One of my favorite verses in the Bible shows us Jesus’ purpose and intention for how He wants us to live.
John 10:10 says this:
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
In this passage, He lays out two radically different approaches to life. There is the enemy’s way, where the thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy—your identity, your purpose, your value, your calling. He wants to sidetrack you so you never step into the fullness God has for your life.
And then there’s Jesus’s way. He came so that you may have life and have it to the full.
So the question becomes: how do we make the most of this life? How do we live it to the fullest, even if we already have regrets?
Regret is just a part of life we all have to deal with. So what do you do when you’re dealing with regret? How do you live life to the fullest when your life feels full of regret?
When we’re thinking about living life to the fullest, but feel stuck in regret, it helps to first identify what kind of regret we’re dealing with.
I think regret falls into four basic categories that most people experience to some extent:
This is the regret of the risk you wish you would have taken.
It sounds like, What if? What if I had stepped out? What if I had started that company? What if I had asked that girl out? What if I had taken the opportunity?
This is buyer’s remorse. It’s the stuff you regret spending money on. But it’s also the things you regret not investing in—what you wish you had done earlier, when you were younger, when compound interest could have started working for you.
Sometimes we regret the relationships we got into. But just as often, we regret the relationships we let die off. We wish we were still talking to that person. We wish we had stayed connected.
This is the biggest and most devastating kind.
This is when you compromised your character. You compromised your integrity. You went the opposite direction of what you knew God had for you. You missed the mark.
And that’s really what sin is. Sometimes people hear that word and immediately tense up, but it simply means this: you missed the mark. You knew the life God was calling you to live, and you went another way.
Proverbs 14:12 gives us a warning about this:
“There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.”
Some of us went down a moral path that seemed right. It felt right. It looked harmless. It looked like something we could get away with. But it was the wrong path. You know that now, but it doesn’t change the fact that you still regret that path and the time you spent on it.
So, now the question is this: how do you make the most of life when you’ve missed the mark? What do you do when instead of hope and promise, you’re carrying these kinds of regret and shame?
To answer that, I want to talk about two guys in the Bible who both absolutely missed it—and yet their lives turned out in completely opposite directions, one for the better, and one for worse.
They’re King Solomon and the apostle Peter.
Here’s what it says about King Solomon in 1 Kings 11:1-4:
“Now King Solomon loved many foreign women, along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, from the nations concerning which the LORD had said to the people of Israel, “You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods.” Solomon clung to these in love. He had 700 wives, who were princesses, and 300 concubines. And his wives turned away his heart. For when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father.”
To me, this last line is one of the saddest verses in the entire Bible because Solomon, son of David, had so much going for him. He built the temple. He built his palace. He strengthened Jerusalem. He expanded trade. He organized the kingdom. He wrote proverbs and songs. He was wise beyond measure. He turned Israel into a powerhouse.
And yet Scripture tells us that in his old age, his heart was turned away from the Lord.
This wasn’t some moment of youthful impulsiveness. This wasn’t a teenager making a bad call. Solomon was seasoned. He was knowledgeable. He knew better. And yet in the end, the people in his life turned his heart to worship other gods instead of being faithful to the Lord his God as his father David had been, and as Solomon had been for much of his life. In the end, when it mattered most, he left his first love.
On the other hand, we have Peter. Read what it says in Matthew 26:69–75:
“Now Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard. And a servant girl came up to him and said, “You also were with Jesus the Galilean.” But he denied it before them all, saying, “I do not know what you mean.” And when he went out to the entrance, another servant girl saw him, and she said to the bystanders, “This man was with Jesus of Nazareth.” And again he denied it with an oath: “I do not know the man.”
After a little while the bystanders came up and said to Peter, “Certainly you too are one of them, for your accent betrays you.” Then he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, “I do not know the man.” And immediately the rooster crowed.
And Peter remembered the saying of Jesus, “Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.” And he went out and wept bitterly.”
Like Solomon, Peter also had an incredible story.
He was one of Jesus’s closest disciples. He was in the inner circle with James and John. He saw miracles, heard teaching, and experienced conversations with Jesus that were never even recorded in Scripture. He was the only disciple who got out of the boat and walked on water. He left everything to follow Jesus. He truly loved the Lord. And yet Peter still denied Jesus three times.
So here you have two men. Both loved God. Both knew better. Both were warned. Both missed it.
Just because you know better—like wise King Solomon and Jesus’ friend and disciple Peter—is no guarantee that you’ll do better.
That’s hard for people to hear, but it’s true.
Some people think that because they love God, know Scripture, or have done great things, they’re somehow beyond failure. But Solomon and Peter both show us that loving the Lord and knowing truth doesn’t automatically guarantee obedience.
These two men were devoted to God. They loved Him. But they still blew it.
They didn’t have bad intentions, but their lives still produced bad results. And yet Peter’s life ended up moving in one direction, while Solomon’s moved in another.
Think about what happened after these watershed moments.
Peter became a disciple Jesus still used. He preached at Pentecost. He helped build the church. He was used by God to start a movement we call Christianity.
Solomon, on the other hand, drifted until his heart was turned away.
Remember this: Just because you love Jesus doesn’t guarantee you’ll automatically do better on the other side of a regretful moment. It takes intentional action on our part to keep regret from becoming a permanent barrier in our walk with God.
James 4:17 says this:
“Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”
The pain of regret is real. But the power of repentance is greater.
The Bible says Peter denied Jesus, and when he realized what he had done, he went away weeping bitterly. It crushed him.
But here’s what Peter didn’t do: he didn’t blame God. He didn’t blame the pressure of the moment. He didn’t blame his upbringing, his finances, his personality, or somebody else. He owned it.
That matters, because some of us want healing while still blaming everybody else for our regret. We want restoration without ownership.
But you’re not going to get whole while you’re still blaming instead of accepting. At some point, you have to own what happened. You have to own the path you chose, the mistake you made, the regret you carry, the guilt and shame you’re trying to outrun.
David shows us what repentance looks like. His failure with Bathsheba is one of the clearest examples in Scripture of somebody blowing it in a massive way.
You know the story—when the kings went out to war, David stayed in the palace, and that’s when he saw beautiful Bathsheba bathing on the roof.
Problem #1 is that David was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that matters more than people realize. If you keep putting yourself in the wrong place, the wrong thing is going to keep happening.
Some people want to stop doing the wrong thing, but they keep going to the wrong place. They keep crossing the same boundaries. They keep staring at the same screen, talking to the same person, feeding the same addiction, making the same choices, compromising again and again—and then they wonder why the regret keeps coming back.
After finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, David inquires about this woman, and learns she is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. Uriah happened to be one of David’s mighty men, someone David relied on in some pretty intense moments. Despite learning Bathsheba is unavailable, David sleeps with her and gets her pregnant. You know how the story ends. David sinned, then tried to cover it up by having Uriah killed. He thought he got away with it. Then Nathan the prophet came and told him the story that exposed him, and David was crushed by confronting the regret of his moral failing head-on.
David quickly came to a place where he wasn’t blaming anyone, but truly owned what he did. And out of that brokenness came this:
Psalm 51:17
“The sacrifice you desire is a broken spirit. You will not reject a broken and repentant heart, O God.”
That is what God is after. He doesn’t want your pretending, hiding, or saving face. His grace rushes in when our hearts are broken and sorry for sin.
So, consider this question: Are you broken and sorry, or are you still hiding and pretending?
The truth is, David blew it in a big way. He messed up bigger than just about anyone I know. But he showed us the way to come back from regret.
He showed us that the regret you carry does not have to become the life sentence you carry out.
King Hezekiah wrote this amazing proverb and I love how it reads in the CEV:
Proverbs 28:13
“If you don't confess your sins, you will be a failure. But God will be merciful if you confess your sins and give them up.”
If you don’t confess it, you will fail under its weight. But God is merciful when people confess their sins and give them up. You may not be able to scrub the stain out, but Jesus can absorb it
And that’s why Peter’s words in Acts 3:19 matter so much:
“Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out.”
Peter knew what it was like to blow it. He knew guilt. He knew shame. He knew what it was like to go back to fishing after failing to stay faithful to God. And yet after being restored by Jesus, Peter could stand up and tell people to repent and turn back so their sins may be blotted out.
“Blotted” isn’t a word we use a lot, but it carries the idea of being absorbed.
Peter says this in Acts 3 just after he healed a man who couldn’t walk. He’s telling thousands of people from personal experience that Jesus can absorb all you’ve done. That your sin is no match for the bloodstained cross, and isn’t greater than Jesus’ sacrifice and grace.
2 Corinthians 5:17 says this:
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”
The hope of the gospel is just this: we don’t need to become an improved version of our old selves, still carrying those regrets with us. We can become wholly new.
The old things can pass away. The old condition doesn’t have to define the rest of your life. God can make you new.
Remember, the reality of your life isn’t set by your goals or good intentions. It’s directed by the choices you actually make. And if you keep choosing the wrong path, the only way out is to get broken, own it, repent, and turn around.
This is the warning Solomon gives us with his life. If what convicted you before doesn’t bother you now, you’ve drifted.
That’s what happened to Solomon. He didn’t wake up one morning and decide to abandon God. He drifted. Slowly. Over time. Desire after desire. Compromise after compromise. He kept following what he wanted instead of what God had said. All that drifting eventually turned his heart and led his heart to a place he wasn’t intending to go.
Solomon wasn’t a bad man. He was a wise person. He did many good things in his life, but in the end, he just drifted.
I love the quote from Christine Caine that says, “All you have to do to drift is nothing.”
That’s true in fitness. It’s true in finances. It’s true in marriage. And it’s true in your relationship with Jesus.
All you have to do to drift away from Jesus and start making choices that lead to regret, sorrow, shame, guilt, and sin, is nothing.
You don’t have to intentionally ruin your life. Sometimes all you have to do is nothing. Just stop paying attention. Stop obeying. Stop listening carefully. Stop taking sin seriously. And drift will do the rest.
Hebrews 2:1 says,
“Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.”
Drifting doesn’t just happen to bad people. Drifting happens to all people. It happens as soon as we stop listening and paying extra attention to the Word of God and all He calls us to.
I don’t think any follower of Jesus intends to drift.
You didn’t intend to get where you are. You didn’t mean for it to go this far. You didn’t mean to have this many secrets, this many coverups, this much shame, this much distance between you and God. But now you’re there, and deep down you know it: I think I’m in trouble.
And if that’s you, hear this: Jesus can get you back on the right path.
1 John 1:9 says,
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
He can get you back on the right path. But the question is: will you be broken? Will you be sorry for the sin you chose? Will you own it? Will you repent of it?
Because that is how you stop drifting. That is how you make the most of this life. That is how you stop being ruled by regret and start living life to the full.
The thief wants to steal, kill, and destroy. But Jesus came so that you may have life—and have it to the full.