Missed Opportunities are Lost Opportunities

Then I said to you, "Do not be terrified; do not be afraid of them. The LORD your God, who is going before you, will fight for you, as he did for you in Egypt, before your very eyes, and in the desert. There you saw how the LORD your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place." In spite of this, you did not trust in the LORD your God...But the LORD said to me, "Tell them, 'Do not go up and fight, because I will not be with you. You will be defeated by your enemies.' " So I told you, but you would not listen. You rebelled against the LORD's command and in your arrogance you marched up into the hill country. - Deuteronomy 1:29-32, 42-43

The Israelites once again rebelled against the command of the Lord. Moses even told them that the Lord would fight for them as he had before their very eyes in Egypt. But they refused to go. Then they turned around and start with the, “Oh, We have sinned.” The Lord had originally told them to go after the Amorites. However since they did not go when he told them to, he now tells them not to go there. He tells the Israelites that he will not go before them anymore. They missed their chance. If they go, he says that they will be defeated. So the Israelites didn’t listen to God the first time, oh, my bad, so now they want to go, but God does not go ahead of them. They are defeated. Moses says that it was in their arrogance that they went up. In the dictionary arrogance is defined like this: overly convinced of one’s own importance; overbearingly proud.
Do we sometimes miss God’s plan because of disobedience and then decide that now we will fix it and do what he had told us. However, a missed opportunity or assignment is a lost opportunity or assignment. God does forgive when we repent of our disobedience, but we cannot just go busting out in our arrogance to the opportunity we lost. After repentance will come reassignment but that is only found in humility. We have to humble ourselves before the Lord and wait on him for redirection. Rebellion and disobedience have very real consequences. We think sometimes that God is just sitting around waiting for us to decide we will do something. The truth is that God expects obedience in his timing and when we rebel we lose. If we try to go on in our own strength we will be defeated. There is the danger then of rationalizing that maybe we were right to stall and should not have done this thing. Actually God was no longer in it because of our disobedience in the beginning.
What a responsibility to hear and respond when god directs. However if we miss it because of disobedience, we need to humble ourselves before the Lord in repentance and then wait for his next call.