If you've been around for any length of time, You know that Sandra and I have three kids. They're grown, they're married, and they have kids of their own. And as some of you can relate to, it just seemed to have happened so fast. Now, if you have little kids, it's happening so slow, okay? But it's, you know, Sandra says this all the time, the days are short, the days long, the years are short right? I get that right, yeah the days are long but the years short. So we're at this season where it's like, you know what happened? You know, we look at the pictures of our kids.
So now, when I see families like with strollers and you know they're walking along with their toddlers or they're even their three and four year olds, you know and the sons with the dad, anywhere I am, I've done this to some of you here in the building and it's not so weird in the building, but I've developed really an annoying habit, I think. Nobody's told me it's annoying yet, but I think it's an annoying habit because wherever I am, I'm, I have this habit, and I know it's kind of an old guy thing. I walk up to, I mean, I'm not creepy, but I'm like, I look at them and I say, I just say this, I just look at him and say, you have so much to look forward to, because I'm looking at, you know, I remember, you have so much look forward too. And then I say. Don't miss a thing, because it goes so fast. So I say, and you have so much to look forward to, don't miss the thing, and then I follow them around, you know, at a distance. Singing Don't Blink and You're Gonna Miss This and I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing. That's like an Aerosmith song that has nothing to do with that, but I just like that song and it has the word miss in it. And then, you know, then they call security and they escort me out of the store and they wave bye bye. Okay.
But the point is, they do have so much to look forward to, but here's the point of these next few weeks. And you may, and this will be some easy for some of you to believe others. It's like, I don't think so. You have so must look forward too. And as strange as it may sound, because maybe we don't know each other, but I don't want you to miss it. I don't want you specifically, I don't want you to miss out. I don’t want you miss out on all the good life has for you. I don 't want to you miss out on all of the good potential you have in you. I don't you miss out because you got distracted, because you discouraged, or because you misled.
And honestly, that burden is really what kept me in high school ministry and middle school ministry for over 15 years. I loved talking to high school students and middle-school students and then college students. I would go to camps and stay at these creepy spring break hotels. And after a couple summers of that, Sandra said. I think that's your thing. You go stay in the creepy spring break hotel that smells, anyway, but it was worth it because to get to stand out in front of hundreds and sometimes thousands of high school kids and say to them what I feel when I see a middle school or a high school student or even a college student. I just want to walk up to everybody. I know it gets even creepier and say, look, you have your whole life ahead of you. You have what I don't have and you have what your parents don't. You have the opportunity to get it right. So don't miss that. Don't miss out on that, and it still drives me.
And even though most of us are grownups, I mean, life is challenging, right? In fact, every season of life is challenge, and every season has its own challenges. And again, we don't know each other, but I know this about you. You wanna get it right. You don't wanna miss it, or you don't want to miss out. So again, as you just saw, today we're beginning at this brand new four-part series, and I titled it Too Good to Miss. And the subtitle is, Three Things You Can't Afford to Miss, Three Things you Can't afford to Miss and How to Ensure You Won't. That's the subtitled, Three things you can't afford to miss and how to ensure you won't. And today in part one, I wanna begin with the second part of the subtitling, this part, How to ensure You won't.
So. Fortunately, just to kind of jump in, fortunately, most of our misses, most of the things we miss in life, most of them are inconsequential. I mean, there's just things you miss and it's like, oh well, whatever. I mean somebody gave you a stock tip and you didn't follow through. It's like ah, oh, well, maybe next time. Or maybe there was a job opportunity that came along and you did follow through or you didn't finish the application and ah, you know, oh wow. Or you know you should have asked her out and you don't, that's oh well. Maybe there's somebody else. You should have said yes when he asked you out. And it's like, ugh. Miss that opportunity, but there's gonna be other opportunities, right? Or if you're a parent and you miss one of your kids' games, there's a thousand more games, okay? You didn't miss a game and there's 1,000 recitals and they're all kind of the same. Anyway, so I mean, there's some misses in life that are just inconsequential or somebody offered you playoff tickets and you didn't pick them up or whatever. And so for a lot of things in life, they're inconsequential, it's kinda like maybe next time, you know, maybe next because they will probably be a next time. But some misses are so consequential that you just get one chance. You just, you get one change that you get one opportunity to, one opportunity to you get that one season in life. And if you miss one of those or you miss out on one of those. I mean, that's rough. That's a regret.
And we have all, we've all lived long enough. We have seen that play out, right? You've seen that pay out maybe in the life of your parents or one of your parents. You've seen it play out in the live of maybe a brother or a sister or a close friend. Maybe, unfortunately, you're watching that play out in a life of one of you kids. And if they, I mean, this was avoidable. They didn't have to miss, but now the season has gone by. The chapter's gone by, it's a swing and a miss, and there's no going back.
This series, I wanna ensure that none of us allow time to steal any more of those good opportunities and that we don't continue to miss out. The batter swings and the summer flies, right? And all of us. All of us have some missed opportunity regrets. Regrets that are connected to the fact that we missed something and we can't go back and recapture it. And here's the other thing we all have in common. And this is kind of crazy. In fact, I think it points to the fact that we're all a little bit crazy. You can tell me in a minute. But we have all, because we've lived long enough, we all had those moments of clarity, right? Because we missed out on something and we decide, you know what? I'll never do that again. I'll, I'll ever let that happen to me again. I'll Never repeat that behavior that caused me to miss out on something so important. I'm never gonna let that happened again.
And by the way, if you're not a religious person or you're from a different faith tradition or you are certainly not a Christian or maybe you used to be a Christian, I mean, this is common to all of us, right? This is kind of an all-skate. It's the human experience. But the fascinating and wonderful thing is this, that in the scriptures, God addresses all of this directly. This is why at our church we say this all the time, the following Jesus. Following Jesus, not believing in Jesus, not just, but following the teaching of Jesus will make your life better and it will make you ultimately better at life.
So the question is, how do we keep from missing out or how do you keep from out again? So to ensure you limit your misses for the rest of our few minutes together, I wanna give you the three primary reasons people miss out on the most important things. We miss out, and I'm gonna give them to you up front in case you leave early or you lose electricity at home. So here's all three, and by the way, if you're a parent, this is dinnertime conversation right here, okay? We miss when we're deceived, when we are distracted, and when we were disobedient. We miss on the big things, the important things when we we're deceive, when we distracted, and when were disobedience.
So I just wanna talk about these three things real quick. What do I mean by deceived? Deceived simply means that we're misled. Somebody, you think about where you missed out on life, it was because you were misled, you either were misled by a group of people or by a person, but in most cases, you were part of the problem, you ultimately were responsible for misleading or deceiving yourself or allowing yourself to be deceived because there was something that you wanted that you were sure was gonna make you happy.
The prophet Jeremiah, I won't tell you the whole story, but it's kind of fascinating. He's a prophet and he's trying to get the king of Israel to do something kind of common sense that would be good for the whole nation. And the king won't listen. In fact, the king ends up putting him in a cistern later on, like an empty well, because he just wanted him to shut up. And Jeremiah can't understand, wait a minute, what I'm asking you to do makes so much sense. What is wrong with you? And then Jeremiah kind of steps back and says, what is wrong people in general? And then he makes this amazing comment. He says this, he says the heart. Is deceitful above all things. That's like all. The heart is deceiving above all thing and he's thinking about the king. I mean, the king has deceived himself into making a terrible decision. Then he realizes, everybody does this. The heart of deceit above all of things.
This is not encouraging, beyond cure. Like as you can't even fix it. Like he says that your heart and my heart is permanently broken. What he's getting at is I will always have the potential to talk myself into bad ideas. And you will always have the potential. You'll always be your worst enemy in the sense that nobody can convince you better than you. The heart is a sea full above all things that beyond curious, then he has asked this question. Who can make sense out of that? I mean, how can that, why is it? Why is it we become our own worst enemy? And the implication is nobody can understand it. And all of us understand that because all of have made really bad decisions at some point and then when we, in the aftermath of the decision and we're facing the consequences of the decisions, do you know what we think? We think, what was I thinking? What was I doing? What made me think that was a good idea or that was gonna have a good outcome? I don't understand in Jeremiah's life. Exactly, your heart is incurable. You are always gonna be potentially your worst enemy. Pay attention. How could I have been so, our word, deceived? The easiest person for you to deceive is the person in the mirror.
You'll get my experience, 40 plus years of doing this. I've talked to people individually, families, couples, who have faced every kind of regret you can imagine and every version of every kind of regret, you can image. And in most cases, in most case is when I press and sometimes it feels insensitive when I pressed and pressed, they admit, yeah, I kinda knew. Yeah, my mama told me. You know, my friends got together and told me, and you know, in my heart of hearts, you know I, yeah, there were signs, there were red flags waving. I ignored some good advice. I ignored all the evidence to the contrary of what I wanted to do. I kind of talked myself into this. I created my own regret. Because our hearts are so deceitful.
So real quick, before we move on, I just wanna get personal for a minute because look up here if you're at home and doing something else, just this part, look up there. Look, what about you? Are you on the verge, are you in the middle of making a decision? Are you in on the verge of making decision? And if you are honest, and the hardest part about all of this is being honest with ourselves because our heart is so deceivable. If you're honest, are you working hard to convince yourself that what you want to do is what you ought to do, and that it will be good for you. Are you in the middle of making a decision and mentally you're building a case to convince yourself that what you just wanna do is what your ought to, there's like a moral imperative, and that ultimately it's good for your. If this is the case, would you just take some advice from me and stop? Because you never have to sell yourself on a good. Good things sell themselves. And when you start selling yourself on an idea, you have just put a regret in the oven and it's gonna come out burnt and it gonna come and when it comes out, you're gonna wish you could go back and do something different. You are planning your own miss. You're planning your miss out.
So I'm gonna give you a verse, okay? So if that's your case, you're kind of in that, you know, you're deceiving yourself. The apostle Paul gives you, here's a verse. You can memorize it on the spot, okay, your instant memory. Here's what he says, pretty on point. Do not be deceived. That's it, that's your verse for the day. Stop being deceived. You need to write this down and put it on your mirror. Do not be deceived because you have the potential to deceive yourself and one of the primary causes for missing out on the things you can't afford to miss out on and the things you don't wanna miss out or you have been deceived, you've been deceived by somebody else. The little Greek term is planio, which means mislead, do not be misled. Or to tease it out even further, don't trick yourself and don't allow yourself to be tricked into doing something that ultimately undermines your own. Don't be misled because misled leads to miss out. Second reason, second reason we miss out on the things that we don't wanna miss out, and shouldn't miss out is that we get distracted.
This is why, and the younger you are, please, please, listen to this old guy. I'm just telling you, I'm telling you. The younger you the more important this is. This is so important for you to decide what you value most. By value most, in other words, you've gotta decide what is most important to you. And then you've got to commit to ultimate over immediate. Immediate usually results in a swing and a miss. Ultimate. Is the ultimate happiness. Ultimate is how you avoid regret. Ultimate is you have set a north star for your life and you've decided that's what's most important and that's why I'm steering my life towards. This is why you need a vision for your live. You need a mental picture of what could be and should be for you in the future. And the earlier you start, it's never too late to start. It's never to late to to start, but the earlier start, the better. What could be and should for you. What could and should you relationally. Do you wanna copy what your parents did or do you want a different trajectory for your life? What could be and should be for you financially? What could and should for you professionally? What could, and should, be for your spiritually?
So here's the point. The reason you can't afford to get distracted by the shiny things and the shiny people to the left and to the right is at the end of the day, you miss out. This is why our family turned this little verse from the book of Proverbs. Into a prayer, hopefully you've heard us talk about this before, but this became a prayer for our family when our kids were very, very young. We would make this a prayer. The writer of Proverbs says this, the prudent see danger, prudent person's a wise person that understands life is connected today is connected to tomorrow. The prudent's see danger and they do something. The prudent's see dangerous and they take refuge, but the simple, the unwise, the fool just keeps on going. And they miss out. The prudent, look up here, the prudent recognize a distraction for what it is. That's a distraction. He's a distraction, she's a destruction. I know what I want for my life and I'm not going to miss it. And regardless of how old you are and what season of life you're in, you can decide that today and you can decided I'm missing it anymore. I'm going to be distracted.
This is why we began to pray early with our kids. Heavenly Father, give us the wisdom to know what's right and the courage to do what's, right even when it's hard. This is important. We didn't want our kids to get distracted by easy and we did not want them to be intimidated by or surprised by hard. And I don't wanna be distracted by it easy and I don't wanna be intimidated hard. You will not miss out on a good thing if you choose to do the hard things.
But if you allow yourself to be distracted from what you really, really want and you really really value, you will step onto a path that will ultimately take you exactly where you don't intend. Let's go, and I don't want that for you, life's too short.
So real quick, real quick kind of leaning in on that a little bit. The path that you're currently on in your life, or to say it a different way, the direction you're current living your life. You know your decisions are like the steering wheel of your life? The direction you are steering your life based on the decisions you're making, the direction your living in. Did you choose it? Did you choose it because you had some master plan, some vision for your life and the direction you're on, it is based on what you value the most. Did you choose it or does it feel more like you woke up in it? And every day you wake up in a life that's moving in a direction, you don't remember ever choosing this wasn't, this wasn't your vision, this wasn’t your dream, but it's the direction you’re moving. Does it feel like you just woke up in it or that maybe somebody chose it for you or like life chose it you? So what do you want? What do you really want? Don't miss it. Don't get distracted.
Last one. This will be you. Now this is what you would expect the preacher to say, okay, but just bear with me. And again, if you're from a different faith tradition, please listen. If you don't even believe in God, please listen, if you are a Christian, this is required, okay? When I talk about being disobedient as a means to missing out on life, I'm talking about being disobeyed to God. And if you're a Christian, specifically, it's about being obedient to Jesus, your King, who has said, follow me. And he explained to us in the Sermon on the Mountain and other teachings, he explained it was exactly what it looks like to follow him. And when you are disobedient to your King who loves you and when you're disobedient to God who created you and knows what's best for you. You're gonna miss out. Every parent who has parented a middle schooler or a high schooler understands this. How many times did you just think, as you thought about your son or your daughter, if they would just listen to me. Mama knows best, daddy knows best. Mom and daddy didn't always do best, but mommy and daddy know best. How do we get them to understand how important this is? How do get them understand that A always leads to B? How do they get them to understand they're undermining their own future? It was so clear to you as a parent. It is so clear to your Father in heaven.
Do you know why God is anti-sin? Because God is for you. And every sin comes prepackaged with a miss, a regret, a consequence. Well, one of the things that I come back to over and over because I want you to understand this, I wish the church in general could understand this. I get criticized constantly on social media for this and I don't care. Jesus was so clear because he illustrated this over and over and when Jesus came, what he made perfectly clear throughout all the gospels is this, if it's not good for you, it's a sin. If it's good for him, it a sin, if it not good her, it is a sin if it is not good, in other words, sin is anything that hurts another person or hurts you. And your heavenly father who loves you doesn't want anything to hurt you. And so like the perfect heavenly father that he is and Jesus the king that he says, come away from that. This is a harsh, what I'm about to put up here, but somebody needs to hear sin, because the reason it's harsh is because some of you have experienced this. Sin has the potential to put your best life out of reach. Send us the potential to make your best life irretrievable, that there's nothing you can do. The river, you just can't step back into the river. And all of us know that at some level, and it's harsh. But if it's a warning to somebody today to come back to the love of your father.
Adrian Rogers, a pastor years ago, he was a pastor in Memphis, incredible voice. Adrian Rogers had the preacher voice every preacher wanted, none of us got but him. And he made this statement I'm going to put on the screen. And other people have taken credit for it, but Adrian said it, listen to this. We could just close with this, but we're not, okay. But it's so good. Look at this. Sin will take you farther than you wanna go. It'll keep you longer than you want to stay. And it will cost you more than you'll wanna pay. Boom. Drop the mic, you know, so it just dangles. You can't drop the mic anymore. Anyway, look up here. Sin will take you farther than you want to go. Okay, no, no. I never, I never. You've said this. Some of you are starting to feel this. I never thought it would. I never though we would. I didn't think it would, it'll keep you longer. No, I was in my 20s. I was just gonna mess around in my twenties. Then went on my 30th birthday. I was gonna put all that behind and become a grownup. And now I'm 37 and I'm still acting like I'm 18. And it kept you longer And it will always cost you more than you wanna pay because on the front side, it doesn't seem like it's gonna cost you anything. And meanwhile, the river, it keeps running and the clock keeps ticking.
So to apply this one real quick, I'm gonna go old school, okay? Are you living in sin? And if you're not a religious person, let me say it in a different way. Are you doing things and participating in things and you know they're not good and you they're good for you and you're wasting your time and you are wasting your life? Are you living in sin? That's what Jesus would say is living in sins, living in something that's not good for your. Not only do you know it, you excuse it and your excuses are terrible. They are terrible. If you were to say them out loud, you would be like, they're terrible. Are you living in sin and you're excusing it? And isn't it true? Okay, isn't true? You chose your sin because you were afraid you were gonna miss out on something. And your sin has caused you to miss out. And now your time is running out.
So your savior who loves you, what do you think Jesus is gonna say? ROCK ON! No, your Savior who loves you, here's what he says. Here's your verse for the day, a little bit longer. Jesus just ran off a group of religious hypocrites and now it's just him and one woman. And he says to her, because he loves her, and he says you because he love you, go now. And leave your life of sin and miss out no longer.
Now, I've been doing this a long time, so I know if I were sitting across the coffee table from you or having coffee and I said, leave your lives of sin, I know exactly what you would say to me. You would say, Andy, it's complicated. And I would say I know it's complicate. And here's how I know. Please don't miss this. The younger you are and the quicker you get this, the better your life is gonna be. Sin always makes life more complicated, always. So leave it, just leave it. I don't want you to miss it. You don't wanna miss it, Your heavenly father doesn't want you to miss it.
So, would you be willing, this is hard, to acknowledge the deception? Would you be willin' to say, I've deceived myself, I've allowed myself to be deceived, I've allow myself to misled, that's why I'm missin' out. And would you willing to throw off the distractions? That might mean ending some relationships. That might you gotta get a different job. That might, you might have to move, you may need to get a new roommate. Whatever it means, how do you get rid of the distractions so you can get back to what you want your life to be? And would you be willing to leave your sin behind? Because when you leave your send behind, you have set yourself up to no longer miss out on the life that God has for. So you have so much, no matter how old you are or what season of life you're in, you still have so many to look forward to.
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