Don’t buy the lies: You can go “too far” …

“This time, he’s gone too far. I’m done.”

I’ve heard versions of that statement many times in my decades of pastoral ministry and counseling. Whether it’s with ourselves, with others, or with God, it actually IS possible to “go too far” and wreck your own life and your relationships.

You wouldn’t think that if you bought into everything you see on social media and hear in our culture. We prefer to believe other messages, some of which has slices of truth within them. They’re messages like these:

“You always have tomorrow” (no one has a promise they will have a tomorrow).

“Every day you wake up is a chance for a fresh start” (maybe).

“You can’t change your past, but you can start today and change your future” (generally true).

Those and other popular sayings might be true if you haven’t already gone so far that you’ve gone too far.

For example, for years now there has been an increase in divorces among couples who have been married for multiple decades. These might be couples who haven’t liked each other for a long time, but “for the sake of the kids” they’ve stayed together. Now as empty nesters, they’re not spending one more day with the spouse who they say has just “gone too far.” In other marriages, that happens early in their relationship.

Many others have spent their lives ignoring all the admonitions for eating well and exercising. Finally, the latest doctor visit comes with bad news. They may survive their current physical crisis, but at a real cost to their physical health, which they’ll never fully recover.

You’ve pushed things at work so far the day finally comes when the boss says, “You’ve gone too far, you’re fired.”

You’ve spent so much of your life procrastinating, living in fear, and making bad decisions that you find yourself at mid-life or later with a poorly lived, hollow life. In this case, you can’t change the past, and you can start today changing your future but all of that at a very steep cost of wasted years or decades.

And while the Bible tells us God’s mercies are new every morning, and we see how relentlessly He pursues us to save and reconcile us to Himself, it IS possible to go “too far” with God as well. The Bible is full of such examples:

Early in human history, the world was so corrupted with sin that God destroyed all living things except for one family and a big boat full of animals. Humanity had gone so far that God literately regretted making them:

“The Lord observed the extent of human wickedness on the earth, and he saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil. So the Lord was sorry he had ever made them and put them on the earth. It broke his heart. And the Lord said, ‘I will wipe this human race I have created from the face of the earth. Yes, and I will destroy every living thing — all the people, the large animals, the small animals that scurry along the ground, and even the birds of the sky. I am sorry I ever made them.’ But Noah found favor with the Lord,” Genesis 6:5-8.

The Old Testament is replete with stories of God pleading for ancient Israel to repent of their sins and return to Him, their failure to do so, and God bringing about their destruction, saving only a remnant.

And in the New Testament, we read about a husband and wife who, in collusion with each other attempted to present themselves as being more generous than they really were; they were called out for their sin by the Apostle Peter and then dropped dead (literally!) because of it (Acts 5:1-10).

We have all these stories to warn US not to follow their example and go too far — with ourselves, others, and particularly with God:

“I don’t want you to forget, dear brothers and sisters, about our ancestors in the wilderness long ago. All of them were guided by a cloud that moved ahead of them, and all of them walked through the sea on dry ground. In the cloud and in the sea, all of them were baptized as followers of Moses. All of them ate the same spiritual food, and all of them drank the same spiritual water. For they drank from the spiritual rock that traveled with them, and that rock was Christ. Yet God was not pleased with most of them, and their bodies were scattered in the wilderness. These things happened as a warning to us, so that we would not crave evil things as they did, or worship idols as some of them did. As the Scriptures say, ‘The people celebrated with feasting and drinking, and they indulged in pagan revelry.’ And we must not engage in sexual immorality as some of them did, causing 23,000 of them to die in one day. Nor should we put Christ to the test, as some of them did and then died from snakebites. And don’t grumble as some of them did, and then were destroyed by the angel of death. These things happened to them as examples for us. They were written down to warn us who live at the end of the age. If you think you are standing strong, be careful not to fall,” 1 Corinthians 10:1-12.

We hear these warnings, but too many of us are willing to risk pushing things as far as possible, and even purposely testing such warnings. Kind of like the dad who had a very strong-willed little girl. For a daddy-daughter “date night,” he took her to a professional basketball game. Knowing how strong-willed she was, when they found their seats the dad admonished her that she had to stay in her seat, or at least right by him, and not go running around in the massive building. The girl immediately went bounding down the stairs and even made her way onto the basketball floor, ran up to the boundary line, plopped her foot over the line, then turned and looked up at her father with a rebellious smile.

Is there something in your life you’re pushing right now that you’re about to push too far? Stop! Hear the warnings! If you haven’t already gone too far, you really do have a chance right now to step back, turn back, and make a change. I implore you to do that before you go too far.

Scotty