Starting Over
Live Life Beyond Regrets
Proximity of Your Regrets
January 27, 2019 • Chris Edmondson • Proverbs 13:20
Have you ever met someone that later you wish you’d never met? Is there a person you wish your husband, wife, son, or daughter had never met? Sometimes people are our greatest regrets because they influence us to ignore what we know to be true, and eventually, we become just like them.
Redeem Your Regrets
January 20, 2019 • Chris Edmondson • 2 Samuel 12:24–25, 1 Kings 1:28–30, Romans 8:28, Isaiah 64:4, Psalm 51
In this session, we are talking about redeeming our regrets. Redemption is what happens when unexpected good comes out of a situation that you could only expect to result in something bad. We could call this the long view of our mistakes. God wants to take our biggest mistakes; he wants to buy them back and redeem them. We’re not just talking about getting over regret, and we’re certainly not talking about forgetting it. This idea is about God taking a regret – a mistake, an error, something you wish you could have a do-over on – and turning it into something He uses for good. If you look in the Merriam-Webster dictionary under “redeem”, the very first definition listed is “to buy back: repurchase”. God is ready to take your greatest regret and buy it back.
Release Your Regrets
January 13, 2019 • Chris Edmondson • Psalm 51, 2 Samuel 12:13, 1 John 1:9, Romans 12:18, Ephesians 4:32
When we have done something wrong or when something undeserved has happened to us, we can easily get hung up in guilt, blame, and grudge holding. The questions and emotions inside us can prevent us from moving past our regrets in a new direction. Once we recognize our regrets, it’s time to begin to release them. This is a critical step that often demands that we forgive or seek forgiveness moving us one step closer to breaking out of the Sorry Cycle. So if regret has become a useless burden around your neck, drop it. Let’s learn to let it go. Release it.
Recognize Your Regrets
January 6, 2019 • Chris Edmondson • 2 Samuel 12, Ephesians 5:8–17, Psalm 51, 1 Peter 5:6–7, 2 Samuel 11
Learning to recognize your regrets seems simple enough, doesn’t it? Maybe too simple? Yet the human mind has some reflexive responses to powerful emotions – such as regret - that can make it hard to honestly face reality. One unhealthy way of relating to your regrets is to dwell on them and play them over and over again in your mind. Another detrimental way of responding to your regrets is to hide from them. You can do this by denying that there is a problem, distracting yourself with other activities, or simply suppressing your regrets, hoping they will go away. All of these futile attempts to keep you trapped in a sorry cycle.
Loving Your Regrets
December 30, 2018 • Chris Edmondson • John 21:15–19, Luke 22:54–62
In our culture we often hear the idea of ‘have no regrets’. The problem is we all fall short sometimes— mistakes, bad choices, and hard lessons learned are part of what it means to be an imperfect human. Our regrets may entail something we wish we hadn’t done or a missed opportunity we didn’t take action on. Our regrets might even entail details that are outside our control. Going even further, by seeing and owning our mistakes for what they are, we open ourselves up to deeper levels of health, transformation, and life change.