From Tricks to Forgiveness

Here comes some through the squeeze. Well done. If you guys have been listening over the last few weeks, we have been learning in church about a family that was always up to pulling tricks on each other, or tricks on other people, tricks on the neighbors. They were very good, or they thought they were very good, at at pulling tricks on other people. And today we're going to learn about, um, I think one of the final tricks in their family before we leave their family. And I was thinking about this and I thought, you know, when I was a kid, I thought I was good at tricks. How many of you think you're good at tricking your parents or tricking your— yeah, you're pretty good. I one time came in, I— my mom says I was only like 4 years old, and I came in and I'd been playing out in the sandpit and behind our house And I came in, I was all dirty, and I had a wet V on my pants that went like this on both sides, and I was wet, right? So what had happened? It's pretty obvious, right? I wet my pants. But when I came in, my mom said, "Oh, Davey, you've wet your pants." And my brother's name was Teddy, and Teddy was always trouble. And so if he's watching this, sorry, Ted. And Ted said— Ted was just standing there being innocent, you know, being Ted. And I said, "No." She said, "What? You did. You wet your pants." And I said, "No, Teddy did it." Now, do you think she believed me? No, that would be quite an artist. And he didn't do it. I was not good at tricks yet, but as I got older, my tricks got better. And I had two sisters as well. And one time we had moved now and we lived on a little hobby farm and it had a little pond and there was mud, lots of mud. And so I went out and I got a big bucket of mud. I probably took my wagon out there and filled it with mud and I pulled it in and I got some of Mom's cookie trays without asking and I made mud cookies and I put them all out on the cookie trays and then I took them around on the back porch and I put them there to dry in the sun. And once they were all dried out, I took one carefully and lifted it up, and I took it to my sister, and I said, "Would you like a chocolate cookie?" And she said, "That's not chocolate, it's dirt." And I said, "Well, it was dirt. It was mud, but when it dries out, it's chocolate, and it's really good." And she said, "I am not eating a mud cookie. You can't make me eat a mud cookie." And I said to myself, "I've got to prove it to her, right?" You got to prove it and it's delicious. So I went, and I took a bite and I chewed it up. Oh, wow, it was not good. And I said, "Mmm, it's just delicious. It's the best. It's better than Mom's cookies." And she said, "Really?" She said, "Okay, let me try it." I handed her, trying not to crumble, you know, give her the cookie and she just licked it, you know. Oh, that's gross. You're trying to trick me. Just go away. Leave me alone. I'm playing with my toys. And so I failed again. Well, as I was growing up, I had a bike. And my bike and I were best friends. And I went out on my bike every Sunday all day long. And we went for rides. And I gave my bike a name, because my bike talked to me. So I should give it a name, right? And my bike's name, because at the time the Herbie movies— you guys, have any of you seen the Herbie movies? Oh, some of you have. Well, I named my bike Herbie because my bike would do things all by itself, because I have a very good imagination. And so one time my sisters were out in the front yard and they were playing. I don't know what they were doing, but they were partway down the driveway. And so how many of you guys have ever done this where you ride your bike really fast and you jump off the back and it keeps going? So I— yep, there we go. So I came tearing down the driveway and they were sitting behind the tree, right? And so just before I got to the tree, I jumped off the back. The bike went shooting past them and I came running after, "Herbie, come back! I didn't mean it! Come back!" And they watched me run past after my bike and I was just trying to convince them that Herbie— well, I don't know, maybe I thought Herbie was— I don't know. But anyway, I don't know if it tricked them, but it certainly had me convinced enough that one day— it's amazing how I tie all these stories together, isn't it? One day as I was having a nap, I wasn't supposed to be having a nap, but I was supposed to be going to school. But I had told mom that I was sick. And so she had taken my brother and sisters to school. And I was lying in bed, you know, with the blanket pulled up. I still don't feel good, mom. And so I got to stay home. And I thought, and I can watch TV all day and I can have a holiday and it's gonna be good. And so when my mom's car left, I heard Herbie. Hey Dave, let's go for a ride. I thought, that sounds fun. And so I got up and I put my shorts and a t-shirt on and I snuck out of the house and put my shoes on and then got on the bike and took off on Herbie. And we were riding down the road and mom, like I was not thinking this through, came back from school. And what road do you think she was— why was I riding on that road? She went by this way and I was going that way and she thought, hmm, I recognize that little boy. And so she turned around and she picked me up, "Put your bike in the car, young man." And so I put it in the back of the van and off we went back home. And then I said, "Do I have to go to school now?" And she said, "No, you're sick." And I said, "Oh, oh yeah." And so I got back in bed and you know what she did? She brought me orange juice every 30 minutes until my brothers and sisters, my brother and sisters got home from school. She said, "Well, you're sick and orange juice has lots of vitamin C. You're gonna be well by the time your brother and sister get home." And I was miraculously. So when I think about the tricks we pull on each other, and lots of families pull lots of tricks, we hand it down. You know, it's, it's, there's a word for that, it's called legacy. And the people that watch us become like us, right? By becoming, by beholding we are changed. And so we become like our parents and we value tricks because they, my dad's a jokester and so I value them and my kids value them and we pass them on. But the one thing that I think that when you look at the word legacy, which is the good thing that you leave behind. The one thing that follows being tricky or cheeky like that is forgiveness. Because everybody else— sometimes your tricks hurt people, sometimes they're mean, and you don't think about it till later and you go, I hurt them. But if we love each other and we see the tricks that they pulled on us and we say, you know what though, but I still love them. And you know, says that Jesus took all of our tricks, all of our sins, everything we did, and he He put them on himself and he allowed himself to be killed on the cross so that all of our sins would be forgiven. And that's the legacy as Christians that we've been given. No matter what you've done wrong, no matter what lies you've told, Jesus says, "If you come to me and say, 'Please forgive me,'" he does. And that's what good families do too. That's the legacy we all have as Christian families who follow Jesus. Thank you for listening so well to my story this morning. I get to listen to Darren's stories now.