Do you ever wish you could rewind the tape? Just go back and do something over? Like the day I was sitting in Fred McNab’s office, a friend of mine on the staff at Pioneer Drive Baptist Church when a friend of ours walked in. Carol was wearing one of those long dresses that wasn’t exactly what I would call form-fitting. I think they used to call them muumuus. I said, "Cynthia, I didn’t know you were pregnant" As I said it, I thought, "I’d really like to take that back. Could I just rewind the tape one time and start all over?" But, it was too late. Of course, Carol said, "I’m not pregnant." Then, as though to prove I had not already learned my lesson, I said, "Then, how come you’re wearing a maternity dress?" She said, "It’s not a maternity dress." Did you ever wish you could do something over?

Did you ever say anything to someone, maybe in a moment of haste or anger or irritation, or you’re tired, like at the end of a day when you’ve been moving all day, and you just wish you could say it a different way? There is no such thing as "rewind," is there? But, there is an alternative.

This next four Sundays, including today, I want us to talk about the basic fundamentals, the "readin’, ritin’, ‘rithmetic," if you will, of meaningful living. Now, there are other Rs of meaningful living. I have selected just four of them that I have found to be crucial and important. If we go out into the world without the basic Rs, we will be forever hampered and hamstrung from experiencing the life God intended us to have. We might well make it to heaven, but not having known the life here we could have known and should have known.

There is clear evidence that the more education you have, the more likely you are to have a life in which you can provide a good living for your family, and security and health and all of those things we all desire. And yet, the truth is, we know also that one-half of the students who enter ninth grade at Adamson High School, just across the street, will drop out before they graduate, and, in many cases go out into life, profoundly unprepared to face the ever-increasing challenges our world is putting in front of us.

So it is with Christianity, with what we believe it means to be a Christian. Those of you on the front row today who are 18 or younger won’t believe what church will be like by the time you’re the age I am now. Some things never change. We do tend to find our spot in church in a certain pew and seek it out every Sunday. That probably won’t change. You can probably also mark it down that these four Rs that we’re going to discuss the next four Sunday mornings, starting today, won’t change, either.

Some of you will well remember, back in the early 1950s, late 1940s, even in the 1930s, when polio was such a terrible disease that wreaked havoc on millions of lives across the United States and the world. Many of you know the name Jonas Salk, the man who in 1952 discovered the vaccine for polio that has not only saved millions of people from dying miserable deaths but has also prevented millions of people from living a lifetime of crippling paralysis much like Franklin Delano Roosevelt did. It was a remarkable discovery. And yet, the more you think about it, behind his discovery of the polio vaccine were two Russian Jewish immigrant parents, neither of whom had been educated and had become very aware, because of their struggle, of the importance of education and encouraged their son Jonas to be the first of his family to actually go to college. But, even behind that, lost to history, are the names of the teachers, all the way back to what we would call first grade, who taught Jonas Salk that 1 + 1 = 2 and that every sentence should have a noun and a verb, and they ought to work with each other, not against each other. Salk gets the credit for the polio vaccine, as he should. But behind him lie the scores of schoolteachers like many of you who are now celebrating that school is out, that taught him the basics.

This particular conversation I’d like to have with you is spurred by a conversation I recently had with a person who said, of a poor decision that threatens everything of value to them, "I wish I could rewind my life. Not just this one decision, but my whole life."

Did you ever feel that way? Did you ever wish you could go back and redo your life? If you could, what would life look like rewound and relived that it doesn’t now? What would you change? "I wish I could rewind my life." Like a VCR. Just push the "rewind" button. Go back and tape over it and start all over again.

This is what God’s word says to us, and we are quoting Jesus now. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world," to fill the world with deep tones of sadness and profound regret, living every day as though we wish we could rewind our lives. For God did not send his Son into the world to fill us with that. But, instead, "that the world through him might be saved." What does that mean?

It means that whatever is in our past that we so deeply regret, God is not interested in anymore. Our past failures are no longer of primary interest to God. Jesus did not come to condemn us, to relate to us, to deal with us, to dole out to us, based on those things we regret. He came, instead, to save, or redeem, us from those things, so that he might set us free for a future we might not otherwise have.

Redemption is one of those words that sounds like a big church word. And it is. But I remember it in other contexts outside of church. In fact, I’m certain that at the very same time I was first beginning to have conscious awareness of the preacher or the Sunday school teacher using the word "redeem" or "redemption" at church, I also remember my mother redeeming her S&H Green Stamps. Do you remember those days?

S&H Green Stamps were stamps you got at the grocery store, so many stamps for so many dollars of a purchase. Mom brought those stamps home, put them in redemption books and then placed them in a special drawer in the kitchen. When she had enough books, she would take them to the S&H Green Stamp Redemption Center where could trade them for something of equal value.

I didn’t come to appreciate until later that every single Sunday my parents were taking me to church they were taking me to the redemption center. A place where we celebrated the fact that, on the cross, God traded in the life of his son for our future, every bit as much, if not more so, as for our past. Jesus came to save, not condemn.

If you need more proof of this past-present-future tense kind of conversation, listen to these words again, from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah: "I said," Isaiah says, in this vision of confession before God, "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips." "I’ve said some things," Isaiah said, "I wish I could take back. "I’ve said some things about God. I may have used his name in vain, or just used it cheaply. I have said some things about other people God loves, too. I have said some self-demeaning, cursing kinds of things about others and myself as well," Isaiah says, "that left my lips feeling as though I had been eating out of the mud. "Woe is me! I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among people of unclean lips." "Everywhere I look, people are saying things they wish they could take back." Yet "my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!’"

"Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: ‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin. . . .’" "Listen! Your guilt has departed. It’s taken a train in another direction. You are sailing east toward the sunrise; your guilt has parted from you to go west, toward the sunset. You are headed in eternally opposite directions from those things that are in your past that you regret. Your sin is blotted out." The place where the records were kept of the things you had done wrong, the blood of Jesus has spilled on. And all of a sudden, that red turned it all to white, and it’s just clean, as though you had never done anything, much less anything wrong." Do you believe that? Do you believe that, not just for yourself, but for the other people around you with unclean lips?

"Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’" This conversation with the trinity, one in three, three in one. "And I said, ‘Here am I; send me."

Do you see the flip-over in this passage, from past tense to present-future tense? Immediately upon dealing with Isaiah’s past, having touched his unclean lip with a hot coal that seared away all the filth and the sin and the germs of death, God asks from that point, having blotted out the sin, having set free the guilt of this man from himself, God asks him then, the present-future tense question. "Whom shall I send, and who will go for me?" Which ought to tell us what redemption means.

This is one thing, by the way, a theme that I will repeat each of these four Sundays. We are not redeemed, we are not saved, for our own sakes alone. We are saved to go for God and tell other people what God does with people whose lives are full of regret. We are saved to serve. Redeemed to return to God our gratitude by extending it to others.

When I first moved to Dallas 13 years ago I was so broke one day that a dear friend of mine who knew my plight gave me $500 out of the blue. I didn’t ask for it; he just gave it to me. I said, "I’ll pay you back." He said, "No, I don’t want you to pay me back." He said, "When you have the money someday, don’t give it back to me; pass it along to someone else who needs $500. You’ll pay me back by helping someone else." One of the greatest joys I ever had was in calling my friend before he died, to tell him that I had paid him back, by paying it forward.

Some people who knew my friend thought he was a liberal, because all of his ideas didn’t fit within the four walls of the church. I’d say my friend was a Christian, for I was hungry, and he gave me something to eat. I was about to be naked and homeless, and he kept that from happening. I’d say my friend was a Christian. Wouldn’t you?

You see, even if we could pay God back for what he’s done for us, just trying to do so would mean that we still think that what has happened in our past, even God’s forgiveness of our sins, is of primary importance to God. Our past failures are of no interest to God. Our past failures are of no interest to God, who has declared they’re blotted out, and our guilt and our shame is gone. Our past failures are of no interest to God; only our present and future service to him by serving others. There is no rewind. There is redemption. “Who will go for us?” God asks Isaiah. The questions God always asks us are about our future, not our past.

In John 3, Jesus says that everyone who wants to be a part of this redemption center celebration must have a new beginning with God, must be born from above, must be born again, which means, just like we’ve had a physical beginning, there must come a time when we mark the beginning of this new journey with God, which is what we do in the baptistry with people who have confessed their faith in Christ. Then we carry forward what he has given us. Not a preoccupation with the past, but a commitment to the future, whatever that may be. The reason most of us don’t make it to the point of what we would call meaningful living, the reason most marriages don’t survive, the reason most careers end before they were supposed to, is because we’re stuck on something that is of no interest to God.

Whatever dreams for our future may be, if they are not dreams that include some form of paying God back by serving others in present and future tense ways, then whatever those dreams are, they almost certainly are not the future to which God intends to carry us on the wings of the same angels that brought the coals to Isaiah’s lips.

My friend says, "I wish I could rewind my life." I thought about it for a minute. Then I prayerfully wrote these words that I share with you now this morning:

"I've always figured that if I could rewind my life, I'd probably end up doing pretty much the same thing all over again the second time around. That's because we couldn’t go back to another time without going back to the person we were when we were back there. Neither could we take the wisdom to make better choices back with us that has come to us now only because of the poor choices we made back there and now regret. That’s also assuming a lack of wisdom was our only weakness, back then. We can't go back, but, we can go forward. Regret is a spiritual, psychological and emotional dead end because it offers no viable alternatives to our reality, only the myth of alternatives that prove to be mirages in the desert. Regret also keeps us focused on things that are no longer of interest to God for us. There is no rewind; there is redemption. Redemption is not a past-tense word; it is present-future tense word. Neither is redemption something God does to us, but something God does with us. It is a participatory event; God asks us to join with him in the act of redeeming."

When it came time to move from Rockwall to Dallas recently, we were ashamed of the way our dog Beau looked, and we just thought we couldn’t move into our new house with a shaggy dog. So, we took him to the dog groomers. When I went to pay for it, I realized we both got groomed, if you catch my meaning.

Have you ever seen a dog get a bath and a haircut? They chain him to a table. It’s not brutal. They want him to stay put, because they’re going to do all the work, and he’s just going to receive it. But, somewhere in that process, they took Beau and hosed him down and soaped him up and hosed him down again. Then they brushed him and they cut his hair. When we went back to pick him up, he looked so pretty. We call it his "Kessler cut" now.

I thought about my dog and realized that sometimes we think that’s the way God does us when it comes to cleaning us up. Somewhere, in some mysterious act we can’t see, God just washes us clean in the blood of Jesus, and it’s over and done. That’s not exactly how it works. At the very moment the angel touched Isaiah’s lips, God asked, "Who will go for me?" At the very moment of cleansing, there was an invitation to participate with God in making of life all that it could be.

We are not dogs on the grooming table, folks. We are the children of God. God, in redeeming us, is not acting upon us. He is choosing to act with us, and he asks us to ask ourselves not, "What about my past?" but "Where will we go from here?" Redemption is not just something God does to us. It is instead something God does with us. There is no rewind, but there is redemption.

If I understood Isaiah correctly, the way of God is to intervene with his grace and do for us what only grace can do, which is to forgive us. Then he asks and invites us to answer a question that only we can answer. "Who will go? Who will participate with me?" Then, having asked the question, God steps back and leaves the question hanging and waits to see how we’ll answer.

Who will go? Who will?