And as you ponder this question, I'd like to tell you a story that I think speaks to what many people will feel at that moment. When I was 11 years old, my great-grandmother died. She was 99 years old, almost 100 years old. She had lived a good, long life. And the funeral should have been a sort of celebration, really, for this good, long life. But that wasn't necessarily the feeling that I got. And I traveled to South Dakota. That's where my mother's family's from. So we were in Watertown, South Dakota, and we're attending this funeral. And my grandmother had had nine children. And my grandmother had died just the year before. That is one of her daughters. So she had outlived actually several of her children.

And even though I was young at that time, I sensed a great deal of emotion during that weekend that we were there. Because, you see, my grandmother had been estranged from her family. And when my grandmother died the year before, there was a great sadness on the part of her brothers and sisters and her mother that she had been so estranged from the family. And in fact, most of the family had not been at my grandmother's funeral. And now here we were, my mother and myself, my aunt. There were, I don't know, there could have been up to 100 family members there. You imagine somebody 99 with nine children. You know how that goes. It just gets really big. And there began to be these discussions of what happened. How did this estrangement begin? What was the argument? What led to this that led to that that led to something else? And there was this sort of healing, a little bit of coalescing, but still a sadness that permeated that weekend as they thought about my grandmother and how things had turned out. And so, as I thought about what that was, you know, it really was a sense of regret. It was a sense of regret. Why didn't I reach out to her sooner? Why did I let that get the best of me? Why didn't I just call her back? And now it was too late. The mother was dead, long life. The daughter was dead. The brothers and sisters all sort of looking around going, how did we let this happen? There was this sense of regret. And I think at the great resurrection of the rest of the dead, I think there will be a common emotion, a common feeling, and I think it will be a feeling of regret. I'm not saying it's the only emotion. I think there will be anticipation. I think there will certainly be joy on certain people's parts, but I think there will be a lot of, oh, I need to go find this person. I need to go talk to that person. There's something I want to say that I didn't say that I should have said. And I think there's going to be regret for what some people had done. I think there's going to be regret, as we'll find out more and we understand from research. We tend to regret the things we didn't do more than the things that we did. There's going to be regret for life and regret for death. And above all, I think there's going to be a regret for what could have been. Now, hopefully that sense of regret will quickly turn to joy and anticipation and excitement, but there's still a process that's going to have to take place. And so the title of my message today is Facing Our Regrets, and I want to answer three questions around the concept of regret. First of all, what is regret? When I talk about regret, what does that mean? What does the Bible say about regret? What does the Bible say? And then how should we prepare ourselves today to understand our own regrets, and to help us be ready to serve those people who will come up in that resurrection, so that we ourselves are ready? You know, in 2011, there was a paper published in Personality and Social Psychology that found that 90% of adults have deep regrets about their lives. 90%. In 2018, Inc. Magazine, a fairly well-known business publication, reported that 72% of people have regrets about things they think they should have done. 72% of people have regrets about things they think they should have done. Now, for those who know the teachings of the United Church of God, or the Church of God in general, know that we believe there is this first resurrection, as I said, named as such.

And I think even for us, at this time, we might have regrets. We might carry regrets with us. We don't necessarily carry them around every day. We don't invite them to dinner every night, but they may come out at different times. There might be something we see, something that brings to mind a little bit of a pain.

And I hope that we today are confronting some of those regrets. Why we feel that way? And what does that mean, and how should that change our behavior? But for sure, in the second resurrection, people are going to need to face their regrets. And facing one's regrets leads to things like reconciliation, change, and many, many apologies. It's really transformative if we take that feeling of regret and we do something with it. On the other hand, not confronting our regrets, I think we'll see as we go through this message, leads the other direction. It leads to continued sadness, and ultimately, we'll see in the biblical sense, it leads to death.

You know, in the resurrection, just like today, we need to be telling the truth. It's hard to tell the truth. It hurts other people's feelings sometimes. It might be uncomfortable for us. But we need to tell the truth. And in the second resurrection, people are going to begin telling the truth.

And when they're not telling the truth, they're going to get called out for it. Probably you can be involved in calling out people who aren't being truly honest with one another. And that means we have to be ready to do that. I quoted Mark Twain before, where he said that only the dead can tell the truth. He was so convinced of this that he truly wrote a book that was not to be published until after he was dead, because he was so concerned about the repercussions that that book would have on him and his friends, that he said, publish it after I'm dead.

He didn't want to deal with the repercussions. The second resurrection will be people learning to tell the truth, which means learning to speak the truth in love, learning to face who they are and the mistakes that they've made. Just like that funeral that I remember so well. What do I do with this now? It's too late.

It's fundamentally learning to say, I'm sorry, and accepting someone's apology if they say, I'm sorry to you. So it's not just about them. I think this message is for us, and I hope it will spur you to examine your own regrets in your life and what you're going to do with them. So that you will be ready to support those people in the second resurrection. So let's start by defining our terms. The Cambridge dictionary defines regret this way. Quote, a feeling of sadness about something sad or wrong or about a mistake that you made and a wish that it could have been different or better.

It's kind of intuitive. You have this sadness. We have this feeling. I was a mistake. I wish I hadn't done that. I could have done that better. But from this definition, we see that regret is fundamentally a feeling of sadness. It's a feeling of sadness. It's a feeling that we really could have fixed something. So I don't have any indication of how people in the second resurrection will feel when they are resurrected. I asked that question in the beginning, and I think we do. And I'd like you to turn over to Ezekiel 37 and verse 10, and I'd like you to read with me what it says about the state of mind of those people at that time.

Ezekiel 37 and verse 10 gives us a hint of what things will be like at the rest of the dead resurrection, which is described in Revelation 20. In this case, this is the resurrection, specifically, of the whole house of Israel. And in this discussion, we have the very famous bones coming together, a really wonderful song. If you haven't heard it recently, go back and listen to it.

It's very catchy about these dry bones and the bones coming together. And if we read through it, we'll see that there's a certain feeling among the people who are resurrected in verse 10. Ezekiel 37 verse 10, it says, Verse 11, and then he said to me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They indeed say, and now here's the quote, our bones are dry. Our hope is lost, and we ourselves are cut off. This is the emotion as these people come back to life. They are stunned, probably, but then as soon as that goes off, they're like, well, this is terrible.

Our hope is lost. We're cut off. What have we done? We have displeased God, and we are cut off. There's regret here. Now, we're going to learn a little bit more about regret, because that doesn't mean that that's going to lead to something. It can lead to different things.

It's a feeling of what have we done? We have cut ourselves off. Our hope is lost. And then in verse 12, it says, God says, no, don't worry. You are going to have a chance. You are not cut off. You are not lost. You will be my people. I will give you my spirit.

I will give you a chance. A different kind of chance. We often talk about the second resurrection as not a second chance, but a first chance. They will not be blinded by the adversary. They will not be blinded by their life experience apart from God. Their hearts will not be hardened. They will have their first opportunity at salvation. And whatever things they did in their lives that they regret, they will have a chance to face those regrets and understand what it means to be reconciled to their brother and reconciled to God. That is the beauty of the resurrection. It's not coming up and saying, great, let's play soccer or go, let's go play football.

I love these legs that work. No, this is a mental, spiritual thing that says I can be one with my family in the way that I couldn't be with them before. I can know my purpose. I can understand that God exists and he truly loves me. This is what is being described. In 2017, there was a TED Talk titled The Antidote to Regret. Kimberly Rich explained that in 1986, researchers at Cornell University asked 600 people aged 70 and above what they would do differently if they could live their lives over again.

While only 12% of people described things they wish they had done, 54% of people described things they wished they had done but did not. This research has been confirmed time and time again. People say things like, I wish I had spent more time with my family. I wish I had told my wife I loved her more often. The regrets for the things we wish we had done will last a lifetime, and people will take those regrets to their graves. That, even as an 11-year-old, I felt and sensed when I was at that funeral that weekend.

In short, regret is the sadness of a mistake we made and the wish that things could have been different and better. Those who are resurrected in the Second Resurrection are going to be resurrected, and the emotion they are going to have is sadness to the point of despair. They think they are lost, they think they have lost hope, but God is going to say, no, that's not the case. We are going to be part of that for them, but we have to be part of that for us now.

In this slide, I'd like to talk about what the Bible now says in my second point. What does the Bible actually say about regret? I told you what Cambridge Dictionary says, but let's look into the Word of God. Turn with me to 2 Corinthians 7, verse 1, and let's read the biblical concept of regret.

2 Corinthians 7, verse 1.

This is going to set the tone for the chapter. This gives us the context for what we're going to read here next in verse 8. Paul says, And he had a discussion about marriage and family and many things, and so he's connecting that thought with the therefore.

What he's talking about in this chapter and what he's setting the stage for is a discussion of repentance, of change, of being something different and new, being something we were not before. In verse 8, he says, in discussion in regard to some communication that he had, he says, Okay, there's the word regret. We're going to come back to that in a second. We're going to define what that word means. He says, Though I did regret it, that is to say, at first he regretted it, but later he did not, I perceived that the same epistle made you sorry, though only for a while.

Now I rejoice, not that you were made sorry, but that your sorrow led to repentance. For you were made sorry in a godly manner, that you might suffer loss from us in nothing. So this word for regret here is the Greek word metamelomei. That's meta. That's now a famous word because Facebook changed its meta, right? It changes the name of meta. M-E-T-A, meta. And M-E-L-O-M-A-I, metamelomei. And help word study says that this word means I change my mind. That's what I mean. I change my mind. When we regret, we change our minds about what we did or did not do in the past.

That is, we did something. And then a little while later, we change our mind. Oh, that wasn't a good idea. I didn't handle that well. I changed my mind about that. That's what that word means. Thayer's Greek lexicon says this. It says that this word was used in two different ways in the first century. Interesting. What Thayer's does is they look at the usage of that word in the first century in other Greek literature, not just in the Bible, but they look at Homer, they look at some of the Greek writers and the Roman writers who wrote in Greek, and they look to see how that word was used.

And what they came to see was that word was used in two different ways. One way describes a concept of what we say in English now is remorse. It's remorse. Remorse is a sadness that does not change our behavior. It is a regret for which we take no action to remedy. That's what remorse is. I have remorse. It doesn't mean I'm going to change anything. I'm not, you know, I regret I have remorse, but I'm not going to change anything about what I do.

I'm just going to have remorse. The other way the word was used conveys a concept of repentance, which Thayer's calls a change of moral purpose. So one says remorse. I'm sad. That's too bad. I think I'm going to get a drink now. That's remorse. And the other one is a change of moral purpose. That wasn't good. I'm not going to do that again.

How can I think about making sure I don't do that again? What can I do to remedy that situation now, if anything? That's what a change of moral purpose means. And that single word was used in two different ways. Paul says here that he was sad to write this letter. That is, he had regrets about writing the letter at first, but then he had no regrets because he saw the change in behavior.

And from this idea of regretting and not regretting, Paul is now going to use the same word to give a lesson. It's a little bit of a word play, really. He's going to give a lesson about how we think about the past. And again, writing this letter wasn't sin. So regret doesn't have to do with sin.

Let's be clear. You can have regrets about, you know, what the tie you wore in the morning or what you had for breakfast. There's no sin there. It can involve sin, and we'll see that in a moment. But he's going to now have a lesson that he teaches us. Look at verse 10 and how he's going to teach this lesson. For godly sorrow produces repentance to salvation, not to be regretted, but the sorrow of the world produces death. So he's using this word just like it was used in the first century, which means this word could go two directions.

And you had to understand the context and how the author was using the word to understand whether he was talking about remorse or whether he was talking about repentance. And he's saying that regret can lead to repentance, which should not be regretted, or it can lead to remorse, which is ultimately going to lead to death. The first type of grief is a grief that leads to change. It's about truth and confronting what's wrong in our lives. It's about learning from our mistakes and seeking to not repeat them. The second type of behavior consists of fear and hiding and pretending, being defensive, getting what we want at all costs. This kind of grief produces nothing but more sadness and death.

Repentance produces life and removes regrets from our hearts. So let's look at this as an example in Scripture. Let's see this actually in Scripture. Turn with me to Matthew 27, verse 2. And let's see how this played out in the life of Judas, Judas who betrayed Jesus. Matthew 27, verse 2. We know that Judas betrayed Jesus Christ. He betrayed his master who he had been with for three and a half years. And we see the result of this in Matthew 27, verse 2. It says, And when they had bound him, that is Jesus, they led him away and delivered him to Pontius Pilate the governor. And now in verse 3, it says, Then Judas, his betrayer, seeing that he had been condemned, was remorseful. Remorseful. That is the same word that we read in 2 Corinthians 7. That's that meta-melome word, just because it can mean remorse. And he said, And he was remorseful, And brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying, I have sinned by betraying innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us you see to it? And he threw down the pieces of silver in the temple, departed, and went, and hanged himself. And that is a regret, a meta-melome, a remorse that leads to death. There was no confrontation of what he had done. There was no apologies. There was no transformation. There was no repentance. There was, I really messed up, and I can't live with myself anymore, and I'm going to die. That's the remorse and regret that leads to death. Judas felt incredible sadness. He had a change in his mind about what he had done. He regretted his decision. But instead of repenting, he killed himself. Now go back a few verses to Matthew 26 verse 75, and let's see the other direction. Matthew 26 verse 75. And Peter, Peter was there too. And I've talked about this before. There were two men who betrayed Jesus that night. One was Judas, and one was Peter. Peter remembered the word of Jesus, who had said to him, Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times. Then he went out and wept bitterly. You see, there was there was great sadness on Peter's part as well. Peter had great regret. The word regret is not used here, but you can feel it right in the verse. What did I do? What was I thinking? He had a change of mind about his denials of Jesus Christ. What did I do? And he wept bitterly. He could have also gone out and killed himself like Judas. But that regret led him, as we understand from the Scriptures, to repentance and change.

And ultimately, forgiveness and reconciliation with Jesus Christ, as is described in John in the last chapter. There is sorrow and regret that can be good in God's sight. I don't think God wanted Peter to do that, but God knew Peter was going to do that. Jesus Christ predicted he was going to do that. And Peter had to learn that lesson. He had to learn that lesson. And that regret, this regret here in verse 75, it led to repentance and it led to change. And it led to him being one of the most powerful men to preach the gospel at that time.

So the key is whether this change of mind, this change of appendant, leads to a change of attitude, which is repentance, or whether it just leads to some unresolved, persistent issue. And we all have those. Those who rise in the second resurrection, as I said, I believe will have regrets. And the question will be, what will they do with those regrets? What will they do with them? Well, let's look at a famous story in Acts 2, verse 2, verse 36, because I think what they will do with them will not be much different than what the people of the first century did with them when they heard Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost. I think you know where I'm going. Acts 2, verse 36.

It says, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, you kill.

Regret. That's regret. And verse 37, It's like Ezekiel 37, right here. It's the same thing that's going to happen. The people will come up and they'll say, our hope is lost or cut off. What do we do? And God will say, repent and receive my spirit and you will be my children.

That's what they need to do. God opens the eyes of the newly living and explains the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Some will be overwhelmed with guilt, probably depressed.

Others will have terrible remorse, and maybe they won't be able to process that remorse. We know that some won't make it. Some won't make it, just like some won't make it now.

And this brings me to my final point.

How should we prepare ourselves today to understand our personal regrets and help those who will rise in the second resurrection? Because we've got to deal with our own personal regrets.

Now, many of you, some of you might be familiar with a very famous French singer named Edith Piaf.

She's very famous in the French world.

I'm going to attempt to sing this, but please be kind. Be kind.

Perhaps you've heard this very famous song. This is a song that says, I have no regrets. I regret nothing.

And if you want to see an interesting biopic, go to Biopic of Edith Piaf, a woman filled with regrets.

A total lie of a song. Her life was just one long set of sorrows and heartaches.

The fact is that if we step back and ask ourselves some hard questions, we all have some kind of regret.

And it's not. It would be a lie for us to say we have none.

In fact, if you think you have none, I'd like you to turn with me to Genesis 6, verse 6, because even God had regrets.

So sorry, but if God had regrets, then I think you might have regrets too.

Genesis 6, verse 6. This is interesting because as I said, a regret doesn't have to be a sin.

It's just a change of mind. It's just a change of thinking.

Sometimes it's sin. Sometimes it's not. We've seen a letter and we've seen a betrayal that led to Jesus Christ being crucified to very different extremes. Genesis 6, verse 6. And the Lord was sorry that he made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart.

The NIV translates this word sorry as regretted, as do other English translations.

As I said, so you can read this in the IV, it says, the Lord regretted that he made man. God had regrets.

The King James Version translates this word sorry as repented. God repented that he had made man.

God regretted and he repented. This doesn't mean that he made a mistake or he sinned in creating mankind. It simply means that he changed his mind.

The Bible doesn't tell us exactly what he changed his mind about, but we do know that he destroyed most of mankind, except for Noah and his family.

And we know that after the flood, our life expectancy took a bit of a tumble. And so, you know, he made some changes. He learned something from that and said, I'm going to do this differently next time.

And we too, in the future, can change our minds about something and repent and regret the way we have treated something, someone or some situation.

What, then, is the antidote to this feeling of regret? What is that antidote?

And you can go listen to the TED Talk. I don't know if I completely buy into the TED Talk, but I'm going to give you what I think the Bible says about this.

The answer to this question has lots of different theories, but let's look over at Hebrews 4, verse 14.

Hebrews 4, verse 14 says, And let's read, really, the admonition that we are given about how we develop our relationship with God the Father and Jesus Christ.

Hebrews 4, verse 14 says, And let's read, really, the admonition that we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.

For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our regrets, our weaknesses, our troubles, our sin, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.

Verse 16, That's the key word. That's the key antidote.

The antidote to regret is to approach the throne of God with confidence and boldness.

It's about being bold and thinking about what we really need help from God with.

God, I really need your help. I'm in trouble. I'm not getting this. I've got this problem. I'm afraid. I can't tell the truth when I know I need to.

I can't say I'm sorry, but I know I need to. I don't know what I'm supposed to do.

That's being bold. That's being courageous. That's not going and getting a drink and soothing the pain and going to sleep and trying to go through another day and pretend it's not there.

That's not what this is saying. It's having the emotional courage to ask for help from God the Father.

And then you've got to do what He leads you to do. God knows who we are. He knows our weaknesses. He knows what we need.

We've got to ask for His help and not be afraid to ask for that revelation of what we need.

If we go boldly before the throne of God and we ask for His help, He is faithful to give it to us. That's what the Scripture says.

The second passage is a follow-up to this, and it's in Philippians 3, verse 13.

Philippians 3, verse 13, we know Philippians is a letter written by Paul.

And if you think about Paul for a moment, Paul must have had a lot of regret. He must have had a lot of regret.

You know, we won't turn there, but if you look at Acts 8, he literally got authority to break into people's homes and pull people out of their homes.

What kind of mind is ready and able to do that? Some poor old woman, maybe a mom with her kids, you know, leave the kids there. Yeah, you know, your relatives will take care of them. You're coming with me to prison.

He was there at Stephen's stoning. He's kind of like a Nazi hydric-himler. That's what he was.

And then suddenly he realized, I made a mistake. This is not what I should have been doing.

Talk about regret. Talk about pain and sadness.

Philippians 3, verse 13, Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended, but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead.

I press towards the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Jesus Christ.

I don't think he's saying, just pretend it never happened.

But he's saying, if you come boldly before God's throne and you ask for help and you say you're sorry and you seek reconciliation and you seek to do the things that God leads you to do, you don't have to carry that around with you. You don't have to carry that guilt around with you.

You don't have to just constantly be dwelling on the past. No, you look forward. Yes, I had that moment in my life. Yes, that's what I did.

I'm not pleased about that.

And then you move forward. Then you move forward.

The antidote is not to dwell on the past, but to dwell on the future.

Dwelling on the future is not about forgetting our mistakes, but it means we don't let our mistakes paralyze us.

As if Christ's sacrifice is in vain. Because that's what we're doing when we're dwelling on the past. If we already made those changes, then we're like, Oh yeah, Christ, your sacrifice wasn't good enough for me because I'm so bad. That's just pride and arrogance and vanity. No, Christ's sacrifice covers all.

When we rededicate ourselves to our calling, to our vocation, and we learn from our mistakes and we ask for forgiveness, we can move on.

And that's what Paul is talking about here. I press towards the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Jesus Christ.

You know, I think we all have regrets, all of us. Some will live with them until their death. There's nothing I say or nothing you say that we'll do to change that.

That's just what people will do. But I hope that doesn't need to be me, and I hope it doesn't need to be you.

I hope it doesn't come to that in your life.

When my grandmother and my great-grandmother are resurrected, they will have their chance to reconcile, to face their regrets, to tell the truth, to say, I'm sorry.

But today, I'm being judged, and you're being judged.

And we must have the boldness and courage to move forward in our lives and to use our change of minds, our regret, to repent, and to take the sadness that is inherent in regret and use it as a force for change.

As a force for change. To follow the example of Peter and not Judas. To follow in the example of Peter.

We might weep bitterly, but that bitterness and that weeping will lead to life. Let us confront our regrets.