Marcus Mecum - Starve Your Mistakes, Feed Your Miracles

Let’s look at verse one. I want to talk to you about starving your mistakes and feeding your miracles. Now the Lord was gracious to Sarah as He had said. And the Lord said to Sarah what He had promised. And Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age at the very time God had promised him. And Abraham gave the name Isaac to the son Sarah bore him. And when his son Isaac was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him as God commanded him. And Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. And Sarah said, «God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.» And she added, «Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.»

A few more verses and then we’ll talk about it. The child grew and was weaned. And on the day Isaac was weaned, Abraham held a great feast. But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar, the Egyptian, had borne to Abraham was mocking her son. And she said to Abraham, «Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for the woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.» The matter distressed Abraham greatly because it concerned his son. But God said to him, «Do not be distressed about the boy and your slave woman. Regarding Ishmael, listen to what Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. I will make the son of the slave woman into a nation also because he is your offspring.»

Early the next morning, Abraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar, set them on her shoulders, and sent her off with the boy. And she went her way and wandered in the desert. We live in a world that’s filled with mistakes. Everywhere you look, there’s some type of mistake. And the bottom line is most people will also just say, «We live in a world void of miracles.» But when you focus too much on the mistakes, whether they’re personal mistakes or just the mistakes of others, you can fail to see the miracles that are all around you.

The Bible here talks about this story, and most of you have heard this story, but God had promised Abraham and Sarah that they would have a child. And many years go by, and after their efforts of trying, they fall short. So they come up with the idea that instead of Abraham and Sarah having this child that God had promised them, he would go in and sleep with his slave woman Hagar. And he does that. Nine months later, a child is born. For many years, this child grows up in the household of Abraham and Sarah. The Bible says that Sarah and Hagar become rivals, that they begin to compete with one another and be at odds with each other.

So after many years, God reminds Sarah that He had told them that she was the one who would have the baby. And she laughs at God. She begins to laugh, thinking there is no way at this age, at this stage, she could ever have a child. But as God said, after 25 years of waiting, finally Sarah gets pregnant. She gives birth to Isaac.

Some years go by and the Bible says Isaac is weaned from his mother Sarah. And finally, as far as we know, Isaac, the promised child, the miracle child, and Ishmael, the mistake, finally meet one another. At this feast they are having, at this great celebration, the miracle and the mistake are at the same table. The mistake begins to be hostile towards the miracle. The mistake begins to harass the miracle, begins to torment the miracle.

You know, it’s amazing how when you begin to try to serve God or do something for God, the mistakes or the shortcomings or the areas where you have failed are never far from your mind. They’re never far from trying to rise up and maybe humiliate you or embarrass you or speak down to you. You try to pray, and the mistakes have a way of showing up and saying, «You can’t really pray. I mean, I know what you’ve done. I know where you’ve been.» You try to worship, but this week you haven’t really been like you should be. Maybe you’ve just kind of been a little off in the last season. And the mistakes are just there saying, «Oh, you can lift your hands in church on a Sunday, but I know you’re not real about it because you didn’t worship even once all week.»

Every time you make a fresh commitment, every time you say, «God, I’m all in. I’m going to quit living for the temporary. I’m going to quit living this low-level type stuff, just what I can see and feel. I’m going to go after the high call of God,» that mistake is there to mock and haunt those times of commitment. The mistakes rob us of joy. They rob us of our peace of mind. They rob us of God’s best in our lives. Constantly there like Ishmael and Isaac, mocking and provoking the miracle in our lives.

So we understand that during this confrontation where the mistake and the miracle are coming up together, the mistake is mocking the miracle, and Sarah notices what’s going on and says, «I want you to get rid of Ishmael. I want you to get rid of Hagar, the one who gave birth to him. So, I not only want you to get rid of the mistake, I want you to get rid of everything that brought the mistake into our world. I want you to evict the one who carried it, birthed it, nourished it, and raised it. I want you to go right to the root of what brought this. I don’t want you to just get rid of the fruit. I want you to go after the root.»

So she says, «I don’t want you to just deal with the mistake. I want you to take measures to eliminate the source of the mistake.» If you go back to Genesis 12 in this story, the Bible talks about how Abraham was in Canaan. He’s in the promised land, the place where God had taken him. This is the place where he had built his altars. He has four unique altars that he had built, four places that he had met with God, four places where God had shown up in powerful ways in his life. And a famine hits Canaan. The first thing that Abraham does is says, «Well, we’ve got to leave this place where God’s been meeting with us, and we’ve got to find another way to take care of ourselves.» So he goes to Egypt, leaving the place where God had instructed them never to go back to Egypt. Isaiah 31:1 says, «Woe to those who go down to Egypt, who do not seek the Lord.»

We know that Egypt symbolizes the world or a picture of the world. It’s a picture of bondage, of living in your flesh or your past. The Bible says Abraham is in Canaan. He’s in the place where the altars were, living in the promise. But a dry season hits, and he starts saying, «You know what? I don’t know if I want to do this anymore. Maybe I’ll go back to Egypt, back to where I came from.» While he’s there, they’re still living under stress. Things aren’t going well in their lives. Abraham and Sarah start talking about how things are hard, how it was a dry season in Canaan, and how it’s not working out in Egypt either.

Maybe they could do something to take the edge off. They might think, «I know it’s probably a compromise. I know we shouldn’t be here, but maybe we can find a servant, a slave girl, who could come in and help take the weight off a little bit.» After a long day at work, you just can’t wait to get home because you need that thing that will take the edge off, you know? Because it’s just too dry over here in Canaan with my altars and you know, it’s not explicit. You just want to make things a little bit more bearable.

It’s quiet at Seven Hills on a Sunday morning. We introduce these things along the way that whether we like it or not we think they are going to serve us, but they end up enslaving us, and we end up serving them. The thing you thought would make life bearable, which you thought would make everything easier, complicates everything in your life. This could deal with some type of substance addiction, an attitude, or a wrong relationship. Misery loves company, and you keep running around connecting with people at the lowest possible common denominator. You can’t get any worse for the reason you connect with that person, and every time you’re around them, it’s just another gossip fest. It’s just another complain fest about what your husband, your wife, the church, or your boss is not doing.

Oh, it feels good at first. It just makes things easier to whine about it. The problem with retreating to the ways of the world when you’re spiritually dry is you pick things that end up being detrimental to the miracle that God has promised. It didn’t take long before Hagar and Sarah became great rivals, and Abraham realizes, «Oh my God, I’ve made a mistake.» This mistake is growing up, getting bigger. This mistake is going to turn into a teenager at some point.

Isn’t that what the Bible says? That sin at first is just conceived; it’s just in James said it just ends up in the womb. It’s manageable. But eventually, you give birth to it, and he says it ends up producing death in your life. In other words, it grows up and becomes a teenager that stabs you in the back. Abraham is now living his whole life managing the chaos of the mistake he has made. He’s living his whole life trying to deal with both the miracle and the mistake.

He’s not spending any time talking about the vision and the dream that God had given him many years ago, the dream where he’s in the tent, and God speaks to him and says, «Abraham, I want you to go outside the tent and look up at the sky and see the stars. If you’ll just start counting the stars, I’m going to talk to you about how greatly I’m going to work in your life.» And Abraham goes out there, starts counting the stars: one, two, three, four. He loses count at some point and comes back in and says, «God, it’s impossible. The stars are innumerable.» And God replies, «Exactly. That was the point. What I want to do in your life, you cannot measure. You cannot count it. It is immeasurable.»

So Abraham has left the dream. He’s many years removed from that, but he’s not thinking about the vision God gave him. He’s not talking about the stars in the sky and the nation God wants to bring from his life. Instead, he goes down to Egypt. He finds Hagar. Hagar brings Ishmael into the scene, and now you have a house of faith filled with the presence of a mistake. Finally, God says to Abraham, «Listen, I know you made a mistake. I know you were spiritually dry. I know you went to Egypt. I know you looked for a shortcut. I know you were trying to find the easy way around things. I get it. I know that life choice has now produced this mistake in your home. But Abraham, the mistake is not your legacy. That mistake doesn’t have to be final. It does not have to be what your whole life is known for. I have a miracle for you, Abraham. Sarah, I have a miracle for you. I know chaos is in the home. I know rivalry is in the home. I know you are at each other in the home. I know there’s bitterness in the home. I know there’s unforgiveness. I understand you’re mad at the shortcomings of the other person. I get that’s going on but there’s still a miracle.»

And you know what Sarah does? She starts laughing at the idea that this mistake could ever be reconciled, that the mistake can ever be overcome. In her mind, for the rest of their lives, they are old. They’ve lived a lot of years now. There’s this mistake in their lives. There’s no getting away from the mistake. Every single day, they wake up and look at it. And there, that mistake is just looking at them, laughing at them. It’s become the rival of their future.

This is what I would say to you. What if God showed up and said that one area of your life, that one choice, that one decision, that one event, that one season, that one mistake, that one fail—what if that thing no longer defined the rest of your life? But I was hurt. But I was devastated. But I’m heartbroken. But you don’t know what it’s like to live with this kind of loss or this kind of failure. You don’t know what it’s like to look in the eyes of great disappointment or betrayal or whatever. You don’t know what that’s like. But what if I said the same way that God came to Sarah and Abraham and said, «That’s not going to be your end, that one thing isn’t going to define…» What if what God wanted to do in your life would be so great that the only reaction you could have is there’s no way! There’s no way He could turn this around. There’s no way He could redeem this. There’s no way He could ever heal my heart.

There’s no way I could ever live with a sense of promise after all the mistakes or misses I’ve had. But Isaac does come along. The miracle does show up, and the Bible says the miracle starts getting the attention. Imagine it starts crying. It needs some attention. Now Ishmael, he’s not getting the attention anymore. You gotta go take care of yourself. Isaac, the miracle, starts getting the attention. He eventually grows up. His presence becomes more and more a part of their house. He begins to take up more space and require more time and attention from Abraham.

He eventually learns how to talk, say some words, and at some point he has a voice. Now the miracle can talk. The miracle can actually connect. The miracle can actually say what it needs, say what it wants. The Bible says that Ishmael would mock Isaac, that the mistake would torment the miracle, that the mistake would badger the miracle, harass the miracle. How many of us can relate to living a life where the miracle and the mistake are growing up in the same space? They just don’t seem to get along, do they? You want to grab hold of the miracle, but the mistake is over here saying, «Don’t you grab hold of that too tightly. I’m still here. Don’t you remember me? I was in your life before the miracle showed up. You sure you can count on that miracle? You can always count on me. You can always turn back to me. I’ll always be here waiting.»

The mistake realizes in the story that it’s not part of the future. The mistake starts to realize that the miracle is going to take over. The miracle is not going to sit back forever and take it. Your future has a miracle attached to it. You just have to choose to starve the mistake and feed the miracle. But many of you showed up at church today and you are starving the miracle and feeding the mistake.

Three quick thoughts and we’ll get out of here today. Number one: the mistake couldn’t stop the miracle from being born. In other words, the dream is still possible in spite of the mistake. It’s not too late. It’s not over for you. The mistake does not have to have the final say. You have a choice: which one you feed and which one you starve. I know this is basic, but I’m just telling you, after doing this for a long time, it pretty much comes down to the same things. I’m just going to choose what to feed and choose what to starve.

No matter how much faith you have, you’ll have to learn to handle your mistakes. No matter how much promise you have or how much miraculous God has done in your life, you’ll still have to learn to come to terms with your mistakes. You’ll still have to come to terms with the human side of who you are. I love the scripture in the Bible when it talks about the faces of God. It says you’ll see the face of a lion, and then it says there’s another face, the face of the bear, and then it says there’s the face of the ox, and then it says the face of a man.

Think about it. This is how we are. We love when people in our lives show us the lion, right? They can take on anything. They’re not afraid of anything. We love the face of the bear, right? Just courageous. We love the face of the ox: just strong. But don’t show me the face of the man. The man part of things is the weak part of us. The mistake could not stop the miracle from being born. All of us have things in our lives we would do anything to go back and change. But we cannot go back and change it. Are you here? It just is what it is. It’s been born. It exists. But it does not have to stop the new thing from beginning to grow and mature and develop and be fed and nurtured as well.

Number two: the mistakes and the miracles—both of them will require that you feed them. In other words, that mistake is hungry. It’s thirsty. It wants your time. It wants your energy. It wants your attention. The mistake wants as much affection from you as it can get. But eventually, you have to decide which one you are going to feed because all the resources, energy, and effort you’re giving the mistake could be given to the miracle. The time, the effort, and the focus can be given to the miracle.

Number three: you have to evict the mistake. Mistake or miracle, which one do you want to live with for the rest of your life? Sarah said to Abraham, «I’m done. We’ve been through this long enough. I want that woman and that mistake gone. I’m not living with it one day longer.» Abraham, the Bible says, was distressed. He was conflicted on the inside. The Bible literally says he’s sitting there knowing what Sarah has said because Sarah essentially said to Abraham, «Hey, you better make a choice which one you want to live with. It’s me or her. It’s Isaac or Ishmael. It’s the miracle or the mistake. It’s Egypt and bondage, or it’s Canaan and the promised land. Abraham, you choose.»

But the Bible is clear that Abraham is conflicted because in his mind he feels responsible for the mistake. He caused it. He created it. He brought it into the world. How is he supposed to just let it go? But the Bible says Abraham takes Hagar and Ishmael, gives them, and leads them away. You see, Abraham really believed that he had to live with that mistake. He believed that his life would always be feeding and nurturing that mistake, which is what guilt is. Guilt to the believer is the feeling of, «I understand that God forgives me, but I’m not really ready to let it go.»

It’s just been with us so long. That guilt has been with you so long. You think that because you were part of creating it, you have to live with it for the rest of your life. But God told Abraham, «I know you feel responsible, and you’re right, you did this. You were there. I saw every step of it. I know exactly what brought this into your world. But Abraham, it’s not your responsibility.» And God tells Abraham, «Will you give it to me? Will you give me Ishmael? Will you give me Hagar? Will you give me the mistake? Will you give me your failure? Will you trust that I can care for it? I can deal with it. I can handle it way better than you can, Abraham.»

The very mistake you feel like you’ll live with your whole life, that you’ll never escape, that you’ll never get over, that you’ll never heal from—there come times where God will say, «Will you give it to me? Will you give it to me?»

So what’s your mistake today? What’s your miss? Will you quit feeding it? Can you hear God saying to Abraham, «Abraham, you got to let it go. You got to give it up.»

Let me ask you this real quick: does anybody else in here struggle with guilt? Or is it just me? Does anyone here struggle with it? My God, you do. After all that Jesus did for you, you still struggle with guilt. I do too. Sometimes I feel guilty for things I didn’t even know I should feel guilty for. Sometimes I think I’m doing the right thing, but then I find out from somebody that it was the wrong thing, and now I feel bad for even doing the right thing because it made somebody feel bad.

It’s like you don’t know what to do sometimes because guilt is just a part of it. We feel guilty. But today, we’re going to starve the mistake and we’re going to feed the miracle. That’s what we’re going to do today. We’re going to feed that miracle. But every eye closed, every head bowed, before we do that, let me ask you a question. At all our locations, just if the Holy Spirit during this message was speaking to you about some mistakes that you’ve made, maybe even sin in your life that you were going through during a dry time. It wasn’t like you were rebellious. It’s not like you’re an evil or bad person. Sometimes we think, «Oh, sin, that means I don’t love the Lord.»

But Abraham, the father of our faith, was just in a famine in his life, and he began to think creatively about how to get through it. Has anybody in here ever done that? Has anyone ever let something in your life that you knew was a compromise? You know it was not His will, but you were just trying to survive, just trying to get through things.

I felt like the Lord really dealt with me on my way here to say, «Hey, don’t just talk about the miracle. Ask people, are you letting that mistake live in your life? Are you feeding that mistake?» If so, God’s instructions to Abraham and Sarah were very clear: stop feeding the mistake. Stop feeding the wrong relationship. Stop feeding that bad attitude. Stop feeding the unforgiveness.

You say, «Well, how do I stop feeding it?» You start feeding the miracle. You just make a decision. «I’m going to evict the mistake. I’m not going to feel bad for it. It happened, it’s done. I’m going to give it to Him and I’m going to start feeding the miracle. I’m going to start spending time with the miracle.» That’s what worship is. Worship is spending time with the miracle. That’s what opening the scriptures is all about. You open up the word and you feed the miracle. That’s what godly relationships are all about. You start feeding the miracle.

Can we just lift our hands in His presence real quick? At all of our locations, let’s just stay sitting in His presence. Can we take just a moment and do business with God right where you’re at? No hype, no need to move around, no need to make any statements. Just in His presence. Can we worship? Every moment waiting, every promise broken, He was working. So just right where you’re at, take just a moment and say, «God, I’m going to evict the mistake today. I’m going to give it to You. I’m going to give you the guilt.»

You say, «How do I know I’m not going to go home to the mistake?» You never know that part of it. But the part you do know that you are in control of is just to feed the miracle. Feed the miracle. Feed the forgiveness. Feed the new beginning. Feed the grace. Come on, feed the courage. Starve the fear. Feed that faith in Jesus' name.

Hey, can you guys-is it okay? I love the song; it’s perfect. But can you not bang it all out? Let’s just stay kind of chill. Is that okay? Come on, let’s just sing it. Every drop of oil. That song is so well written. Come on, can we sing it together at all our locations? Every voice, as you sing that statement worth it. Nothing ever wasted. Every moment. Thank You, Jesus. He was surely working. Do you believe that? Every drop of-

Come on, can we stand up on our feet? And as you sing this, guilt is lifting. Would you just begin to say, «God, I’m going to give you the guilt. I’m giving You the shame. I’m giving You the regret. I’m giving it to You today.» Come on, let’s fix our attention on the promise. Peace is showing up. I believe that the peace of God can rule and reign in your heart. But you got to feed the miracle. You got to learn to feed the miracle in moments like this because the mistake is waiting. The lie of the enemy is waiting.

Now, just begin to declare the truth of God over your life. And that is He’s the one that decides. He’s the one that gave you the promise. And He’s the one whose hand, whose mouth promised it, and His hand will fulfill it. Praise the name of Jesus. Let’s all put our hands on our hearts and say this with me:

«Jesus, thank You for the miracle that You’ve promised me. I’ve not forgotten the times that You’ve shown me some really special things that You wanted to do in my life. You wanted to do it in my family. There are some gifts that You’ve given me. There are some dreams that You’ve given me, and I’ve given up on them because just the mistakes have convinced me that it’s too late. But in the mighty name of Jesus, I’m leaving this place today with a word from You to feed the miracle and starve the mistake in Jesus' name. I’m going to give the miracle a voice. I’m going to make a big old feast, and I’m inviting the miracle to the table. I’ve let the mistake talk long enough. It’s my miracle. It’s my time to heal in Jesus' name.»