Making Things Right!

By Jesus, speaking in prophecy

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“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”1

Confession and being honest about your mistakes or failings plays an important role in the whole process of learning from your failure, receiving My forgiveness, and setting things right.

Taking responsibility for the problem is an important part of learning from your errors. As long as you’re thinking that what went wrong was someone else’s fault, how can you learn from it personally, or even see the situation accurately and gain experience thereby? Why would you even need to? It’s not your problem, right?

The glitch with that reasoning is that if you were at all involved, there is probably something you can learn from it—and that you probably need to learn from it, to prevent it happening again. I want you to benefit from the things that go wrong, but until you’re willing to accept responsibility and face your failing in the matter, you won’t benefit thereby.

When you accept your role in a blunder, apologize sincerely from the heart, and humbly receive the forgiveness that I and others extend to you,then there’s no more dodging, no more justifying, no more energy wasted on the wrong part of the problem.

When something has gone wrong, it’s important to focus on what can be learned from it, how you can grow because of it, and how I want to turn that defeat into a victory.

The opportunity to gain from your mistakes and failings is a good thing in My eyes. But the only way to get past the hard, tough, unpleasant parts of the humiliation and guilt and into the lesson-learning and profiting is through the path of true humility, honesty, confession, and forgiveness. If you can make it past those difficult aspects by being honest and accepting responsibility and facing your faults, then you will make it to the other side and I will be able to enrich your life through the experience and help you to do better next time.

It’s a three-step process: First, you have to accept the blame and recognize that what you did wasn’t right and seek forgiveness. Next, you do what you can to make things right; sometimes an apology is enough, sometimes more is required. And finally, you learn from the event. You seek Me about what I have for you in that mistake, challenging Me to show you the silver lining and turn it into a learning and growing experience.

It’s been said that those who don’t study and learn from their failures are doomed to repeat them, and there’s a lot of truth to that. If you stop the process of learning and growing as soon as you apologize, and you figure, “Okay, well, I apologized, so it’s all fine now,” then you aren’t getting all the mileage you could be from the situation, and chances are that you may have to go through the same or a similar event again before you get the point.

If you really want to be stronger for it each time you face a failure, you have to look for the lesson and find the strengthening. That’s a proactive, useful way to look at mistakes and shortcomings. Condemnation and guilt don’t help you learn. They can overwhelm your thoughts, keeping you from seeing clearly the lesson and the progress I’m hoping that you will make. Mistakes should cause you to be contrite and humble before Me and others, and you should be willing to do whatever is necessary to make amends. But don’t let yourself fall into the pit of condemnation, because that will only prevent you from learning all that you can from the situation.

A victory is when you take that failure and allow Me to break it down for you, showing you what went wrong and how you can do better next time. It’s a good exercise to meditate on the event, give it some good, quiet thought, and let Me give you My perspective about what happened.

If you seek out that final stage of the process—the actual learning and growth from the experience—then you’re truly a man or woman wiser today than you were yesterday. You have “godly sorrow which worketh repentance,”2 and I will use that kind of attitude to aid in your future growth.

Every failure or mistake is a chance to learn. Every time you mess up, picture it as an opportunity in which I’m saying to you, “I’d like to give you a chance to strengthen your character. I have wisdom and maturity and experience that I’d like to add to your life. I’d also like to bring you closer to Me and to others. Are you interested?” In the spirit, that’s truly what a failure can represent. It can be a time of tremendous growth, and if you go through the steps in humility and true repentance, then there’s no way you won’t come out on the other side having gained something of great value.

There are no shortcuts, there’s no easy way out. Sometimes it’s extremely painful, as you have to own up to something that you did that let Me down or hurt someone. Sometimes there is pain or anger involved, and you don’t always get the satisfaction or comfort of knowing that everything is okay and all right just because you’re sorry. Sometimes the effects of your failure linger on and make things hard on you or others for some time.

Often the best treasures of wisdom and finest gems of experience and growth are hidden within the most embarrassing and humiliating of experiences.

As you go through this sometimes painful process, remember that you have a secret weapon on your side, something that can help you and hold you up—and that is your knowledge of My unconditional, unchanging love for you. Even if you’ve screwed up as badly as you possibly could; even if you feel totally humbled and worthless in the sight of others, I still love you, and I always will.

I love you when everyone else is mad at you. My love for you is not contingent upon your righteousness. Of course I want you to come to Me, to make things right when you’ve done something wrong, to repent. But even before you do that, I still love you. I love you without condition. You don’t have to do anything to earn My love; you just have it.

Rely on that love during the process of atoning for a failure and learning from it. It can be a difficult process, and often your apology doesn’t make it immediately better. You sometimes have to struggle through a very humbling process, and it can really break you and make you feel low. But at those times fight to remember how much I love you regardless, and let that be your ray of hope; it will be your lifesaver. I’ll be with you all the way if you’ll let Me.

I believe in you. I have faith in you. You can come through any error or misstep or failure with wisdom, humility, and lessons learned, and be the better for it.

Published September 2011. Read by Simon Peterson.copyright@thefamilyinternational