Sometimes we see a squirrel in the middle of the road, and we start yelling at it through our windshield to get out of the middle of the road so our car won't crush it, and it just sits there. And I think that is sometimes how God feels about us as He watches our life. Warnings, but we do nothing. Today I'm talking about how to recover from bad choices, because we all make bad choices. Sometimes we get flashbacks of these bad choices, don't we? We're driving down the road and a flashback happens, or we're in the shower in the morning and a flashback happens, and we say, "How could I have been so foolish as to do that?" It would be wonderful if we always made the right choice, but we don't. And it would be wonderful if we were always wise and perceptive and saw where this choice would lead to a crash in our life. But we aren't. And we have a past that influences us. And you know, sometimes our friends who influence us are not top shelf. That's why I think the most expensive mistake we can make is to spend time with the wrong people, because they influence us. Aaron Hernandez had a stellar future with the Patriots, but he did not break his connections with gang friends in his hometown. And he ended up a killer. And now he's in prison with a life sentence, with no possibility of parole. You see, God does not give us a good or bad life. He gives us a life, and it's up to us to make it good or bad with our choices. Choices. There are no neutral choices. Every choice affects us and our destiny, just a little bit. There are no neutral choices. Decca Records said no to the Beatles. They said, and I quote, "Guitars are on the way out." So Decca did not sign the Beatles. Bad decision. Kodak, did you know this, was the first to develop the technology for the cell phone and for digital cameras. They had it, but they sat on it and didn't do anything with it, because they thought that technology threatened their existing business. Apple and Nikon are thankful for that. Napoleon invaded Russia, and when winter hit, he decided to push on towards Moscow, and his army froze. Bad decision. And our decisions affect other people around us. On the screen you see a picture of Jane Fonda. It's her picture from November 3rd, 1970, when she was arrested for having cocaine in her possession in an airport. Her response: the little white pills were actually vitamins. You see, after we make a bad choice, we have only two choices. We can get better or make excuses. Make excuses or make changes. You cannot do both. You cannot do both. People who make excuses, if anything, get worse. But for sure, they stay stuck in that behavior in their life. They don't get better. I say, don't be afraid of making mistakes. Be afraid of making excuses, because that's what eventually ruins your life. Excuses are for people who don't want it bad enough. I believe that's true with all my heart. Excuses are for people who don't want it bad enough to change, to do things differently than they've done in the past. It might surprise you that this fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood, is all about how bad choices don't mean you're a bad person. Bad choices don't mean you are a bad person. That's the grace. Now, there are several versions of this fairy tale. In one version, Little Red Riding Hood and her grandma are eaten by the wolf. In the other version, the wolf locks Grandma up in a closet, doesn't eat her, and Little Red Riding Hood is saved just before the wolf does eat her. In both versions, they rebound from their mistakes. So bad choices don't have to be the end of our story. You can make bad choices, and right now some of us have done that, and dreams are in shambles. But that doesn't have to be the end of your story. That's Little Red Riding Hood. The bottom does not get much lower than a prison cell. But that's where Tim Allen found himself after he was arrested with 650 grams of cocaine on him. Prison was his new home. But he didn't let bad choices be the end of his story. It seems that when he partied, he was a hard-partying guy, and he loved to make people laugh. So in his hard-partying days, he was really a comic at parties. And in prison, he decided he might use that ability to pass the time with prisoners. So he put on comedy shows in prison. He even made the meanest guards laugh. And when he was released, after about three years in prison, a friend of his challenged him to be a comic at an open mic at a comedy club in Detroit. And he did, and he was a hit. And out of that came the TV series all about Tim "the Tool Man." The moral of the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and of the life of Tim Allen, is: don't let bad choices be the end of your story. It doesn't have to be the end. First, if you want to make a rebound, realize that every one of you is a target of Satan, who wants to ruin your life. I don't think a lot of us realize that you're a target. You're being hunted by the evil one, Satan. And he hates you. Satan hates everyone that God loves. And he hates you, and he wants to ruin your life. Did you know you're a target? Surveys of church-attending Christians show that 69% do not believe Satan exists. They think Satan is a myth. He's a metaphor for evil, but he's not real. And when they're asked, "Why do you believe Satan is a myth?" they say, "Well, we're too modern. We're too intelligent to believe in such a thing as the existence of Satan. We're too scientific." Well, when I hear people say that, I know they don't read very much. Dr. Richard Gallagher is a psychiatrist. He's an MD. He's a professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College. He graduated from Princeton, Yale, and Columbia. He's brilliant. He's scientific. And he's written a book entitled Demonic Foes. And the book is all about cases he's had, clients he's had, where he has seen how real Satan is and how he has ruined lives. Scott Peck is a Harvard psychologist. He wrote the bestseller People of the Lie. He titled it that because in his practice he came across people who really were the personification of evil. And as he got involved in their lives, trying to help them break that, he came face to face with Satan. He was an atheist. But he said, "Before, I didn't believe in anything but the material universe. There was no spiritual dimension. But in my practice, I came across the unseen spiritual dimension, and it would have been unscientific for me to deny that." He said invisible does not mean imaginary. Does Satan exist? Many learned, educated, intelligent people say, "Yes, I have the evidence." But the greatest proof that Satan is real is Jesus Himself. Jesus says He was tempted three times by Satan in the wilderness before He began His ministry. This was before He appointed any disciples, before He had any following at all. He was alone. No one was with Him. So the question is, did Jesus lie? Since there's no one to verify this, we only have Jesus's word. Jesus, did You lie about this experience of spiritual war with Satan? So the question is: either Jesus lied, or Satan is real. Those are the only two options, logically, that we have. In fact, when you read the Gospels, you find that Jesus's entire ministry was spiritual warfare. He's casting out demons. He's talking to Satan, and the things that He's doing. He's healing people who have diseases because of Satan. He teaches about Satan, how he was cast out of heaven for wanting to be God himself. And He teaches that in the end, Satan is going to be quarantined at His second coming and not be able to continue his evil work among us. It is from Jesus that we learn about Satan. So what are we to do with that as Christians? For a Christian to say they believe in Jesus but they don't believe Satan is real is illogical. Essentially, we're calling Jesus a liar. 1 Peter 5:8 sums up Jesus's teaching about Satan. It says, "Your enemy, Satan, prowls around like a lion, looking for someone to devour." Devour. That really is like Little Red Riding Hood, isn't it? And the wolf prowling the forest, looking for someone to eat. First Peter 5:8 means you are on Satan's menu. You are on Satan's menu, to be eaten. If you are ever going to rebound from bad choices, you must take that seriously. When fairy tales were written, Western civilization was saturated with Christianity. People knew the Bible. They knew the teaching of Jesus about Satan. It's not like today, when people are just pretty vague on this. No, they were saturated with the Bible and Christianity. So what you find in fairy tales, most of which were written in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, during this time of saturation, is that fairy tales are actually stories about biblical truths, put in an interesting form for children to remember. They're really biblical stories about biblical truth. It's important to remember that wolves in fairy tales always represent the devil, Satan. Because these fairy tales were written in Western Europe, and some of them in Russia, with heavy forests, dark forests that were very dangerous, literally, especially for children. And one of the reasons is they were inhabited by wolves that attacked people. That's the background of these stories. So Little Red Riding Hood is on the wolf's menu, and he plans to eat her and her grandma. This fairy tale is actually First Peter 5:8. The wolf, Satan, is prowling the forest, looking for someone to devour. And the wolf finds Little Red Riding Hood in a vulnerable spot. If you want to rebound from bad choices, you must take seriously that Satan's favorite weapon is shooting thoughts into your head. Because all action comes from a thought. It doesn't come from nowhere. You first think it, and then, if you continue to think it, you act on it. So Satan, and the Bible in Ephesians 6 describes it as flaming arrows, shoots thoughts into your head, to motivate and prompt you to make bad choices. So guard your mind, because thoughts lead to behavior. You have never made a bad choice without first thinking about it. Thoughts lead to behavior. So don't just accept every thought that comes into your mind. You have to do thought battle. The battle is in your mind, with Satan. Every day, Satan is shooting thoughts into your mind. You've got to test your thoughts by asking, "Would Jesus do what I'm thinking about?" That's the test that will tell you whether this thought is good, or whether it's from your enemy. Would Jesus do what I'm thinking about? That's how you guard your mind. If you want to make a rebound, you've got to test your thoughts before you act. Secondly, if we want to rebound from bad choices, we must start conquering our temptations. All of us are tempted, many times each day. Everyone's tempted. There's no one here who hasn't been tempted already today. And the reason I know that is Jesus was tempted continually. And if Jesus was tempted, why should I believe you're not? Everyone is. The question is resisting those temptations. Billy Graham was asked, "When do you think you'll no longer be tempted?" He said, "Well, three days after I'm dead." That really is the truth of the Bible. We're constantly tempted. So I've got to say to myself: recognize temptations, and begin to resist what before I have not resisted, and not make excuses any longer. One of the most important things is to stop being an excuse maker. You'll never overcome bad choices if you continue to be an excuse maker. No excuses. Every time you resist a temptation, you become more like Jesus. Every time you give in to a temptation, you become weaker and actually become more like the devil. The Bible describes a temptation as a hook that Satan baits with something that appeals to your weakness. Really, something where you have sinned before. He'll bait it with that same sin. He'll knock on the same door where you've fallen before. You see, Satan's an expert fisherman. And all fishermen, if you didn't know this, study what the fish are biting on. If you're a fly fisherman, you walk the river, and you look at what kinds of flies are around, what insects, and then you pull out your man-made fly that looks just like that, and you fish with that, because they're biting on that. And Satan, he watches you. He watches what you read, what you look at on TV and in movies, who you're with, and what you talk about. He's investigating you to find where your weaknesses are, and he's going to hit you there. When he tempts you, he often uses something that you bit on in the past. He knows your habits. He baits you with temptation, because you are on his menu. Little Red Riding Hood's mother told her to go straight to Grandma's house through the forest and not to pick any flowers. So what does Little Red Riding Hood do? She stops and starts picking flowers. And the moment she disobeys her mother, the wolf appears by her side. And the wolf doesn't look threatening at all, because Satan doesn't come to you and threaten you. He seduces you with his bait. The question is, why bother to resist temptation? It's because of James chapter 1, verse 15: After temptation is conceived, that is, you take the bait, you were not resisting it, you take the bait, it gives birth to sin, bad choices. And sin, when full-grown, gives birth to death. Full-grown, that is, you do this repetitively. Then it's full-grown, and it produces death. There are two words in Greek for death. One is physical death. The other one is when you decay, become deformed, or become hideous. Temptation leads to people being deformed, because every choice you make changes you a little bit. There are no neutral choices that you can make. Every choice changes you, one way or another. And repeated bad choices decay us. They turn us into a hideous person, and not the person we are meant to be. Have you ever met a person whose personality is deformed? You'd have to say, "Well, that's a pretty ugly person. Their behavior is pretty ugly." That's what we're saying. Thanatos: hideous. So a woman is very controlling and wants to control her husband, and she uses different things to control him. She can use sex. She can use pouting, being unhappy, being an angry person and unlovely to live with, until he finally gives in. She gets her way, but she becomes more and more selfish, more and more controlling. And I'm telling you, a controlling person is not a beautiful person. She becomes deformed from the person she was meant to be. But she often doesn't recognize it, because she's getting her way. But that's no compensation for what she's doing to herself. Or a guy has a temper, and a temper gets worse over time. Lots of things set him off. I mean, if you knew him 20 years ago, he had a temper, but not like he has right now. And you know, he does some ugly things when he's mad. He becomes deformed, not the person you thought he was. We could multiply this again and again. But giving in to temptation like this, in attitudes and behavior, deforms you. You see, we become our choices. We improve or we deteriorate. Our choices change us for better or worse. They just do. Every choice matters. And so we must stop taking the bait. This is my happy worm. Bait always looks good. Don't even lick the bait. Run. Get away from it, because you're being baited. You're on his menu. And I just wonder, right now, is anybody having a flashback where you took the bait, and it really did damage in your life? You took the bait? How do you recover from that? Well, you learn, and you don't take the bait next time. And third, if you want to stop making bad choices, start taking warning signs seriously. There are always warning signs. When Little Red Riding Hood reaches her grandmother's house, she doesn't realize that the wolf arrived earlier. And the wolf, depending on the version, either ate the grandmother or locked her up in the closet, took her clothes, dressed in her bedclothes, jumped into bed, and disguised herself as Grandma. When Little Red Riding Hood in the fairy tale enters the room, she just senses something's not right. She says, "What big eyes you have." And the wolf says, "All the better to see you with." That was the first warning, but she ignores it. "Grandma, what big ears you have." "All the better to hear you with." That's the second warning. She ignores it. She senses there is danger, but she does not run, even though she's had two warnings. "How did your hands get so big, Grandma?" "All the better to hug you with." Third warning. You know, as you read this fairy tale, you begin to wonder, how many warnings is it going to take before she runs? She said three. "Grandma, what big teeth you have." And the wolf jumps out of bed and grabs Little Red Riding Hood. Fourth warning. Too late. So in one version, she's eaten, and later the woodsman rescues her still. And in the other version, she screams, and the woodsman comes and rescues her. The whole point is she's on the wolf's menu. He disguises himself. There are warnings that she ignores, and she's in great danger because of that. And really, that sums up what the Scriptures are saying in James chapter 1, chapter 5, verse 8. He prowls, and you're on the menu. I just wonder if any of us, right now, know we are ignoring warning signs. Surely someone here has had warning signs, but so far you haven't run. The Bible says a bell always, always rings inside our head, warning us. And you know, people will tell me this. I hear this again and again in counseling. They'll say, "There was an evening, a morning when I was in the shower, when I knew I shouldn't marry this person. When I knew what I was doing was wrong. That I should have different friends." The warning bell rang, and they didn't stop. The bell always rings. Maybe it's something a mother once said to us, or a sermon we heard, or a movie, but the bell always rings. And when it does, run. Run. Has the bell been ringing in anyone's head here? Life is short. Don't waste your short life by making bad choices. I say that because the last thing we run out of is future time, when our story really is over. Let me pray for us. Lord, I pray that You would help us. Help us to sift our thoughts, and when the bell rings, to run, and to recognize warning signs. And if the bell really is ringing in anyone's head here this morning, give them the power to break off and run and save themselves. I pray it in Your name, Jesus. Amen.