Good Morning Everyone,
Our theme for this month: “Mistakes”
Our Bible verse for today: “This is what the Lord says: ‘When people fall down don’t they get up again? When they discover they’re on the wrong road, don’t they turn back? Then why do these people stay on their self-destructive path?” Jeremiah 8:4-5 (NLT)
Our thought for today: “To avoid repeating our mistakes we must change our ways.”
In the last couple of years I’ve been doing some work in the jails. It’s mostly been with young men who have fallen into the drug culture and have spent some number of years using drugs, selling drugs, and committing crimes in order to get money to buy drugs. As you would expect, they all have criminal records and have been in and out of jail numerous times. The ones I work with have come to the point that they hate the life they’ve been living and they want their future to be different from their past, but they know they need help to accomplish the change. That’s the opening the Lord has given me. I visit with them, talk to them about the life God wants them to have, and then working with defense lawyers, district attorneys, judges, and probation offices, I help them to enter a Christian recovery and transition program in South Carolina where my brother is on staff.
The key to success for these young men is to change their ways. If you want your future to be different from your past then you need to stop doing what you’ve been doing and start doing something better. It’s like the old adage says, “If you keep doing what you’ve always done you will keep getting what you’ve always gotten.”
For those guys the change involves first of all, turning their lives over to the Lord. Second, they need to accept help. And third, they need an entirely new circle of friends, because if you hang around with drug users you too are going to do drugs. So if you want to be drug free, spend all of your time with other people who are also drug free. That principle applies to anything in life also by the way. If you hang around with a bunch of bank robbers then sooner or later you too will be robbing banks. If you surround yourself with people who use profanity, it won’t be long before those words are coming out of your mouth too. So surround yourself with the kinds of people you want to be like. Spend your time with the people who already have the kind of life that you would like to have.
How does this apply to our theme of “mistakes”? It was summed up in our thought for the day: “To avoid repeating our mistakes we must change our ways.” Whatever your mistake is, especially if it is repetitive and has become a pattern in your life, the only way to avoid repeating it is to do things differently from this point forward. If you want to lose weight then you need to employ new patterns of living which help you to not overeat. If you want to quit smoking then you need to stop buying cigarettes. If you’ve been divorced four times but would like your fifth marriage to be successful, then you need to figure out what mistakes were made in the first four marriages and make sure you don’t repeat them in the fifth.
The point is that if we want the future to be different from the past then we have to change the way we do things. To avoid repeating our mistakes we must change our ways.
God Bless,
Pastor Jim
Oak Hill Baptist Church 