Fix Your Mistakes

Raise your hand if you’ve never made a mistake!

If you’re raising your hand right now, I find that a little hard to believe.

Even in the game we played today, some of you made mistakes. You thought you knew where the match was, but you made a mistake.

Mistakes come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes we make mistakes that only effect us. We spill our lunch tray all over our clothes at school. We mark a wrong answer on our spelling test. We trip on the playground and skin our knee. All of those are mistakes, but they only really effect us.

But tonight, I want to talk about a different kind of mistake. This type of mistake is a mistake that really effects other people. It’s when you speak before thinking and you say something that really hurts someone else. Whenever your playing outside and you accidently knock your friend over onto the ground. When you’re in art class and you accidently spill paint all over your friends art work. Those are mistakes. But they are mistakes that really effect other people.

Those are the types of mistakes that we will be talking about in our first week of this new series called “Famous”.

Whenever famous people make mistakes, everyone knows about it! It’s in magazines, on TV, it’s all over social media. Typically they get interviewed by reporters and asked really tough questions.

Well today, we are going to be talking about someone in the Bible who made a huge mistake against someone else, but luckily they had someone who asked them a really difficult questions that got them back on track.

This is story is found in 2 Samuel 11.

The story begins with a man named David who was king over all of Israel. One night, David was walking around on the roof of his palace, surveying the land that was in his kingdom, when suddenly his eyes became locked on someone in the distance.

There was a woman who was on the roof of her house, her name was Bathsheba and David thought she was very beautiful. He wanted her to be his wife. However, there was a problem: Bathsheba was married to a man named Uriah.

David thought long and hard about this issue until he came up with a devious plan: He was going to kill Uriah.

Here was how he was going too do it…As king, David was in control over all of Israel’s armies. At that time, they were in a war with a nation called the Ammonites. David told his commanders:

“Put Uriah right in the front of the fighting where the battle is the heaviest. The most dangerous part of the battlefield! And then, pull back your entire army, except Uriah. Leave him out there all by himself.”

And David’s evil plan worked. It went off without a hitch. Uriah died on the battle field and David married Bathsheba. They had a son named Solomon.

And everyone lived happily ever after.

How’d you like that story?

That’s not how it ended though.

One day, a prophet came to him, a man named Nathan.

Nathan knew the evil that David had done. He knew he’d made a big mistake.

So he told him a story:

“Two men lived in the same town. One was rich. The other was poor. 2The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle. 3But all the poor man had was one little female lamb. He had bought it. He raised it. It grew up with him and his children. It shared his food. It drank from his cup. It even slept in his arms. It was just like a daughter to him.

4“One day a traveler came to the rich man. The rich man wanted to prepare a meal for him. But he didn’t want to kill one of his own sheep or cattle. Instead, he took the little female lamb that belonged to the poor man. Then he cooked it for the traveler who had come to him.”

How do you feel about that story?

And the Bible says that David burned with anger!

New International Reader’s Version Chapter 12

The man who did that is worthy of death. And that’s just as sure as the LORD is alive. 6The man must pay back four times as much as that lamb was worth. How could he do such a thing? And he wasn’t even sorry he had done it.”

7Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man!

Nathan told David that he was just as bad as the rich man for killing Uriah! He’d made a huge mistake! And now it was time for David to do something to fix it.

2 Samuel 12:13 NIrV

13 Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Nathan replied, “The Lord has taken away your sin. You aren’t going to die.

What David show us is that when we make mistakes, we have to do something to fix them. And it starts with asking for forgiveness from God.

When we make mistakes, we can make things right