“Good job catching your mistake!”
Our daughter’s homeschool coordinator commented during one of her quarterly home visits. As our daughter was demonstrating her growing math skills while doing long addition, she erased the wrong number and wrote the correct one in its place. That’s a wonderful approach, I thought to myself. It dawned on me that while I was in school, we were taught to never make mistakes. Mistakes were frowned upon as taboo. You were less than if you made mistakes while doing your schoolwork. That is why I’m so grateful that our children are being shown the merit in catching and correcting mistakes. What a valuable lesson. It is important that we all learn how to catch and correct our mistakes, because as human beings we are bound to make lots of mistakes. I make a mental note that going forward, I will not be too hard on our children. Expecting perfection from them is not only an unrealistic expectation, because only God is perfect, it is also hypocritical of me since I’m not perfect myself. Quite far from perfect in fact. Rather, I’m now expanding my teaching to go beyond avoiding mistakes and including practical life lessons on how to catch mistakes, correct them and learn from them. Because making the same mistake over and over and never learning and growing is another thing all together. We learn through our mistakes. We learn not to do things a certain way because it did not yield the desired results when we did it that way.
Even the Bible credits people that make mistakes and learn from them as righteous. The Bible doesn’t say a righteous person is one who never makes an error or mistake. Even though that’s how you would expect a righteous person to be described: always right and never wrong. On the contrary, the Bible says a righteous person will fall but get back up again. In other words, a righteous person is one who makes a mistake, then corrects it and does the right thing.
Proverbs 24:16 For though a righteous man may fall seven times, he still gets up; but the wicked stumble in bad times.
And how do we get back up again? By the grace of God and the power of God. Not by our own strength and power, for it is weak and unable to save. God is the one who helps us back up again. We see this testimony in Psalm 34:19:
Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all.
We make mistakes everyday, but thankfully, God has not dealt with us according to our sins or repaid us according to our iniquities. (Psalm 103:10) Instead, in His loving kindness, God calls us to come to Him in repentance, to be cleansed and forgiven. He has compassion on us and restrains His anger. (Psalm 78:38) Because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed, for His mercies never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness! (Lamentations 3:22-23) So, what about those mistakes that we don’t catch? What about the blind spots that elude us and have us walking around with un-repented sin? I love how the Message translation puts Psalm 139: 23-24:
Investigate my life, O God, find out everything about me; Cross-examine and test me, get a clear picture of what I’m about; See for yourself whether I’ve done anything wrong – then guide me on the road to eternal life.
What a reassuring passage, that our Almighty God who sees all, even the hidden motives of our hearts will reveal to us what we need to repent of, and turn away from. And as we open ourselves up to Him in worshipful devotion and prayer, He not only reveals the wrongs within us, but He takes it further and guides us onto the right path, the right train of thought, the right mindset, and the right set of actions to take that are pleasing in His sight; leading us to eternal life and bringing us back to God, which is our goal as followers of Jesus. And all of this, God does in love, not condemnation.
What a wonderful God we serve!
All His actions towards us are motivated and driven by unsearchable love! Love so divine that it never runs out. God never gets tired of helping us correct our mistakes and leading us to the right path. His love for us is steadfast, which means it passes the test of time. He looks at us with mercy that never runs out. In fact, His mercies are new every morning.
Shall we continue to sin because God’s grace never runs out? Of course not! We work at our salvation and exercise sound judgment and disciple. And when we do make mistakes, (as we are bound to do as long as we are human beings living in this fallen world), we acknowledge our wrongdoing and accept God’s gift of mercy and grace. As 1 John 1:9 says,
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
Hebrew 4:16 So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.
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