Did I Do Something Wrong?

You're lying in bed, you can't sleep, it's late, the house is quiet, and your mind is doing that thing again. The thing it does when nothing in your life is necessarily wrong, but something just doesn't quite feel right. So you're scanning, you're going back through old chapters of your life, looking for the thing, trying to put your finger on it, the mistake that you made, maybe the choice that you made, the version of you from before you knew better, the relationship that wasn't supposed to happen, or the years you spent running from God, the thing you did, or the thing you didn't do, or the thing you said you'd never do again, and then you did it anyway. So you're not exactly praying. It's more like you're investigating, trying to find the reason. You're trying to figure out why your prayer hasn't been answered yet, why the door hasn't opened, why the breakthrough still hasn't come. And quietly, somewhere underneath all that searching, a question starts to form. The kind of question you'd hesitate to say out loud, even to the people you love. Did I do something wrong? Hi, I'm Melissa, and this is my question for you. We're still in season three, walking through the question behind the question. It's a series where we're going through real life questions and just getting honest about the questions we actually carry, not just the ones we know how to talk about in Bible study. And if I'm being honest with you, I've caught myself in that same late night place more than once, wondering if something from before I knew God might be the reason something hasn't shifted yet. Quietly going through my past, looking for the thing that must be holding me back. So I'm not standing above this question today. I'm actually sitting in it with you. We say, did I do something wrong? But my question for you, the question underneath that question is this. Am I being punished by God for who I used to be? That's the one a lot of us are actually asking. We just don't have the words for it. So we ask the smaller version because the bigger one feels way too dangerous to actually say. But today, I want us to say it. There's a hidden equation a lot of us have absorbed somewhere along the way. If life is hard right now, I must have done something to cause it. If a prayer hasn't been answered, there must be a reason God is holding back. Or if something good hasn't come, maybe I haven't been good enough yet to earn it. That's the math. And it's running in the background of a lot of our spiritual lives, even when we don't realize it. It sounds spiritual enough when we're thinking it. It sounds humble, and it even sounds like taking responsibility. But underneath, it isn't really humility. It's a quiet conviction that God is keeping a tally and that the tally is the reason your life looks the way it looks. Some of us have picked that up from how we were raised. Some of us may have picked it up from a sermon we heard somewhere along the way in church. Maybe even some of us picked it up from the culture that's around us, from society and from people that pour into our lives. That whole what goes around comes around logic that sounds biblical, but it isn't really. And some of us just picked it up from being human because when life hurts, our minds go searching for a reason. And the easiest reason to land on is ourselves. You know, it almost it's almost easier to believe I caused this than it is to sit with the discomfort of I don't know why this is happening. At least if I caused it, I can fix it. At least if I caused it, there's a reason. And sometimes we think, if I caused it, the universe still makes sense. We can still explain away things if we place all the blame on ourselves. But what if the equation itself is wrong? What if you've been doing math on a problem God never set up? That's the question I want us to follow today. And I want to take you to a moment in Scripture where Jesus is asked this exact question and where he does something that nobody saw coming. Stay with me here, because what Jesus does in this moment changes how I read suffering, my own and other people's completely. In the Gospel of John chapter nine, Jesus is walking with his disciples, and they pass a man who has been blind since birth. And the disciples ask Jesus a question that probably sounded reasonable to them. In John 9, verse 2, they say, Rabbi, who sinned this man or his parents that he was born blind? Read that for what it actually is. The disciples are not asking if somebody sinned. They're already certain somebody did. The only thing they're trying to figure out is who? Was it the man? Was it his parents? Because in their framework, suffering that severe had to come from somewhere. There had to be a cause, and the cause had to be moral. And I want you to notice, really notice what Jesus does next. He doesn't pick between the options that they ask him. He doesn't say, actually, it was his parents. And he doesn't say, actually, it was the man. He throws the whole question out. In the next verse, John chapter 9, verse 3, Jesus says, Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. Neither, it was neither one of them. That word, neither, is doing a lot of work in this verse, because Jesus isn't just answering the disciples' question. He's correcting the framework underneath their question. He's saying the assumption you're making that suffering must be the result of someone's sin, that pain is always punishment, that assumption is wrong. I want you to sit with that for a second. Because if you've been lying awake at night asking, who sinned that this happened to me, Jesus is gently saying to you exactly what he said to his disciples. Neither, not you, not the version of you from before, not your parents, not your past, neither. This is not a punishment. Now, I want to be careful here because I don't want to overstate this. Scripture absolutely talks about consequences. Choices have outcomes. That's true. And Scripture also talks about something called the discipline of the Lord. But I want to draw a sharp line on that one in just a minute, because I think a lot of us have confused two things that aren't the same. But the bigger point Jesus is making in John chapter 9 is this when faithful people are suffering, the first move is not to assume God is settling a score. That is not how God works. He is not an accountant. Your pain is not a punishment, and your past is not the reason your present life is so hard. Now, let me draw the line that I just promised, because this is the place a lot of listeners get stuck, and I don't want to leave it um fuzzy or confusing for anyone. So stay with me through this. Because if we don't make this distinction clean and very clear, the rest of this episode just won't sit right. Okay. So some of you are thinking right now, but Melissa, the Bible says God disciplines those he loves. Hebrews 12. So how do I know the difference? And that's a fair question. And the difference matters. Here's the cleanest way I know how to say it. Punishment is what Jesus already took on the cross, the wages of sin, the penalty, the settling of accounts. That bill has been paid in full permanently. For everyone who belongs to God, there's none of it left for you. Now, discipline. Discipline is what a father does for a child he delights in, not to settle a debt, but to shape their life. And here's how you can usually tell which one you're experiencing. Discipline produces fruit. It produces clarity. It draws you closer. You feel the father in it, even when it stings. It's specific. It's pointed at a particular behavior or pattern, and you usually know exactly what it is because the Holy Spirit makes it clear. What you might be carrying right now, the vague free-floating sense that something old is the reason your present feels stuck, that isn't discipline. That doesn't draw you closer to God. It pulls you away from Him. And it doesn't produce fruit, it produces shame. Those have different outcomes, different fingerprints. They feel so different. Because shame says something is wrong with you. The Holy Spirit says something is between us and I want to deal with it together. Let's work this out together. Shame is vague, but conviction is specific. Shame isolates. Conviction draws you in. It draws you closer to God. Shame makes you hide, and conviction makes you whole. So if what you're carrying is the foggy late-night, I don't even know what I did, but I must have done something kind of feeling, friend, that is not the voice of God. That is not Him. He doesn't whisper to you in vague accusations. He speaks specifically, and he speaks to restore you. Okay, now that we've drawn that line, I want to take you to the Apostle Paul, because Paul had a past, a real one, the kind of past that, by the math we've been talking about, should have disqualified him for the rest of his life. And I want you to see what God did with his pain and his past. If anyone had a reason to believe their past was blocking their future, it was this guy. Before Paul was Paul, he was Saul. And Saul didn't just have a past. He had the kind of past most of us can't even fathom. He actually hunted Christians. He approved of their executions. There's a moment in Acts chapter 7 where a man named Stephen is stoned to death for his faith, and Saul is standing there watching, and he's actually holding the coats of the men who did it and giving his approval. Saul didn't just sin in the past. And then on the road to Damascus in Acts chapter 9, Jesus stops him cold, knocks him down, and asks him, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And in that moment, Saul becomes Paul. He surrenders and he's transformed. And here's what I want you to notice. In 1 Timothy chapter 1, verses 12 and 13, Paul writes this, and I want you to hear this clearly. So important. Paul says, I thank Christ Jesus, our God, who has given me strength, that he considered me trustworthy, appointing me to his service, even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man. Read that. Take your time, find your Bible. I want you to read that again slowly every time you find yourself wondering if God can use someone like you. Paul doesn't pretend his past didn't happen. He calls himself a few times verses later in 1 Timothy chapter 1, verse 15, he calls himself the worst of sinners. He's not in denial about who he was. But notice what he doesn't do. He doesn't say, I'm waiting for God to forgive me enough to use me. He doesn't even say, my past is blocking what God wants to do. And not once did he say, if only I hadn't done those things, my life would be different now. He says God appointed him right there, in the same breath as naming his past. The man who hunted Christians became the man who wrote 13 books of the New Testament. Just let that sit for a second. Talk about being used despite your past. If anybody had a reason to lie awake at night going through their past for the thing that was blocking their blessing, it was Paul. And the thing he found when he looked back was the very thing God ended up using the most. His past didn't disqualify him. It became part of the testimony, not because the things he did were good, they weren't, they weren't at all, but because God's grace was bigger than any of it. So here's the question I want to put gently in front of you. If God could use Paul's past, the actual hunting and persecuting and standing by while people died kind of past, what makes you so sure he can't use your past? What makes you so sure your old chapters are blocking the new ones when Scripture is full of people whose old chapters became the very foundation of the new ones? I'm not asking you to celebrate what you did before you knew God, but I am asking you to consider that the God you serve specializes in taking the things we thought disqualified us and writing testimony into them. So I want to talk to you for a minute now, not as a person speaking on a podcast, but as someone who has needed to hear this herself. If you have ever been quietly believing that something from your past is the reason something in your present is stuck and not moving, I want you to just take a breath, because that belief is exhausting and it is not from God. The God you serve does not punish his children for who they used to be. He does not hold a grudge, he does not keep a list, he does not bring up old chapters to explain why the new chapters are so slow. That is not who God is. He is the father who in Romans chapter 8, verses 38 and 39, declared that nothing in all creation, not your past, not your present, not your worst version of yourself, can separate you from his love. He is the Father who in Psalm chapter 3, verse 12, says, He has removed our sins from us as far as the east is from the West. He's the same Father who in 1 John chapter 1 verse 9 promises that when we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive them and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Cleanse, as in there's nothing left to point at. The version of you that God sees right now is not the version that that did those things in the past. The version of you he sees right now is the version he bought back, the one he calls his own, the one he has plans for that have nothing to do with the old chapters you keep trying so hard to hand over to him. He's not interested in those chapters anymore. He's interested in you. And if there is something specific the Holy Spirit has been bringing up, something concrete, something he's putting his finger on, that's a different conversation. Take it to him. Let God do what he does. He is faithful and just to forgive and he will. But the vague, I must have done something wrong feeling that has no name and no specifics, the one that you're just using as the reason that something's not happening or a prayer hasn't been answered, that isn't from God. You can let that go. You were already meant to. You have already been forgiven. So here's what I want you to carry into this week. You've been asking, did I do something wrong? My question for you, the question underneath that is this Am I being punished by God for who I used to be? And the answer, friend, is no. You are not being punished. You are not being held back. You are not being kept from something good because of something old. You are loved, you are forgiven, you are not defined by what you did, and the very places you thought disqualified you might be the places that God's power is preparing to show up the most. Let that be the truth you fall asleep with tonight. Not the searching, not the wondering, but the settled. This man or his parents? And Jesus said, Neither. Paul looked at his past, a real past with real damage, and said, Christ considered me trustworthy. Your past is not the reason your present is hard. Your past is not your sentence. Your past might be the foundation God is still building on. So tonight, when the searching starts, when your mind wants to go scanning back through old chapters, looking for the thing that's blocking the new ones, I want you to remember this. Neither, said Jesus. Trustworthy, said Paul. You are not what you did. You are whose you are. And whose you are has never changed and is not changing now. Before you go, if today's question stayed with you, I'd love to keep the conversation going. Going. Each week I send a short email called This Week's Question, a Quiet Invitation, and it's a simple reflection to help you stay grounded, to pay attention, to dive deeper into God's Word, and to walk with God throughout your week. You can sign up at myquestion for you.com, bringing you encouragement for your spirit and wisdom for your walk.