DEAR YOUNGER ME
2 Samuel 12:13-14
Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the Lord." Nathan replied, "The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die. 14 But because by doing this you have shown utter contempt for the Lord, the son born to you will die."
When I was in high-school I was hunting near our camp. One afternoon I met a man, jerry, that was hunting a piece of public property. He was a neighbor and very nice. He asked if I was going to hunt a specific area that night, and even though I had planned on it, I told him I would leave and he could hunt there.
A year later I again encountered Jerry In the area and we began to talk. He reminded me of our last meeting and let me know that the evening when I left and let him hunt, he harvested a huge 8 point buck, the biggest buck of his life. I could have hunted there that evening as I was there first... wrong choice I guess.
We can all look back at the decisions that we made at a younger age and wish we had made them differently. We wish we could go back and warn our younger self of the dangers of bad choices... Some of these decisions made small differences in our lives while others changed the path of our future drastically. Up until his meeting with Nathan, King David hadn't faced the decisions that he had made of taking another man's wife then killing him. When Nathan called David out on his sin David was devastated.
God has set His perfect will for our lives. When we break away from this, we will change the rest of our lives. David's family paid for his bad decisions and sins for many generations.
All this said, when we turn our lives back over to God, He will bless us again. While there are consequences to sin, Jesus paid the price for that sin and we can move on.
Living proof is David. He called a married woman away from her home, slept with her then murdered her husband. David had times of major conflict and depression in his life but in the end he was called, " a man after God's own heart."
And more proof of God's forgiving nature through the life of David is Jesus Himself. Jesus comes from the line of David. He doesn't come from any of the wives that God gave David but from the line of David and Bathsheba. God took something wrong and made it right when confession took place.
There's a relatively new song called, DEAR YOUNGER ME that speaks to this
Dear younger me
If I knew then what I know now
Condemnation would've had no power
My joy my pain would've never been my worth
If I knew then what I know now
Would've not been hard to figure out
What I would've changed if I had heard
Dear younger me...
We can't go back to warn our younger selves about bad choices. But God forgives and He never holds our sins against us. There may be consequences, but when we allow God to work in and through us there is hope for a far brighter tomorrow.
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