M and M’s
(Mercy & Mistakes)

Brian Suggs

Sunday, September 12,
2004

Lamentations 3:22-23

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

How many have made a mistake?  We’ve all made mistakes.  It’s not intentional.  It is a mis-take,
a wrong action or statement, faulty knowledge, to blunder in the choice of.

Bible characters made mistakes--women and men who lived and
made mistakes.  They were humans and
walked the face of the earth just like us.
We’re all in this together.
Famous men of history have made mistakes.

We rehearse our mistakes over and over in our mind.  We look and think about how it could
have been.  We hold onto our mistakes.  We carry them around in a basket and try
to cover them up.

Then the enemy comes in, Satan—the father of lies, and
lies to us.  Then we listen to him
and believe him.  We have shame and
guilt.  They hold us back.  They stop us and keep us from doing what
the Lord wants us to do.

Let’s move forward together from our mistakes.

Mercy is very big.
Mercy is part of God’s character and His nature.  It’s a string that flows through
the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.

Some of us are allowing our mistakes to hold us back and we
can’t move forward.  We would
give anything to go back and start over.
The devil lies to us and says that our past determines our future, but
that’s a lie.

A partition has been put up in your life and you
haven’t been moving forward.
You haven’t taken job promotions, but you look at your mistakes
and it’s holding you back.

God is mercy and is compassion and has loving kindness.

A person said to his mother who was on her death bed when
she was dying of cancer.  This
person said that they should have been the one to be dying of cancer.  That person had made many mistakes
unlike his mother who had always been in church and brought her children up
right.

Loving kindness means compassion and is God’s mercy.

II Samuel 9:1-11

Mercy is kindness between friends, master and servant.  It presumes that a relationship is in
place.  The person exercising the
kindness acts as if the relationship already exists.  Even if men are unfaithful to
God’s relationship, God’s mercy and loving kindness are everlasting
anyway.

Mephibosheth is Jonathan’s son.  Mephibosheth was cripple from age 5
because his nurse dropped him.  He
is 13 when this story begins.  He
was traveling a good distance over mountains to visit David.  One person in the king’s house
remembered where Mephibosheth was located.
This story is an example of God’s mercy.  David sees himself acting on behalf of
God.  He acts in the kindness of
God.  Mephibosheth lives as a
king’s son for the rest of his life.
What happened to Mephibosheth was a mistake and was not anything that he
did himself.  David asked if there
were anyone left in Jonathan’s household.  One person remembered Mephibosheth.  King David gave Mephibosheth all of
Jonathan’s lands and servants to work the land since Mephibosheth was
crippled.  Mephibosheth response
was, “Why would you look on a dead dog such as I?”  He had forgotten that he was in the
royal line.

Brian became friends with someone and then became
nasty.  The friend began to be
controlling and domineering.  Brian
became engrossed in shame for 3-1/2 years.
He tried so many things to change things.  It affected his other friends, job,
etc.  He listened to the lies of the
devil.  He thought that he would
never be able to fulfill his destiny without being in the relationship with
this friend.  Going to England brought
healing about this relationship and over his mother’s death.  The lies of the enemy sound convincing
and true.  God has been merciful and
kind to Brian.  He is a merciful,
merciful God.  He is full of loving
kindness.  We fail and do things
that are wrong.  The Lord
doesn’t want us to be held back.
We have life because we have a purpose and a destiny.  Even though that is a part of his past,
it is not holding him back.  Sharing
this with us is a part of the healing process.  God’s mercies are new every
morning.

Later, Sis. Lucille Sutton (about
86 years old) testified that God had given her this scripture many years ago:
His mercies are NEW Every Morning.
She really liked what this CHILD (Brian) preached tonight.