FFTF Ep 9 - Rising After Failure - From Regret to Redemption
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[00:00:00] Welcome to From Failure to Fulfillment, where failure isn't the end. It's an acronym for Growth, friend, analyze, investigate, learn, understand, regroup, and Execute. I'm your host, Dr. Andrew Blackwood, also known as Coach Drew, and together we'll discover how God transforms our failures into steps toward Christ-like fulfillment.
If you've ever struggled with intense anxiety, there's a strong chance you've also faced the lows of depression. Those moments often come with a heavy companion called regret. Today I wanna talk about failure, but not just the mistakes we make. The regret that keeps us from standing up again after we fall.
In my book, the Art of a Genuine Apology, I talk about the difference between regret and remorse. It's an important distinction [00:01:00] because how we see our failure determines whether we stay stuck in shame or grow through grace. There is a difference between regret and remorse when we fail, especially when our actions affect others.
It's natural to feel guilt. Guilt isn't always a bad thing. It tells us we've crossed a line that we care about the impact We've had remorse. Although it's painful can be a good thing. It ties into empathy and what scripture calls godly sorrow, the kind of sorrow that leads to repentance and healing, but regret, that's a different beast altogether.
Regret isn't always about what we did to others. It's often about what we wish we'd done differently for ourselves. It's the if only voice that plays on repeat in our minds over and over, and over. Paul writes in second Corinthians seven verse 10. [00:02:00] Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.
Worldly sorrow, what we'd call regret, doesn't move us closer to God. It just traps us in what might have been. Now I wanna talk about the trap of the shoulds. It's a thought pattern that I talk about in my online course called Conquering the Big Five. It's interestingly one of regret's, favorite tools, the shoulds I should have known better.
I should have done something differently. I should be further along by now. These shoulds weigh us down with judgment and unrealistic expectations. A few years ago, I was hanging out with some youth at church, and one of them challenged me to a race. Now, I used to be a pretty good athlete back in the day, so of course I wasn't about to let this youngster think he could beat me.[00:03:00]
Well, my body didn't get that memo a few paces into the sprint. I tore one of the major muscles in my quad. I thought it was just a pull, so I tried to walk it off. I was older, but clearly not wiser. Months later, when I finally got it checked out, the doctor said it was too late for a full repair. To this day, I live with that loss of mobility, all because I didn't understand the seriousness of the injury.
Isn't that true In life, we often keep running after failure, pretending we're fine until something reminds us. We're not quite healed yet. There is this illusion of retrospect that I think is really important to, to talk about as it relates to regret. I was having a [00:04:00] conversation with a young man recently who said, I keep thinking about what I could have done, would've done and should have done differently.
And I smiled when I said to him, you know, people say hindsight is 2020. I think hindsight is actually 40. 40 because when we look back with regret, we act as if we know for sure that things would've turned out better if we'd chosen differently, but the truth is we don't know that we can't predict how the future would've unfolded.
Reflecting on the past is useful when it helps us learn, but regret keeps us fixated and it rewinds the past instead of rewriting the future. Several years ago, my family was conned out of a good chunk of money. And looking back, there were red flags we should have seen, but there were also details, details and deceptions we never encountered before.
Let me [00:05:00] tell you, there is an artistry that con artists have honed. You can't know what you don't know. And when we don't take the time to understand what led to our past decisions. We end up burying ourselves in guilt and shame instead of finding the lesson God's trying to teach us. That reminds me of Paul's story.
Before he was Paul, he was Saul. A man convinced he was serving God, but in reality he was persecuting the very people God loved. In Acts chapter nine, Saul is on his way to Damascus to arrest followers of Jesus when suddenly a bright light from heaven flashes around him. He falls to the ground and hears a voice, say, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?
In that moment, everything Saul thought he knew collapsed. Talk about regret. The very people he had been hunting were the ones [00:06:00] walking in truth. The Jesus he rejected was actually the son of God. But notice what Jesus didn't say. He didn't say, Saul, how could you or Saul? You should have known better.
Instead, he said, get up. Go into the city and you'll be told what you must do. God didn't cancel Saul. He redirected him. That same man blinded by pride and zeal became Paul the Apostle, who wrote most of the New Testament and carried the message of grace to the nations. God took the very area of Saul's failure and used it as the foundation for his purpose as opposed to being stuck in the past.
We wanna live in the present with God. Regret wants to chain us to the past, but God meets us in the present when he says in Isaiah one verse 18, [00:07:00] come now and let us reason together. Your sins be as scarlet. They shall be as white as snow. He's not scolding us. He's inviting us into a conversation of understanding, healing, and grace.
God is less interested in punishing our wrong choices and more concerned with teaching us why we made them. He wants to help us understand the deeper motivations, the blind spots, the fears or the wounds that led us there. Only when we understand that, can we grow? So while regret darkens the past and clouds the future, grace opens our eyes to the beauty of what God is doing right now.
Failure doesn't disqualify you. In fact, it might be the classroom where God does his best teaching. Regret will [00:08:00] keep saying, you should have known better, but God says, come let us reason together. You may have fallen hard, but you haven't fallen beyond God's reach just like Saul became. Paul, your story isn't over.
It's being rewritten by grace. So if you're still carrying regret. Bring it to the one who can redeem it. Let him show you not just what went wrong, but what he's making right. Let's pray together. Lord, help us to see our failures through your eyes. Teach us to exchange regret for wisdom and shame. For grace, we thank you that even when we fall, you never stop rewriting our redemption story.
You are good to us, Lord. Amen. I want to thank you for spending this time with me and I [00:09:00] want to remind you. God never wastes a failure. He transforms it. Failure is not final with God. It's just the next step on your journey to fulfillment. Thanks for listening to From Failure to Fulfillment. If this episode encouraged you, share it with a friend and don't forget to like, follow, or subscribe so you won't miss the next one.
Until then, remember, with God, failure is never final.
